Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts

Friday, February 7, 2025

Post Consumer Product Phishing



A reversal of sorts, where the market used to have people who made things and people who bought things, but now it's just people taking things from other people, who get nothing in return.

The consumer became the product. Because let's face it, all DNA-testing sites are really just Ancestry dot com, which was based on early 20th century surveillance, similar to the very expensive advertising lists compiled from reams of public and non-public personal data. Think churches, governments and community organizations holding marriage certificates, military records, or payment accounting books. The DNA part was just like hanging a Store Closing All Items Half Price sign in the window. 

Granted, there are a few easy genes to tell you otherwise really obvious things about yourself. Are you Asian? That's ABCC11, called the 'no body odor' gene. I had no idea I was Asian until now actually, thank you DNA company. There'a another one for people of African origin, something related to sickle cell anemia and diabetes, called the HBB mutation.

Here's a better explanation:
"To understand the ancestry tests, you have to begin by looking at the fine print. This [type of test] says 'for recreational purposes only' or something very similar. It obviously is written by lawyers, not scientists, and it's a way of saying that the results have no scientific or legal standing. This is privatized, corporate science, not ordinary science. "How do they come up with numbers? They take DNA from people from disparate regions and compare yours to theirs. The numbers reflect a measure of your DNA similarity to those of the divergent gene pools. How do they calculate it? Don't know; the algorithms are protected intellectual property. Are they accurate? About as accurate as looking in the mirror."
--NPR, Why You Should Think Twice About Those DNA-By-Mail Results, 2017 [link]

It's not that the DNA-ancestry companies don't work at all, just that they work far, far less than they would have us believe (kind of like smart shoelaces or AI handlebars).  

In other words, when you give your DNA to a company for the purposes of discovering your ancestry, they're getting more usable information about you than you are about yourself. And then things like this happen:
 
DNA-testing site 23andMe fights for survival
Nov 2024, BBC News

"Until we ban the trade in personal data, we are not well protected enough."
-Carissa Velez, author of Privacy is Power


Something to consider - the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation has the Tabula Sapiens atlas of human tissue. (2022) [link]


I gave my DNA to tracking company - then it vanished
Nov 2024, BBC News

A DNA-testing firm appears to have ceased trading - without telling its customers what has happened to the highly sensitive data they shared with it.

Atlas Biomed, which has offices in London, offered to provide insights into people's genetic make up as well as their predisposition to certain illnesses.

However, users are no longer able to access their personalised reports online and the company has not responded to the BBC's requests for comment.

Customers of the firm describe the situation as "very alarming" and say they want answers about what has happened to their "most personal information".

This next article seems different, but it's actually the same:

Smart gadgets’ failure to commit to software support could be illegal, FTC warns
Nov 2024, Ars Technica

Makers of smart devices that fail to disclose how long they will support their products with software updates may be breaking the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned this week.

The FTC released its statement after examining 184 smart products across 64 product categories, including soundbars, video doorbells, breast pumps, smartphones, home appliances, and garage door opener controllers. Among devices researched, the majority—or 163 to be precise—"did not disclose the connected device support duration or end date" on their product webpage, per the FTC's report [PDF]. Contrastingly, 11.4 percent of devices examined shared a software support duration or end date on their product page.

Post Script on quality in the post-consumer era:
Majority of clothes being donated are exported or discarded: Study calls for city fashion waste shakeup
Nov 2024, phys.org

Charities and collectors have been reporting the plummeting quality of garments over the past 15 to 20 years, decreasing resale potential

Further Reading: Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, 2022

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Sunday, January 26, 2025

The Offloading of Executive Function as Precursor to the Singularity


When they said the phone had become your exocortex, they were not kidding - the executive function of a human is being outsourced to computers (algorithms, AI, etc.); we're seeing it happen in real time. Not sure what this means for the future of humans, and not sure what the intorduction of the alphabet did in this regard, or what Socrates would have said about all this, but here we are:

(Don't forget the incentive here - with the offloading of executive control, we also offload liability.)

