Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
>jnfr: You can't get statehood through the Senate. 

Not in the 117th, perhaps. We get a whole new Senate in less than a
year.

>jnfr:What next?

There are 20 GOP Senate seats in the hazard this cycle, five
undefended by incumbents. Dems should take half of them. One
solution to the filibuster perplex is to hold 60 seats.
  

    
<ggg>: Heather Cox Richardson just published good/scary info about
the Oath Keepers...

"The Justice Department indicted Oath Keepers leader [Elmer] Stewart
Rhodes III and 10 other members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right
antigovernment militia that specializes in recruiting veterans, for
a number of crimes including seditious conspiracy in relation to the
January 6 insurrection. Sedition is the crime of inciting a revolt
against the government, and these men allegedly established training
sessions and areas for staging equipment around Washington, D.C.,
before the insurrection to support an attack on that day. They also
brought knives, tactical vests, radio equipment, and so on, to the
Capitol on January 6.

"Rhodes stated that, should Biden assume the office of the
presidency, 'We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody
revolution against them. That’s what’s going to have to happen.' He
wanted Trump to use military force to stop the transfer of
presidential power. On Christmas Day, he messaged his
co-conspirators about the January 6 joint session of Congress, 'We
need to make those senators very uncomfortable with all of us being
a few hundred feet away.... I think Congress will screw him [Trump]
over. The only chance we/he has is if we scare the shit out of them
and convince them it will be torches and pitchforks time is [sic]
they don’t do the right thing. But I don’t think they will listen.'
On December 31, he wrote: 'There is no standard political or legal
way out of this.'"
  

    
The metaverse will allow Meta to see and record your every blink,
eye movement, breath, and utterance. Santa Claus on steroids.

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/13/privacy-vr-metaverse/>
  

    
This is why the blockchain people are so up in arms about stuff like
Meta and fighting like hell for Decentraland: it is possible, at
least in theory, to build the Metaverse as a peer to peer protocol
where shared state is managed by the peers (on the blockchain)
rather than having all the shared state being managed on corporate
servers which also drag in all your telemetry and feed it to
advertisers.

That vision is roughly the same vision as RSS vs. Facebook. It's the
eternal fight between "you do most of the work and get most of the
control" and "you do none of the work, are are sold like potatoes."

As we know that fight very strongly tends to wind up with people
being sold like potatoes. But hope springs eternal and _maybe this
time it's different_.

Here's why. It's possible that The Metaverse (tm) winds up with a
*utility* backbone - something as general-case as Ethereum or
Bitcoin. That general case backbone is neutral: akin to ISPs obeying
Net Neutrality as a principle. Big Dumb Blockchain.

On top of Big Dumb Blockchain, a "Metaverse Protocol" which is
basically HTML-meets-VR. You have a space, it speaks the Metaverse
Protocol over the Big Dumb Blockchain, and the *value* in the
ecosystem is created by an enormous myriad of little companies and
hobbyists pumping out great little experiences. They get directly
paid (by the minute?) via the Big Dumb Blockchain and are therefore
not beholden to the App Store / Meta / Apple / Whoever.

It's just about technically feasible. 

https://grayscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/grayscale-building-blocks-dec
entraland-march-2021.pdf 

Look, there's running code!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL09UfXvl6g

If we could stop snarking about people making a lot of money from
speculating on cartoon apes... maybe we could actually free the
Metaverse. You know? Ready Player One?
  

    
We may be making a category mistake if we assume that "blockchain
people" are likely to be immune from the moral temptations that will
lead to what <karish> mentions in <353>.
  

    
"We are where we are precisely because forces who consider
themselves above it all are stoking hate and division. They seem to
know how to leverage the chaos for their won benefit. Hate is a
tool, hate is a weapon. Sowing division, they reap power."

And most of all, sowing (or surfing on) fear, which I believe
disguises itself as hate.
  

    
"I'm not enough of a historian of these matters to know if the
militiamen are drawing on the KKK heritage - is it the grandkids of
the guys wearing white hoods in the 1950s?"

Not all militias.  Some are explicitly white supremacists, some are
just anti-government, some are nationalists, etc.
  

    
"A lot of these militia folks are well-educated middle-class
Americans who should know better. Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader
of the Oath Keepers, is a lawyer and an army vet from Montana. What
got into his head?"

Just because one is educated doesn't necessarily mean one is
compassionate (or at least tolerant) toward others.  Education is a
tool, like just about anything else, and it can be directed toward
life-affirming or more venal or atavistic ends.
  

    
Craig Maudlin: There's a reason RSS readers didn't carry
advertising.

Your code, your computer, your P2P network... it's just not going to
broadcast the telemetry, any more than EMACS uploads what you type
for spell checking.

A FOSS Multiverse on blockchain *is* possible.

I doubt it'll happen but that's not for technical reasons. It's for
reasons of WILL.
  

    
“If human beings are our enemy then with whom are we to live?”

