Being wrong tends to be good for encouraging engagement. People will shout their objections and retorts. And if 99% of the public disagrees with you, that may only mean the 1% are more vocal in support to compensate, while the 99% need not bother with rhetorical pugilism.

A naive read of Twitter might suggest the public agrees with these thoughts. More likely than not, only a small percentage of the people who use Twitter do so. Beware the engagement bias.

News from Haiti

By most accounts, the situation in Haiti is dire and continues to become more dire. The government (run by unelected strongman1 Ariel Henry) has minimal support in the country. There is no national army (probably2), and the police are overpowered or working with gangs. Fuel shortages continue, as a militant gang blockades3 the largest fuel depot in the country. Businesses and hospitals are shut down. And now a cholera epidemic has started.

However, if you do a search on Twitter for «Haiti», you will get a very different picture. Apparently, the only people who care about Haiti on Twitter are …

Let’s not mince words: these are anti-American activists. Many are “tankies” or openly racist. They ignore the facts when the facts don’t suit them. They are, quite simply, wrong. Yet, because there is no appetite for “maybe we should do something about the situation in Haiti” posts, this is what the algorithm says are the most popular recent posts on the topic.

From the humanitarian perspective, it is fortunate that the “deep state” does not need support on Twitter. It is a safe bet that the American electorate will continue to not care what happens in Haiti.

The Fetterman-Oz Debate

In most situations, Mehmet Oz would have been the clear loser of the Pennsylvania Senate debate. The television personality and snake-oil salesman4 gave a sound-bite that only an opposition researcher could love:

However, his opponent, Democrat John Fetterman, was the real loser. Mr. Fetterman had a stroke in June, and there have been continuing concerns about his health. The debate … did not ameliorate those concerns.

Democrats have two responses: denial, and denial. Denial that there is a problem with his health, or denial that the problem with his health should be considered by voters.

If you are talking about the “bravery” of your candidate for doing one of the staple activities of a campaign, you are losing. And the “ableist” claims … it is hopefully the beginning of the end of the Carthage paradigm. Fifty years ago, Roman Hruska, a conservative Republican, was mocked for suggesting that “mediocre” people should be represented on the Supreme Court. Now it is liberals who are suggesting that expecting basic competence is an unreasonable demand.

And a anklenote

the footnotes are still down further, but this is close to the feet. we’ll call it an ankle note.

Large portions of the Republican Party still appear to be constitutionally incapable of honesty. Even when the facts are squarely on their side, they make up new lies:

“Specialized computer assistance” means closed-captioning. Which is a reasonable accommodation, but one that the Oz campaign and enablers like Trump administration veteran Stephen Miller went to great lengths to obfuscate and attack.

Overall, it hadn’t seemed worthwhile to start a discussion on the issue. It is quite a rabbit-hole, and none of the potentialities seemed particularly promising2.

However, now that Leonid Bershidsky has written an opinion piece published in both Bloomberg and the Washington Post on the topic, the discussion is started.

First, a brief comment on a more mild plan. There have been various proposals for political reform to accelerate development of the Russian Far East. In 2012, an article in the Financial Times discussed a proposal to move the Russian capital from Moscow to Vladivostok.

That seems implausible. A more reasonable proposal would involve an independent nation in the Far East of Russia, presumably consisting of all the land east of the Sakha Republic.

Ideally3, Vostok4 would be part of an Asian bloc that counter-balances the political power of China. While Vladimir Putin currently appears to be friendly5 with China

As a matter of realpolitik, a full-scale dissolution of Russia is impossible. Even in the worst-case scenario for the Russian war effort, where their armies are defeated and Putin is forced to resign in disgrace, the Red Army and the KGB will still control a large nuclear arsenal and will have no motivation to agree to such a dismemberment of Mother Russia.

However, anyone experienced with realpolitik should see the next question instantly: what motivation can we offer those powers that be in Russia? What strings can be attached to the offer?

To start with, what if it were tied to Russia’s6 “California Independence Movement” becoming successful?

Any proposal must start with a name, and we have one: “Mutual Assured Devolution”. There are four non-negotiable points:

• The five7 southern states of India (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana) are separated from the Republic of India.

• The three western provinces of China (Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Xizang8) are separated from the People’s Republic of China.

• The six southwestern states of America (Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) are separated from the United States of America.

• The eleven eastern federal subjects of Russia (the components of the Far East Federal District) are separated from the Russian Federation.

Other proposals could be considered and debated. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision each of the federal districts of Russia as separate nations. It also takes very little imagination to imagine the rest of the United States deciding to part ways with Washington DC once it is a live option.

The independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia, once it is agreed they would remain in the EU, seem to be trivial distractions in this context.