Internet addiction affects behavior and development of adolescents, study finds
Jun 2024, phys.org

Meta study of small groups but fMRI: 12 articles involving 237 young people aged 10–19 with a formal diagnosis of internet addiction between 2013 and 2023.

The effects of internet addiction were seen throughout multiple neural networks in the brains of adolescents. There was a mixture of increased and decreased activity in the parts of the brain that are activated when resting (the default mode network).

Meanwhile, there was an overall decrease in the functional connectivity in the parts of the brain involved in active thinking (the executive control network).

These changes were found to lead to addictive behaviors and tendencies in adolescents, as well as behavior changes associated with intellectual ability, physical coordination, mental health and development.

via University College London: Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies, PLOS Mental Health (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000022



And now, speaking of executive function, it appears that the executives among us (i.e., managers) are the most at-risk and yet the most unwilling to recognize that they are squarely on the chopping block in the coming revolution:

Economist says hybrid work is a 'win-win-win' for productivity, performance and retention
Jun 2024, phys.org

Sometimes the truth is easy, not often but sometimes:

In a randomly controlled experiment on more than 1,600 workers at one of the world's largest online travel agencies, Trip.com, employees who worked from home for two days a week were just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers.

On a third key measure, employee turnover, the results were also encouraging. Resignations fell by 33% among workers who shifted from working full-time in the office to a hybrid schedule. Women, non-managers, and employees with long commutes were the least likely to quit their jobs when their treks to the office were cut to three days a week. Trip.com estimates that reduced attrition saved the company millions of dollars.

Also, resignations fell only among non-managers; managers were just as likely to quit whether they were hybrid or not.

And, managers predicted on average that remote working would hurt productivity, only to change their minds by the time the experiment ended.

Opponents say that employee training and mentoring, innovation, and company culture suffer when workers are not on site five days a week, but critics often confuse hybrid for fully remote.

This suggests that problems with fully remote work arise when it's not managed well.

via Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research: Nicholas Bloom, Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2. 

Using AI to train AI: Model collapse could be coming for LLMs
Jul 2024, phys.org

The research shows that within a few generations, original content is replaced by unrelated nonsense, demonstrating the importance of using reliable data to train AI models. This is called model collapse. 

They found that feeding a model AI-generated data causes successive generations to degrade in their ability to learn, eventually leading to model collapse.

Nearly all of the recursively trained language models they tested tended to display repeating phrases. For example, a test was run using text about medieval architecture as the original input and by the ninth generation the output was a list of jackrabbits.

The authors propose that model collapse is an inevitable outcome of AI models that use training datasets created by previous generations.

via OATML Department of Computer Science University of Oxford: Ilia Shumailov et al, AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

Also: Emily Wenger, AI produces gibberish when trained on too much AI-generated data, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-02355-z , doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02355-z

Autonomy boosts college student attendance and performance
Jul 2024, phys.org

Students were given the choice to make their own attendance mandatory. Contradicting common faculty beliefs, 90% of students in the initial study chose to do so, committing themselves to attending class reliably or to having their final grades docked. Under this "optional-mandatory attendance" policy, students came to class more reliably than students whose attendance had been mandated.

Like too many rules make the willpower weak.

via Carnegie Mellon University: Simon Cullen et al, Choosing to learn: The importance of student autonomy in higher education, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado6759


Breaking MAD: Generative AI could break the internet
Jul 2024, phys.org

Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD) by analogy to mad cow disease. Auto phage means eating yourself.

First peer-reviewed work on AI autophagy:

"The problems arise when this synthetic data training is, inevitably, repeated, forming a kind of a feedback loop--what we call an autophagous or 'self-consuming' loop," said Richard Baraniuk, Rice's C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Our group has worked extensively on such feedback loops, and the bad news is that even after a few generations of such training, the new models can become irreparably corrupted. This has been termed 'model collapse' by some--most recently by colleagues in the field in the context of large language models (LLMs). We, however, find the term 'Model Autophagy Disorder' (MAD) more apt, by analogy to mad cow disease."

via Rice University Digital Signal Processing group: Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD. Sina Alemohammad et al. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.01850

Post Script: Contemplate the possibility of us having to rebuild the internet from scratch and on purpose, so like there will be literally armies of artists, writers and musicians, etc., who's sole job is to create authentic, original training data. (Idea stolen from artist Ben Grosser)


And on the other hand:
A person's intelligence limits their computer proficiency more than previously thought, say researchers
Sep 2024, phys.org

"Everyday user interfaces have simply become too complex to use."