The answer that initially pops to mind: “What if it’s not that
simple?”

I’m not a Sinophile, but I used my quick-study skills to credibly
edit a few articles about politics or religion under Xi last year.
So for whatever it’s worth: If I were Taiwan, I’d look at what’s
happened in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea over the
past few years, and worry.
  

    
Re: <359>

One important sort of category mistake might occur when we ascribe to a
technology certain characteristics that are really just the result of
human choices. If you haven't seen ads delivered via RSS, you've been
lucky -- or you stopped using RSS before the ads started to appear.
It also took quite a while before ads began to be delivered via email,
as I recall. But, as with email, there's nothing about RSS tech that
*prevents* ads.

> Your code, your computer, your P2P network... it's just not going to
> broadcast the telemetry, ...

I think there was a time we might have said something similar about
"Your TV" -- but now we know that TVs can and do collect and broadcast
quite a bit of telemetry. 

> A FOSS Multiverse on blockchain *is* possible.

I completely agree  -- and, as you say, it's even been done.
  

    
Vinay, I’m wondering which “blockchain people” you enjoy reading,
and where do conversations take place? Is via Twitter or do they
usually happen elsewhere?
  

    
So it used to be Twitter and Medium, but I don't know where it is
now. Pandemic took me out of the conference circuit, so I don't get
the face-to-face pointers these days. Back soon I hope!

Andreas Antonopoulos is great. Emin Gun Sirer is great. Vitalik is
great. Joe Lubin is great (he's the spitting image of Lex Luthor, if
you're wondering, but is a lovely man as far as I know). Ian Grigg,
obviously - inventor of the Ricardian Contract. Stephen Diehl if you
want a critic (an old friend). Nick Szabo, although covid seems to
have tilted him at an odd angle. Older material like The Playdoh
Protocols. Satoshi. Stani from AAVE. Stan Stalnaker of Hub
Culture/Ven.

I feel like this is basically a Classics syllabus given how fast the
field is moving.
  

    
I will definitely be fighting for Senate seats this year.
  

    
“Ricardian contract” is new to me. A search brings up several web
pages defining it, which I only sort of get. Do they actually exist,
or is it just a theoretical construct? If they’re real, it might be
interesting to see an example of one in use.
  

    
Brian:

Here is an NFT on OpenSea which gives the owner the right to
physically take delivery of a 1oz gold bar currently vaulted in
Singapore, or its financial value.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/478243877
05324153400210554042155132922682187088261737780213014306821163188225

When this NFT is purchased, each new buyer pays 2% of the value of
the NFT for a set of six Ricardian contracts, each signed by a
real-world legal entity with a bank account, corporate registration
documents etc. Actual companies, including my own, which
orchestrates the legal-technical interface work.

The payments happen on chain, and the proof of payment (a digital
signature on the blockchain, authorizing the payment) constitutes
acceptance of the contract: a service is offered, accepted, and paid
for in a single transaction.

You can see this suite of contracts here:
https://passport.mattereum.com/ntfa.20210319.20.alpha.004.619263/

Each warranty offer protects the Real World Asset gold bullion NFT
buyer against a different class of risks. Together they form a sort
of "legal testudo" - providing a relatively secure armoured shell to
protect the assertion that the NFT buyer **actually gets the gold**
or equivalent financial value in a very broad range of
contingencies. Over time, obviously we'll add more and more
protection in layers to get closer to 100% protection over time.

Here is the full legal text of one of the Ricardian contracts:
https://passport.mattereum.com/ntfa.20210319.20.alpha.004.619263/06_carbon/ass
ets/out/certification-contract.html

This one is a contract between the NFT owner and my company, which
guarantees that we have bought-and-retired carbon credits to cover
the physical mining of the gold bullion that is being sold. It also
covers the CO2 emissions of the NFT issuing process.

Clause 20 has the arbitration machinery.

We've worked fairly closely with the UK government on arbitration
rules for blockchain asset disputes.

https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/new-dispute-rules-envisage-direct-t
o-blockchain-enforcement-arbitral-decisions

The rules themselves are here:
https://35z8e83m1ih83drye280o9d1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/20
21/04/Lawtech_DDRR_Final.pdf

We get a name check on page 4.

So what's being built out here is a very tightly bound legal
framework for buying and selling physical goods, with suites of
Ricardian contracts creating legally-enforceable claims about what
the goods are **DRAWN ON THIRD PARTIES**. Those third parties do not
benefit from the sale of the goods themselves, they make a living
providing legal warranties on the goods - they're essentially third
party inspectors with no economic interest in the situation other
than by selling insurance on the fact that something (for example)
contains no slave labour.

We work with a world class anti-slavery expert on a long term
project to drive slavery out of the supply chain using exactly these
kinds of certification protocols. I would estimate it will be two
years before we are doing this at an industrial scale - it is very
complicated - but the will is overwhelming and the technical, legal
and slavery-prevention expertise is sufficient. We are going to do
this, do it right, and do it at scale. It took us a couple of years
to get CO2 done, and now all the NFTs we produce attached are fully
offset. 