The situations are all different, but have a similar theme: with all the great powers becoming less powerful, those powers will have fewer objectionable qualities. We’ve already talked about Russia, the others in brief:

• India: for many purposes, the primary official language of India continues to be English, not Hindi. It is clear9 that the Dravidian-speaking states will not allow for this change. There are economic benefits to having a country more fluent in the language of governance.

• China: if you’re reading this, you must know the history of “Free Tibet” and the recent western reporting about Xinjiang “re-education” camps. Also, these are regions that (pre-1949) were almost entirely non-Han ethnicity and non-Mandarin speaking.

• United States10: By 20th century standards, the 1845-1848 conflict between the US and Mexico was an illegal war of aggression. The acquired territories11 Also, this would resolve the political tension regarding immigration.

We call this “devolution” and not “dissolution” for one important reason: the regional security guarantees provided by today’s great powers will remain largely intact.

It is a re-envisioning12 of the World Order. Bureaucrats13 in Moscow and Washington will have less power in their hinterlands, but will continue to meddle in the affairs of Eastern Europe and Africa.

We were going to run “corrections and apologies”, but have decided to wait until the final edition of the week’s news for that. Instead, it appears the theme for the week is emptiness2.

The likely change for the Newsletter: Year 2 will be to run the tisatsar‘s news. every 19 days. perhaps at that frequency we will not have to skip issues.

In lieu of the week’s news, a rant about Google, Business Insider, and how the algorithm’s love for tawdry crap is destroying America.

I have an Android phone, and the Chrome web browser shows “recommended links” when I open a new tab.

Last night, the top recommended link was from Business Insider: Recruiters at major companies like Amazon are going after Tesla employees angered by Elon Musk's return-to-office demand: 'If the Emperor of Mars doesn't want you, I'll be happy to bring you over'

Tesla workers might not have to return to the office after all — if they're willing to jump ship.

On Thursday, tech recruiters put out calls to Elon Musk's employees who might be looking to dodge his return-to-work edict.

On Thursday, {name redacted}, who identifies himself as a technical recruiting leader at Amazon Web Services on LinkedIn, issued a call for disgruntled Tesla engineers to join the tech giant.

"If the Emperor of Mars doesn't want you, I'll be happy to bring you over to #AWS," {…} wrote on LinkedIn, referencing Musk's fixation with colonizing Mars.

First: yes, that is a headline over 30 words in length. By comparison, The Office (US TV series) made a joke about the excessive length of an eighteen-word3 headline.

Second: this presents itself as a news story, but it isn’t. It is a few hundred words of churnalism, summarizing two LinkedIn posts from recruiters. One of them was deleted by the poster before this “article” was published, having presumably realized it was ineffective and in bad taste. The other was deleted in the day-or-so after the “article” was published.

Third: no, that’s really the entirety of the message. There is no there there. Just a prominent so-called “news website” posting private individuals’ social networking posts. Posts with no particular newsworthiness. Posts that those individuals have deleted.

Alas, that is what the algorithm thinks is the best link to recommend. A narrative looking for evidence. And that narrative isn’t even a narrative, it is just “noun + verb + Elon Musk bad”.

the Newslettr’s editorial standards would not allow for such crap. However, apparently Business Insider has no standards, and no decency. And for their depravity, they are rewarded by the algorithm as the top recommendation.

And since we clicked on the link, the algorithm presumably has concluded that it is working as desired, and the algorithm will continue to destroy America.

We could probably go into settings and turn Business Insider off as a source. A few months ago, we did that for Coindesk after the volume of crypto-bullshit in the “recommended” feed became intolerable.

But the Newslettr cannot turn this off for everybody. This content is bad, and Google should feel bad for promoting it. To borrow a phrase from Ralph Nader, it is unsafe at any speed. It has no redeeming value for anyone. No sane person would recommend it. But we are not dealing with a sane person, we are dealing with an insane algorithm.

Please4 make it stop.

Since the dawn of Twitter, “prominent people being wrong” has been an unsolved problem. One possible way to solve it is to use a different medium to comment on the wrong-ness. The goal is to discuss people who are frequently and recently wrong (a minimum of 5 objectionable tweets in the past 3 months), who are plausibly public figures, and to exclude people who are deliberately trolling (JD Vance) or who are discussed too frequently in the news media.