"It is clear that differences between individuals cannot be eliminated simply by means of training; in the future, user interfaces need to be streamlined for simpler use. This age-old goal has been forgotten at some point, and awkwardly designed interfaces have become a driver for the digital divide. We cannot promote a deeper and more equal use of computers in society unless we solve this basic problem."

"However, the research findings also show that age remains the most important factor in how well an individual can use applications. Older people clearly took more time to complete their tasks, and they also felt that the assignments were more burdensome."

via Aalto University Department of Information and Communications Engineering and the University of Helsinki Department of Psychology:  Erik Lintunen et al, Cognitive abilities predict performance in everyday computer tasks, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2024.103354

Post Script on too much executive function!?
Research AI model unexpectedly modified its own code to extend runtime
Aug 2024, Ars Technica

"The AI Scientist automates the entire research lifecycle. From generating novel research ideas, writing any necessary code, and executing experiments, to summarizing experimental results, visualizing them, and presenting its findings in a full scientific manuscript." It's run by Tokyo-based AI research firm Sakana AI.

"In one run, it edited the code to perform a system call to run itself," wrote the researchers on Sakana AI's blog post. "This led to the script endlessly calling itself. In another case, its experiments took too long to complete, hitting our timeout limit. Instead of making its code run faster, it simply tried to modify its own code to extend the timeout period."
Nice.

Post Post Script, on Automation and the Illusion of Control
Partial automated driving systems don’t make driving safer, study finds
Jul 2024, Ars Technica

Whatever you do, don't read this sentence: "Everything we’re seeing tells us that partial automation is a convenience feature like power windows or heated seats rather than a safety technology," said David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.


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Friday, December 20, 2024

Inside the World of the LSD User


The spread of misinformation varies by topic and by country in Europe, study finds
May 2024, phys.org

Researchers analyzed news activity on Twitter (now X) in France, Germany, Italy and the UK from 2019 to 2021, including a focus on news about Brexit, the coronavirus, and the COVID vaccines. Each news source they analyzed was rated as either "reliable" or "questionable" based upon their NewsGuard score.
  • Across all four countries, the vast majority of users only ever consumed reliable news sources on each of the three topics.
  • But in every country and in each topic, there was always a small percentage of users who only ever consumed questionable news sources - with very few people consuming a mix of both reliable and questionable sources.
  • Germany had the highest ratio of questionable news retweets to reliable news retweets on all three topics, with France in second, followed by Italy, and the UK had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets overall.
  • Italy had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets for the topic of the coronavirus - but had the highest percentage of people consuming only questionable news sources on Brexit.

"Cultural nuances" will be important when it comes to fighting misinformation.

via Ca' Foscari University of Venice: News and misinformation consumption: A temporal comparison across European countries, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302473

Image credit: 3D printed vacuum system traps dark matter - University of Nottingham - Jun 2024


Study finds avoiding social media before an election has little to no effect on people's political views
May 2024, phys.org

35,000 Facebook and Instagram users who were paid to stay off the platforms in the run-up to Election Day.

I'm thinking about the overall social influence, like if you're not online but your friends are, it's all the same. So if they did this study by taking only the friends of the people chosen, then we would see an effect? (Friendship Paradox)

via Stanford: Gentzkow, Matthew, The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2321584121.


Mental disorders may spread in young people's social networks
May 2024, phys.org

Contagion - 700,000 ninth-grade pupils born between 1985 and 1997 from 860 Finnish schools followed for 11 years (largest and most comprehensive so far on the spread of mental disorders in social networks).

The number of classmates diagnosed with a mental disorder was associated with a higher risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life.

