Day: June 30, 2020

please, no facebook money

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We can't go back in time and strangle baby Hitler but there's a possibility that Mark Zuckerberg's fake cryptocurrency can still be stopped.
Banking on Surveillance is a "black paper" [PDF] giving all the reasons why Facebook money is a bad idea:

The Libra project poses three overarching, interrelated threats: (1) mass surveillance of Libra users and business partners, (2) hazardous arbitrage of the financial regulatory system, and (3) the concerted encroachment of Facebook and its partners into the financial services sector, which would violate the traditional separation between commerce and banking, and deepen corporate economic and political dominance.

A few years ago it seemed that people were moving on from Facebook. Yet according to the paper,

Around two-thirds of people in the United States use Facebook, three-quarters of us [ouch -tm] on a daily basis. Overall, ​Facebook accounts for 77% of mobile social networking traffic in the country.

Facebook always had a knack for inflating its monthly user count but those numbers above are still frightening. That's power, like it or not. It would be nice to know how many of the 25% who haven't joined the borg are skeptics, versus unwashed clods. In other words, how many are consciously opting to starve baby Hitler. Their (OK, our) actions, if recognized and imitated, could ultimately be much more effective than legislation or inter-agency government oversight.

Kidnapped (notes)

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Public domain ebooks might be a good way to stay amused and edified during plague time. For example, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, known as a boy's adventure story, in fact details the intricacies of manners, social position, notions of honor, and the limitations of masculine pride in the Scottish highlands, during the time of the Jacobite uprising of the middle-1700s. The Wikipedians say the novel is about "justice," and that's in there, too, among uncounted arguments about how gentlemen should behave. It begins with a rousing shipboard battle with an alarming body count for a boys' book (or maybe that's what makes it so), and then tracks the two main characters through various physical trials as they cross the wild, sparsely populated Scottish outback. Their narrative includes many encounters with hill people, scrupulously describing dialects and customs, and the writing is fairly brilliant throughout. The Bloomsbury Group excommunicated Stevenson from the canon for some reason, relegating him to the children's section of the library, even though his admirers included (as the Wikipedians tell it): "Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Emilio Salgari, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton."