2. Some grace for the spy app defenders |
3. Social engineering is no replacement for actual engineering |
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This week marks four years since the invite-only Clubhouse chat app launched at the top of the Covid lockdowns and rocketed to meteoric popularity. One year of dizzying tech hysteria later, with more attacks from the press on a startup in beta than I have ever seen, and the founders fumbled a $4 billion offer from Twitter. Today? It’s close to dead — another warning of the speed at which a company can grow, and the blinding nature of consensus before a rapid fall. But it does appear the anti-speech crusaders were right to be afraid. They just picked the wrong target. From the rise of newsletters to Elon sacking Twitter, the story of the early 2020s couldn’t be more clear: Clubhouse might have lost, but “unfettered conversations” now control the memes of production. Yours truly, case in point. Welcome to the Daily.
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Some grace for the spy app defenders |
This week, in hearings for Murthy v. Missouri, Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson one-upped her colleagues on their apparent position that governments should be permitted to communicate with tech companies by suggesting that the government should also be able to occasionally force these companies to take “misinformation” down. Well, damn. It sure would be a lot easier to counter the position that TikTok’s divestiture bill is part of a secret plot to mainline government censorship if one of the most influential statists in the country wasn’t presently arguing for exactly these powers.
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Social engineering is no replacement for actual engineering |
Harvard recently halted a solar geoengineering project meant to mitigate global warming. Environmentalists didn't like it because it "eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions." By "societal pressure," they mean paying 5 cents a pop for grocery bags and sorting plastic bottles into little bins so they can be shipped abroad and thrown into a river by Asians. This is America. I'm not riding a bicycle to work. Let the scientists cook or the planet will!
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inside the DEI hivemind that led to gemini's disaster |
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a florida law that would prevent citizens of foreign adversaries like china from buying agricultural land and land near military bases has been halted by an activist judge for being racist |
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Project Roomkey: California’s $3 Billion COVID Homeless Policy Disaster |
newsom is asking taxpayers for billions more to address homelessness after forcing them to foot the bill for his inhumane, pandemic-era program to house homeless people in hotels |
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