The connection observed in the study is not necessarily causal. "It may be possible, for instance, that the threshold for seeking help for mental health issues is lowered when there are one or more people in your social network who have already sought help for their problems" (beneficial contagion).

via University of Helsinki: Jussi Alho et al, Transmission of Mental Disorders in Adolescent Peer Networks, JAMA Psychiatry (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1126

Dual-species Rydberg array combining rubidium and cesium atoms to enhance quantum computing - BernienLab at University of Chicago - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests less conformity leads to more innovation
May 2024, phys.org

These methods reveal something crazy - how easy it could be to manipulate a big part of a population just by doing some very small adjustments to the recommendation algorithms, and the idea of synthetic networks cycling through the real networks as a kind of social regulator.

  • The Matthew effect aka "rich-get-richer effect" increases centralization in the network, which destroys the niches protecting minority opinions, reducing sociodiversity.
  • "Networks that promote sociodiversity have structural features that protect minority opinions"
  • "Unfollowing a few VIPs can help to promote sociodiversity"

via Complexity Science Hub and ETH Zurich: Andrea Musso et al, How networks shape diversity for better or worse, Royal Society Open Science (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.230505


Misleading COVID-19 headlines from mainstream sources did more harm on Facebook than fake news
May 2024, phys.org

They showed thousands of survey participants the headlines from 130 vaccine-related stories - including both mainstream content and known misinformation - and tested how those headlines impacted their intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Researchers also asked a separate group of respondents to rate the headlines across various attributes, including plausibility and political leaning. They matched that against 13,206 vaccine-related URLs and the number of users who viewed each.
  • Misleading content from mainstream news sources - rather than outright misinformation or "fake news" - was the primary driver of vaccine hesitancy on Facebook.
  • "Vaccine-skeptical" content was potentially misleading but not flagged as misinformation by Facebook fact-checkers.
  • One factor reliably predicted impacts on vaccination intentions: the extent to which a headline suggested that the vaccine was harmful to a person's health.
  • The most-viewed was an article was from a well-regarded mainstream news source, and its clickbait" headline was highly suggestive and implied that the vaccine was likely responsible.
  • (That's significant since the vast majority of viewers on social media likely never click out to read past the headline.)
  • Contrary to popular perceptions, the researchers estimated that vaccine-skeptical content reduced vaccination intentions 46 times more than misinformation flagged by fact-checkers.
  • Even though flagged misinformation was more harmful when seen, it had relatively low reach.
  • Gray-area content is less harmful per exposure but is seen far more often, thus it's more impactful overall.
(Also, what does this mean about actual advertising metrics?)

via MIT Sloan School of Management: Jennifer Allen, Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3451.


Advertisers may be inadvertently funding misinformation
Jun 2024, phys.org

(I think we're starting to see a pattern here.)

5,000 websites (1,250 were misinformation websites); 42,000 unique advertisers; nine million instances of advertising companies appearing on news websites from 2019 to 2021. 

The companies advertising on misinformation websites accounted for anywhere from 46% to 82% of overall companies in their respective industries.

Companies that used digital advertisement platforms were 10 times more likely to appear on misinformation websites than those that did not.

Authors propose two low-cost, scalable interventions: 
  • Improve transparency for advertisers about where their ads appear 
  • Make it easier for consumers to identify which companies advertise on misinformation outlets through information disclosures and company rankings

via Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Stanford: Wajeeha Ahmad et al, Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07404-1

Entangling pairs of photons using 1.2 micrometer niobium oxide dichloride - Leevi Kallioniemi at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests ambivalence and polarized views can promote political violence
Jun 2024, phys.org

Time to get confused! 

Previous research has shown that ambivalence about a political issue typically leads people to avoid taking moderate actions such as voting or donating money in support of that issue.

And that's why these findings for extreme behaviors surprised the researchers.

Here, researchers found that ambivalence can actually lead some people - especially those with polarized views - to be more supportive of extreme actions.

The reason? Ambivalence creates discomfort in those with extreme views by making them feel weak or insecure about their beliefs - and that can lead them to compensate.