We also took the entire Avalanche blockchain Net Zero CO2 last year.

https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-technology-social-m
ovements-with-helen-burrows/transcript

You can read more about our anti-slavery work here.
https://passport.mattereum.com/ntfa.20210319.20.alpha.004.619263/

The objective is to produce a trade commons: a circular economy ("on
the blockchain") in which all goods are fully CO2 offset, slavery
free, and nearly everything has been used before and is being passed
around and used, repaired and re-repaired, until it is genuinely
done.

We think that will produce both higher quality of life, and
*dramatically* reduced environmental impact from that quality of
life.

I've put this stuff here in quite some detail to really illustrate
the point: Ricardian contracts are extremely powerful tools for
creating the world you want if they are applied diligently and
intelligently to real-world problems. It is an act of will: you have
to *push* in that direction to get the blockchain to behave this
way.

Otherwise, if you don't, it's a lazy beast that follows the path of
least resistance, and you get very expensive
cartoon-monkey-wearing-a-hat jpegs.
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

(bslesins) #318 "There seems to be precedent for American acceptance
and tolerance of higher levels of violence without society breaking
down?"

A thousand deaths and more a day from COVID in USAmerica is now
taken in stride, barely mentioned on the news.  Welcome to the
behavioral sink.
  

    
Also, George, I think whether or not society is stable can be both
subjective and situational experiences. Whether we’re at peace is
all relative to how far you live from the front, you know?

When you start to delve into the data on structural inequities in
the U.S. – I’ve been editing stories explaining the chronic health
disparities between whites and most minorities, for example – it is
obvious that society has yet to function consistently well for
millions of people. 

In terms of perception, Rush Limbaugh rose on his talent for
twisting a small bit of progress on LGBTQ+ or women’s rights, for
example, into a towering sign that society was breaking down right
around straight white males. 

Then, with globalization, it’s arguable that society really did
start breaking down around millions of white working class people,
as manufacturing fled to cheap labor and laissez-faire regulation
overseas. The powers that be had deemed them and their families
extraneous to the economy and society, and they knew it.
  

    
Emily: Yeah. Skin tone vs. life expectancy is one of those charts
which **should** exist, but nobody with the data will present it.

Literally just pantone colors down one side, and life-years down the
other, for the entire global population.

I really appreciate the focus you are bringing to this reality.
  

    
<366> thanks for the detailed explanation! It might be good to put
something like that on your website as an introduction for those of
us catching up.

<367> The bit about "barely mentioned in the news" irks me. I find
it odd to pretend that the top news story of the past two years,
often with its own dedicated newspaper section and daily updated
statistics page where you can look at the death rate at any time,
broken down to state and county levels, is somehow undercovered.
There are good and bad news stories but overall, journalists have
done a great job on this one and as a news junkie I could hardly ask
for more.

I wish I could find better charts and analysis for other news
stories I'm interested in.
  

    
I agree with <bslesins> - most of the coverage of Covid has been
excellent and informative, though confusing. The confusion is not
attributable to the news organizations, but to the actual work of
science in action - we've watched how a novel phenomenon is studied
and how thinking changes as research continues and new facts emerge.
Because news is so immediate, we've seen the evolution of scientific
thinking as it happens. Anyone seeking authoritative and unchanging
explanations have been, not just disappointed, but in many cases
confused and pissed off. Science is a disciplined approach to
knowledge, but it is not a source of ultimate truth. Rather, it's a
method of inquiry and evolved understanding through ongoing
research. Speaking for myself, from following Covid so closely for
the last couple of years, I've learned not just a lot about the
specific disease, but a lot about epidemiology, public health
practices, how diseases evolve and how they spread. I'm thankful for
the coverage, and uncertain how to address the unfortunate problem
of pervasive misunderstanding, especially as it's aggressively
politicized.
  

    
<hexayurt>: "nobody with the data will present it" is false. Those
graphs are readily available. The Census Bureau publishes all the
numbers, current and historical, for every community in the US. It's
easy to search for that information.
  

    
The point that seems to be lost in this conversation is that the 
confusion is a direct result of deliberate campaign of misinformation by 
the administration.  Trump knew it was going to be bad, but made a 
calculation that the proven steps to prevent pandemic infection would be 
far too costly, would hurt the economy, and at that point in time, the DOW 
was his big selling poing for re-election.  And he decided to kill people 
in order to get re-elected.

Once he compromised the CDC, and sabotaged Fauci, there has been no place 
to get clear, clean, and trustworthy information.
  

    
<rik> That's what I meant when I said "especially as it's
aggressively
politicized." But you're correct in that, more than exploiting
misunderstanding, Trumpists were adding to and encouraging it...
  

    
Yes, but "adding to it and encouraging it" misses the point that 
he began it.   This is the big story.  Trump knew what he was doing and 
literally chose to kill people in pursuit of power.