2024-10-29

contraceptive schools, billionaire overconfidence, Catholic anime, COCOT history, Robinhood gambling, another non-endorsement, Bezos is Trumpist by default, NYT admires China's industrial controls


etc

Horseshit

celebrity gossip


Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • Russia to create its own Linux community

  • The sins of the 90s: Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance

    Where does anyone get the idea that continued cryptographic export controls would have stopped the growth of Internet commerce, rather than simply limiting the security level of Internet commerce? How do we reconcile this idea with the observed facts of Amazon already growing rapidly in the 1990s? The export controls were still in place; to the extent that Internet commerce was encrypted at all, it was encrypted primarily with a weak cryptosystem, namely 512-bit RSA.

    When a talk claims that preserving cryptographic export controls would have stopped the mass-surveillance industry, the talk isn't just making a claim for an audience of historians. It's influencing future action. It's telling you that there's a tradeoff: an unhappy choice between stopping one bad thing and stopping another bad thing. It's telling you to pause, and to worry that your actions will similarly have bad effects. That's the most important reason to look at whether the claim is actually true, as I've been doing in this blog post.

  • buy payphones and retire (HN comments)

    Despite a certain air of inevitability, COCOTs had a slow start. First, there would indeed be an effort by telephone companies to legally restrict COCOTs. This was never entirely successful, but did result in a set of state regulations (and to a lesser extent, federal regulations related to long-distance calls) that made the payphone business harder to get into. More importantly, though, the technical capabilities of COCOTs were limited. The Robotguard design could charge only a fixed fee per call, which made it a practical necessity to limit the payphone to local calls. Telephone company payphones, which allowed long-distance calls at a higher rate, had an advantage. Long-distance calls were also typically billed by minute, which made it important for a payphone to impose a time limit before charging more. These capabilities were difficult to implement in a reasonably compact, robust device in the 1970s. A number of articles will tell you that COCOTs became far more common as a result of payphone deregulation stemming from the 1984 breakup of AT&T. I would love to hear evidence to the contrary, but from my research I believe this is a misconception, or at least not the entire story. In fact, payphones were deregulated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but that was done in large part because COCOTs were already common and telephone companies were unhappy that conventional payphones were subject to rate regulation while COCOTs were not

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Harris / Democrats

Biden Inc

  • Biden administration announces $3B for rural electric co-ops

    The grants include nearly $2.5 billion in financing for the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, as well as nearly $1 billion through the Department of Agriculture’s Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program for six co-ops. The New ERA program, which uses $9.7 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funds, is the biggest federal investment in rural electrification since the New Deal in the 1930s. The Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association funding will cut electricity rates for members by an estimated 10 percent over the next 10 years, equivalent to about $430 million in benefits to rural electricity consumers. Meanwhile, the six co-ops announced Friday, some of which will serve rural areas in multiple states, are in Minnesota, South Dakota, South Carolina, Colorado, Nebraska and Texas.

Trump / Right / Jan6

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

China

  • China Adds 160 Gigawatts in First 3 Quarters of 2024

  • How Beijing Tamed a Lawless Industry and Gained Global Influence - The New York Times

    As recently as 2010, few industries were as lawless, and yet as central to the global economy, as China’s production of rare earth metals. Consignments of rare earths frequently changed hands for sacks of Chinese currency: The rule of thumb was that a cubic foot of tightly packed 100-renminbi bills was worth $350,000. At a warehouse in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, acid was used illegally to extract rare earths, and the residue, faintly radioactive, was dumped into the municipal sewage. The gang operating the warehouse brought in foreign buyers in the trunks of cars to keep its location a secret. But since then, a crackdown by Chinese law enforcement and the government’s consolidation of the industry have allowed China to seize control over the country’s supply of minerals and curb its excesses. “Gone is the Wild West, go-go mentality where the environment was given short shrift — now it is much more controlled,” said David Abraham, a rare earth industry consultant.

Health / Medicine