"When people have these polarized views on a political topic, but also feel some conflict about that belief - that is really a potent combination."

"Those who are conflicted are more willing to give their money to extreme organizations."

"Those who have extreme views, but still feel conflicted about them, feel a need to prove themselves, to show that their beliefs are real and strong."

via Ohio State University: Joseph Siev, Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn2965.

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Thursday, December 19, 2024

Clash of the Titans Can't Stop Won't Stop

 
Every system wants one and only one system administrator. The body wants a brain. The brain wants a self. The people want a king. The market wants a monopoly. But that's not sustainable for a system. Eventually, as the agents, or actors, or nodes in network are reduced to a handful, and then to a few, there comes a time when there can be only one. 

Now is that time. (See previous post for more of this.)

Let's start with this, a bit tangential, but putting the point up front, in practical terms:

ANCHOR website isn’t broken, state says. Error message is a security measure
Sep 2024, NJ Advance Media 

This an example of what happens when you offload government services to private enterprise, at a time when all the enterprises get along and follow the same rules, until they don't because they get so big they start eating each other, and make the whole infrastructure of the internet not work, and government is screwed, because that's what's happening:

(ANCHOR is a state program that allows New Jersey residents to get money back for their high property taxes.)

“When someone has an ANCHOR status page open in one page, then tries to open another ANCHOR status page, it will stop the user.”

Some of the users who got the message insisted they did not have multiple tabs or windows open. They said they tried to use the tool on computers and laptops, tablets and cell phones, but they continued to get the error.

Those who tried other browsers reported they were able to access the tool.



Now let's look at some direct hits:

Google accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations over Azure cloud platform
Sep 2024, Ars Technica

Google also said in its complaint, which was sent on Tuesday to the EU’s powerful competition unit, that it was concerned that Microsoft was degrading the user experience of those customers that were moving their Windows software to competing cloud providers.

This is almost exactly and literally the same language used by Mehta against Google in the Oct 2024 DOJ anti trust suit: "Plaintiffs contend that Google’s conduct has caused three anticompetitive effects particular to the text ads market: ... (3) product degradation through diminished transparency regarding text ads auctions. ... ." (p258, link) 
[^Note that Google's customers are not the average internet user who runs a search, but advertising people, so when they talk about the deterioration of the product, it's of the advertisement4, or its placement, or its audience, not the search results.]

Google accused of shadow campaigns redirecting antitrust scrutiny to Microsoft
Oct 2024, Ars Technica

FTX sues Binance for $1.76B in battle of crypto exchanges founded by convicts
Nov 2024, Ars Technica

Albertsons calls off merger and sues Kroger
Dec 2024, CNN Business

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Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Art Hurts


This man is a genius

Image credit: Oobah Butler w a bottle of Release - Nov 2024

Amazon drivers’ urine packaged as energy drink, sold on Amazon
Nov 2023, Ars Technica

The drink is called Release, and it's filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.

Release is just marketing for a new documentary called The Great Amazon Heist, which shows how easy it is to bypass Amazon's buying and selling safeguards, but Oobah is a cultural genius.

I fucking love this man - Oobah Butler

See also his fakesploitation of the food reviews market where he created a fake restaurant on top of his garage that won like 4 stars overnight; called the Shed at Dulwich

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Sunday, July 14, 2024

The Measure of Success


Everyone has a different measure of what it means to be "making it".

Not "making it" like 1950's or even 1970's sex (recently watched Taxi Driver 1976 and the 12 year old prostitute Jodie Foster asks Robert De Niro if they're gonna "make it" or not). I think "making it" is also a mafia term, but I'm not sure what it means. 

To say another way, everyone has their own definition of what luxury is. A washing machine, for those who spent their early 20's and 30's washing clothes in a big pot down by the river where it took literally all day, one day a week. A car, for those who ride a bike to work everyday (in America, that's usually not something you do by choice). A house, for those who share the walls, floors and ceilings of their home with strangers. 

