On Let's Regulate Facebook!
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On The Global Casino
I know that everyone has a pretty visceral, negative reaction to the idea of markets behaving like casinos, or high frequency trading, and so forth - but it does serve a useful purpose.
Buying any public stock offering is made far more comfortable when you know that the stock is being traded frequently. You know that someone, somewhere will buy it from you if you don't want it anymore.
As the author himself said:
"If we didn't have big, liquid markets where we could sell our stocks and bonds if we needed to raise cash, we'd be back in the 17th century and nobody would invest in anything."
Well, I'm not sure there's a line where liquidity stops being good and starts being bad. If I'm a long term investor, it does not matter one bit that some high frequency trader is snatching up pennies every few minutes. But it does mean that if I need to get out, I always can.
This argument really strikes me as an emotional objection, and not a rational one. I can see that we want to distinguish between a Warren Buffet, investing in useful parts of the economy; and then there's the high-frequency douche who is just gambling. But that doesn't mean we need to get rid of the latter.
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On I Hated 'Avatar' With The Fire Of A Thousand Suns, by Maria Bustillos
"Note well, however, that l’homme sauvage, for all the purity of his Native Wisdom, is still quite helpless without a white man to show him what the hell to do."
Maybe I don't understand what happens in the movie well enough as I haven't seen it, but I'm confused by this particular critique.
1. An advanced civilization is battling a far less advanced one.
2. An accomplished member of the advanced civilization's armed services becomes a part of the less advanced one.
Am I supposed to believe that this new guy, what with both presumably advanced knowledge and specific experience wouldn't be essentially the world's most useful dude to the natives... like ever?
I understand why we get touchy when this sort of thing is done in a movie about a real culture, but this movie is about fake blue aliens. Who cares?
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On Let's Regulate Facebook!
I keep trying to make sense of this article, in some kind of denial of how nonsensical it is. (Aside from perhaps only the evenhanded appraisal of what role "social media" is playing in these revolutions.)
There was a lot of talk after Egypt successfully shut down Internet access nationwide about how great it was that such a thing could never happen in America. But while it would be politically unpalatable, there doesn't seem to be any legal reason that such a thing couldn't happen... there's no legal prohibition on ISPs here restricting or even shutting down access if they feel like it.
Why would an ISP want to shut down? It's kind of how they make money. And there's no legal way to compel every ISP in America to do this at all.
The current conception seems to be that Facebook and Google are a kind of market exchange—that you are given free access to their services in return for your data. But that's not really the way it works when the service is itself unusable without your information.
No, that's exactly how it works. None of us have to be there! You don't have to give them your data, and I know plenty of people who don't, out of concern for many of the issues raised here. If Facebook troubles you so much, do yourself a favor and quit.
What does it mean if who we are becomes not a thing we carefully control but a construction loosed online, bought and sold over and over again to various advertisers? Are we what we say we are, or are we what private corporations have decided we are?
This is just silly hyperbole. "Who we are" is 100% in our own hands. The artifacts of our lives that get scattered around the internet are not "us." The simple, not-world-changing issue at hand is that many websites privacy controls are inadequate for many people.
I'm concluding with the doozy at the beginning:
...having the identity we’ve built through our actual social network placed under a hierarchical corporate system like Facebook makes it vulnerable to manipulation by private and government interests. As useful as social media can be to people trying to overthrow governments, it’s also becoming the kind of thing we need our own government to keep an eye on.
Can you not see the bizarre logical loop going on here? Facebook and other private internet corporations are vulnerable to government manipulation, therefore, the government should keep an eye on it - and I guess, exert more control over them.