Today, I address @balajis, one Mr. Balaji Srinivasan, a person who once held the title of CTO of Coinbase. Apart from having the good luck to have started on Bitcoin early, I observe he is generally wrong about everything. Seven examples from his Twitter posts this month:

The most obvious flaw here is the idea that “crypto phones” should be created; they exist already and are called phones. The distinctions needed would be stupid (carry two pieces of hardware around instead of one?) and useless (if you assume unlimited back doors, they can still access your data when you use it). If you legitimately need to make sure you have an air-gap for your cryptography, you shouldn’t be doing it on an easily-stolen cellphone form factor. And the people who would actually be motivated by marketing for a “crypto phone” are generally more technically savvy than Mr. Srinivasan (who it appears is not a programmer) and would not buy the hype.

Another situation where the wrong problem leads to the wrong solution. I have struggled for years to put messages on the blockchain. With Bitcoin, all you can do is partial hash matches through fake target addresses (unless you are mining a block). I haven’t been able to figure it out with Ethereum either. Shitcoins (a term of art) may let you do this, but they are generally more centralized than Google; governed, mined, and cared-about only by a small set of people.

The claimed solution is already handled by Twitter; you get the same result for the same query (unless, like Mr. Srinivasan, you delete all your tweets to suck up to the Trump administration). The “censorship” described here in a negative light is effectively the same as “moderation”, which he endorses:

A “global moderator hierarchy” doesn’t solve any of the hard problems of moderation. It does create a feudal hierarchy, which is great for certain monarchists. The hardest problem of moderation is the cost of labor to do so; I assume people will say “AI” and ignore this. Most times on large platforms, moderation is about content forbidden on the platform (calls for violence, etc.) and a hierarchy will do nothing at all to help with that, it will just encourage systems to develop that will work against that goal.

But when platforms are moderated, moderation is really a form of curation, choosing bad content to not-show is similar to choosing good content to show. A focus on “disputes” is absurd; disputes are rare and difficult by nature, and if you optimize for solving them you will certainly just make them more common. And, again, this is the same thing as the “censorship” complained about earlier.

Mr. Srinivasan appears not to know what a private key is. There is a difference between authorization and authentication. Authorization is who you are. Authentication is how you say who you are. Both passwords and private keys are authentication technologies; you use them to verify your identity. All of the “users” tables have a globally unique primary key; whether that is an email address or a public key or a Google ID is largely irrelevant. You can use either method with blockchain or private companies. It doesn’t change how your identity authorization is managed at all.

But the linked article isn’t about private keys at all; it’s about “blockchain”, because everything Mr. Srinivasan talks about is about blockchain. The author presumes the data becomes public because blockchain makes that necessary; if “having all user data be public” was a good idea for any of these companies they would have done it already. The network effects of a shared user database are trivial. The size of your “users” database matters not, it is the number of active users that matter, or at least the number of users that have heard of your product. You can get a billion-user “users” database just by using the existing Google or Facebook authentication. (Well, technically, you won’t have explicit database rows for them, but the user experience will be exactly as-if those rows existed.)

I could write a formal review of that blog post, but in one of the most blatantly dishonest patterns I have seen, are offering $100 “rewards” for the best reviews. Which means favorable reviews, as “be constructive” is code for “don’t point out the entire article is an edifice of shit”. In other words, they are paying for astroturf promotion.

I must assume that, in carelessness, “screenshot” has replaced “screen scrape” in the Tweet. (Maybe he means photos of paper receipts?) Regardless, “screenshots and CSVs” is entirely wrong as a description of the existing method for tracking accounting. Bank card transactions already have APIs. This is literally a problem that has been solved multiple times. I am sure he has heard of Plaid, one of the companies that has done so.

No, the “pseudonymous economy” is not coming. If you believe in the coming AGI “apocalypse”, you will note that the only companies where pseudonymous work would be useful are the ones that will get replaced by AGI workers. Today, most companies do one better than “pseudonymous employees” regarding employee privacy: they have publicly anonymous employees, as they simply don’t advertise their full list of employees. And most useful business and all legal business requires some form of physical nexus of presence.

If you’re entering a full-time employment contract and aren’t willing to comply with basic paperwork such as Form I-9, the government will assume you have something to hide, and I will too. Do I really want to take the risk that my “pseudonymous” security engineer works out of the offices of Mossad, the NSA, or the Chinese government?

Nobody is moving to Guam because of the time zone. I’ll let somebody else make the “colonialism” argument as well as the “everything is expensive” argument. If you’re going to move halfway around the world, why not move to Sydney or Ho Chi Minh City or Phnom Penh? The obstacles to permanent residence for remote work can’t be that hard, especially if you’re working for a company in an Asian country. Or move to Portland, sleep till eleven, and work swing shift.

That’s seven. I could do seven more, starting with his take on how blockchain thought will cure aging. But I will not.

In conclusion: virtually everything Mr. Srinivasan says is wrong, and you shouldn’t believe him. Don’t like his posts, don’t re-tweet.