When you live at the tip of the spear of the modern world, penetrating through the history and customs of thousands of years and billions of people, the definition of luxury becomes more abstract, more creative. Just ask someone who lives in an urban-suburban community within about 10-20 miles from either coast of the United States, over 30 years old, carrying an advanced degree. They have washing machines and cars and, well probably not a house, but close. (Maybe by 40 years old. Or 50. Maybe you should just accept reality and purchase your burial plot now before even that becomes unaffordable.)

As per the popular media, luxury for these folks is avocado toast, complaining about Twitter on Twitter, or never ever leaving your house for any reason ever again because you can use your exo-cortex to order food and supplies and eventually even virtual hugs to your virtual skinsuit (true).

I propose a different measure, one that will certainly be found with strong disagreement, perhaps even outrage, by many. The measure of whether or not you've "made it" is one simple thing - how much stuff you carry in your pockets. 

How much stuff do you carry in your pockets? Keys phone wallet?

I used to sit outside early mornings and watch people walk to the train to go to work, all the way from the suburbs of New Jersey to the transportation trap that is New York City (sometimes you can get in, but you can't get out, an all too common experience for the hundreds of thousands of daily commuters). Bookbags and briefcases, sure. Some people had a suitcase on wheels, every day. Some people had 2 suitcases on wheels, and a bookbag, a lunchbag, and a purse, every day. Some people, correction, some men, have a carbiner clip on their belt loop, laden with a whole Groundskeeper Willie's worth of keys, and a bottle of water, but that's it.

But there was one man, one, who would walk to the train station every single day with absolutely nothing in his pockets; every day. He was going in for a full day of work, that I know because I often saw him coming back around 5 or 6pm. How can I be so sure his pockets were empty? He wore really nice slacks, not the working man's blue jeans, so you could see even the slightest outline of his pockets from the outside, and there was never, ever anything in his pockets. He carried his phone in his hand and that was it. 

How do you pay for lunch with no wallet? I don't think this man pays for lunch. You need to drink water on the train, the one that gets stopped in the tunnel for 2 hours on your way to work? No, you don't. You are so refreshingly and satisfyingly hydrated from your life of luxury that you don't need that. And when you get where you're going, you don't have to find the water, they give you water, just like they give you lunch. You don't need a briefcase, because shit I don't know what the hell you do for a living but if you're not even bringing a folder with some papers in it to even ---look--- like you're doing something important every day, then damn you have a nice ass job, and you sure as hell don't need a briefcase. 

No phone charger. No keys? No keys. He probably doesn't even have a car. Or better yet, his driver has the car, so his driver carries the keys. He probably takes the train because there's a toilet on the train. For this man, luxury is a limo with a toilet in it, so that he can be driven to work in his own personal car but also go the bathroom with dignity in case there's a 2-hour traffic jam, while he's drinking his 20-ounce morning coffee. I wonder if he even realizes that having absolutely nothing in his pockets is like the greatest mark of success in this world. 

We live in a consumer society. Our economy, and in fact our entire Western civilization, is upheld by "disposable income". We literally keep our country running by buying useless shit (disposable shit). We carry that shit with us everywhere we go. The water bottle. Why have a vast infrastructure of public water fountains where anyone can get a drink of water anytime, when you can instead carry your own water around with you all day? By the bottle? Nah son we live in America we carry our water around with us in fucking gallons. Why carry a car key when you can opt for this battery-powered piece of plastic that's bigger than your fist? How else are you going to show other people how much you're "making it" if they can't see the type of car you drive when you're not in the car anymore? (My conspiracy theory is that car key fobs keep getting bigger so that we can't keep them in our pockets anymore, and have to show off the brand, free advertising, because it's really all about advertising.) 

I don't want to be a walking billboard for disposable income or disposable consumer products, and so I try to carry as little as possible with me, but alas I am not making it. Lo, water bottle, behold, keys. As I lie in my comfortable bed, in my climate controlled apartment, I fall asleep to dreams of a life where I have none of these, and I know it doesn't make sense, but my own body dislolves, until there's nothing left but plastic and PFAS. I made it.


