reid/write



home // about
shitbloggin with reid scoggin

link roundup 3

Published:

i’ve got a little pattern down now – i have a page on my vimwiki where i record my candidate links for the week, then burn off a few when i decide to post. i also finally linked this blog to the outside world today. if anyone got here from twitter, let me know in the comments. on to the links:

reading

Whereas in the past tongue mutilation was the last resort to use in order to preserve your secrets, the digital realm has developed a material base where multiple identities can flourish and harden into protective obscurity. Cypherpolitics is advanced by these tools, but only to an extent. Technological migration is a necessity. The minute one tool is compromised, depleted, it is best to find a replacement. Resorting to deletion is not succumbing to an opponent’s or system’s pressures, but something cypherpolitics actively encourages. Deletion immediately refreshes anonymous intergrity and anonymity is the backbone of cypherpolitics- its most powerful feature. If your identities coincide across various platforms, forming patterns, your traces will lead clues. The data sniffer forms beliefs from this picture; denunciation follows. To avoid this, it is necessary to encrypt yourself.

In response to emailed questions, Williamson said that although the list price for Evzio is more than $4,000, that’s “not a true net price to anyone … due to numerous discounts and rebates that are negotiated in the supply chain that make up our healthcare system.”

In other words, even though the price tag for his company’s easy-to-use, lifesaving device is ridiculous and indefensible, there’s no need to worry because backroom deals by assorted players in the healthcare food chain make that price tag meaningless.

This stunning advertisement does a thorough job of showcasing Philadelphia’s many features, including the ability to generate PDF reports and charts of victims “to track your malware campaigns” as well as the ability to plot victims around the world using Google Maps.

“Everything just works,” claim the proprietors of Philadelphia. “Get your lifetime copy. One payment. Free updates. No monthly fees.”

The laughter has now stopped, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons systems. “This idea that these things were just bargaining chips — something that was true years ago — is superseded by the fact that there is now a rocket force . . . with a commander and a headquarters and subordinate bases, all with missiles,” said Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “This is now a living, breathing thing.”

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.

The emergence of post-rationality/post-truth/post-systemism/etc is the final triumph of what we might call Irony. The iron-clad position of ultimate immunity to everything, the ferrous dark tower against which pin the world must be turned aside, the point of nuclear stability from which no further action can be extracted. Not merely to unthink your thoughts, not merely to meet a stop-sign and turn back, but to unthink the thoughts about unthinking, and the thoughts about that, quine the whole thing and be done with discourse forever. Ironic detachment beyond merely a new level, but taken to a whole new realm of smug disengagement, an Alcubierre drive running on exotic logic, causally disconnected from the rest of reason and already accelerating away to some absurd infinity.

Actually, one of the best things the book did to me was make me take cliches about “rich people need to defer to the poor on poverty-related policy ideas” more seriously. This has become so overused that I roll my eyes at it: “Could quantitative easing help end wage stagnation? Instead of asking macroeconomists, let’s ask this 19-year old single mother in the Bronx!” But Scott provides a lot of situations where that was exactly the sort of person they should have asked. He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.

  • tilda terminal – drop-down terminal à la guake, but lighter-weight and plays nice with i3

  • teach yourself computer science – i probably won’t have enough time to plow through much of this on the remainder of my break, but it looks promising

  • syncany – self-hosted spideroak alternative