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Thursday, July 11, 2024

I Drink Your Milkshake


AKA The Economy Doesn't Exist

Believe it or not, we have run out of things to buy, and now we're coming for you, the consumer. 

Let's start with this old blog post by a guy who says Karen is an acknowledgment of the downfall of consumerism:

For decades this prevailing ideology ["the customer is always right"] instilled in millions of consumers around the world an expectation that when it came to the items they bought and services they used, few things beyond the limits of time and space should get in the way of their satisfaction. If something did go wrong, it was the responsibility of the consumer to “speak with the manager” in order to let them know of the flaw in their operation and insist they correct the problem lest the patron not return in the future. ...

Such admonishments ["go shopping" by GWB after 9-11] worked due to the fact that no matter how unpredictable one’s life or how dysfunctional the performance of core institutions, the system that delivered consumer bliss would never fail. The problem now, of course, is that the system is now failing and the ability of consumer culture to paper over the contradictions of the contemporary global assemblage of power is waning rapidly. ... 

Floods and rising ocean levels will destroy favorite beaches and destroy oceanfront vacation property. Droughts and water shortages will shorten ski seasons and prevent the filling of back yard pools. Pandemics will require lockdowns and the closing of large portions of the economy. Supply chains will be disrupted from any number of new problems not contemplated in decades past.

--The Post-Consumer Society, Aug 2021, Eric Fattor's Blog, professor of politics, security and media at Colorado State



The gaming industry is aiming for subscribers. Will gamers play along?
Jan 2024, BBC News

"As it becomes increasingly difficult for younger generations to own real things, we start to see a push towards temporary ownership, or renting, and that’s going to be the case at a high level, with fewer young families buying homes and cars," he says. "For younger generations ownership is not a necessity, and we’re going to also see that in the games industry."

No it won't. This is what it looks like now, but it's not what will happen. When sectors of industry collapse and re-emerge, and at the same time, regional and national subpopulations revolt against their rapid and absolute loss of agency, this is not what will happen. A disturbance in the force has indeed already happened. The consumer economy is completely out of touch with reality, and the people who control it are unknowingly exposing their entire societal utility as no longer useful but undeniably hostile and extortionist. 

The pendulum has already swung, hard. But when your job depends on not accepting something as real, you don't. The media, which in the United States is majority commercial in nature, as opposed to government-funded or fully user-sponsored, cannot see this happening, because if they did, they would lose their funding ecosystem. This article comes from BBC, but it's written for the US population (almost wanted to say "market" but BBC is ostensibly government funded so it's not a "market" per se) and follows the narrative of the majority media there:

Why US economy is powering ahead of Europe's
Feb 2024, BBC News

For the first time in my life, I see the meaning of these words, right there in plain sight:

High inflation has been a painful experience for many Americans and has shaped their view of how the economy is faring. But a strong jobs market has helped disposable income, which is the engine behind consumer spending.

Disposable Income - It's the engine behind consumer spending. Our consumer economy is predicated on the disposable.


Researchers show Reddit users caused the famous GameStop 'short squeeze'
Feb 2024, phys.org

Not sure we needed this but it's good for posterity 

Background:
The most notable short squeeze in decades was the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021. Notably, it seemed to originate on social media, especially the r/Wallstreetbets subgroup of Reddit. Users there saw GameStop's stock price receding due in part to the pandemic, and approximately 140% of the public stock was sold short, meaning some who had borrowed the stock had re-lent it.

Redditors decided the stock of the company - a brick-and-mortar video game sales company - was undervalued and began buying it up. The buying caused the stock price to rise, panicking short sellers, who bought back their borrowed shares, creating still more panic. In just three and a half weeks the stock price rose 2,702%, making millionaires of some and breaking others.

Study:
When analyzed, the data showed a stronger cross-correlation of trading volume with Reddit activity than with the stock price itself—about three times larger—suggesting that the changes observed in trading volume were more tied to discussions on Reddit than reactions to the increasing stock price.

Conclusion:
The wild swing of GameStop stock price served as an alarm for many investors who were now more aware of the power of social media networks and online communities in influencing financial markets and investment decisions.

It has opened the eyes of institutional investors on Wall Street.

via Technical University of Denmark: Antonio Desiderio et al, The causal role of the Reddit collective action on the GameStop short squeeze, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.14999


More than money, family and community bonds prep teens for college success
Apr 2024, phys.org

No need to make it any clearer, money is the opposite of people; good old financial capital vs social capital; but social capital disperses the power to the many, and power wants to be concentrated into the hands of the few, so it's hard.

Social connectedness had a bigger effect on college enrollment and graduation rates than a family's socioeconomic status, a high school environment or a student's high school grades.
  • Build family social capital -
  • Bond with teens
  • Convey expectations and norms toward schoolwork
  • Check homework
  • Discuss classes
  • Developing connections with others in the community, including with the parents of their kids' friends and with neighbors, coaches or teachers.
  • Work policies that encourage family time
  • Urban planning for walkable neighborhoods
  • School practices that help parents get involved
Their data came from 20,000 students who participated in the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study and the 2002 Educational Longitudinal Study, which provided data about family relationships, community connection and educational attainment from students in eighth, 10th and 12th grades, then followed up two and eight years after high school graduation.

via Brigham Young University, North Carolina State University and the National Institute on Aging: Mikaela J. Dufur et al, Is social capital durable?: How family social bonds influence college enrollment and completion, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298344

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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Public-Private Partnerships and Bandwidth-as-Currency

Investment in fiber optics is down, wireless is up. It leaves unused fiber laying around. By being able to deliver to specific customers on-demand, as opposed to a large-investment, wide-area of customers, PPP's can use up this unused fiber, and then run your life with it. (but not really; but then again; see below.)

NASA Langley Research Center - Multimedia Repository

Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?
KLINT FINLEY 01.11.13
clipped:

"Seattle is one of several cities left behind by the major broadband providers, but it happens to have excess fiber capacity. But according to The Seattle Times, few residents have been able to take advantage of it, though Spectrum Networks does offer service in the South Lake Union neighborhood."

"The problem, Ansboury explains, is that the most expensive part of a fiber deployment is the what’s called the “last mile” service — bringing fiber from the big “backbone” connections to the customers’ homes and office buildings. Gibabit Squared will lease fiber capacity from the city and build much of the last mile infrastructure itself."

 -Mark Ansboury, president and co-founder of GigaBit Squared, broadband provider company\

 [The topic of bandwidth is next mentioned in the article, where we are looking at the potential for wireless to equal fiber. It is so very difficult not to remember Charles Stross, in his posthumanist scifi Accelerando (2005), where he places a lot of value on bandwidth in the future, and ever offers a solution to the Fermi paradox, claiming that the apparent lack of intelligent life in the universe is an illusion created by a shortage of bandwidth. Anyway, back to reality.]

...the secret to getting and maintaining these speeds is keeping the user count low, according to GigaOM

...the issue with both CTC and DARPA’s project is how many simultaneous users it can support
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-fiber-shaming-exercise/all/

It's hard to see the future without wireless communication dominating all other forms. The problem with the future of bandwidth will not be what -  the medium of transmission - but who and when is using it and at how much. It's a time-management issue mixed with some user-prioritization. We can imagine myriad package deals of data use, similar to peak times and multi-tiered data plans already in play. But now imagine that you need data to live, more than money, in fact, and the better job you have, the better your data package. The president can have maximum access of the total bandwidth if he wants, whenever he wants. Children under 6 years old get much less.

With so many new ways to create disparities within society, what laws will we be fighting for and against?

Zoning Laws in the Metaverse
JUNE 25, 2012
Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization
AUGUST 4, 2012

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Friday, May 25, 2012

Status Consumerism vs. Goods Consumerism


The link between material assets on the one hand, and status and power on the other, is not self-evident or given by the nature of things. The links are socially created and what we need to think out is what these links can become under the new dispensation. Material goods do still lead to power and status, but they are not the only path towards it. The allocation of position depends on the social system and not the economy.

Ernest Gellner on Self-Image
Plough, Sword and Book
U. of Chicago Press
1988
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