Ross Anderson

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 195

"'Well, for economic stimulus, we can give you a payment, but if you don't use it, you lose it'," he said. "Simply the idea that anyone anywhere can revoke your money is terrifying."
'Bitcoin Must Be Private By Design': Edward Snowden - Decrypt
Snowden also described central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as "terrible."
'Bitcoin Must Be Private By Design': Edward Snowden - Decrypt
As Snowden put it, “for economic stimulus, we [the government] can give you a payment, but if you don’t use it, you lose it. Simply the idea that anyone anywhere can revoke your money is terrifying.”
What Beijing is Buying With Bitcoin | The American Conservative
China is responsible for a staggering 75 percent of the world’s bitcoin mining.
What Beijing is Buying With Bitcoin | The American Conservative
“Cancel culture” is nothing more than the belief that one’s enemies consist mostly of Milo-like assholes, and that as many of them as possible should be treated this way, rather than be debated. Moreover, this belief encourages lazy intellectual habits, because calling someone an asshole or hitting him on the head is easier than, say, reading The Bell Curve and figuring out where it goes wrong.
Was Nikole Hannah-Jones Cancelled? - The Atlantic
Did he also then perpetrate a cancellation when he withdrew from an event upon discovering that the right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos was a fellow speaker? In explaining his reasoning to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Murray did not enumerate Yiannopoulos’s faults. He said, “He is a despicable asshole.”
Was Nikole Hannah-Jones Cancelled? - The Atlantic
“We made the decision a couple of films ago that we weren’t going to mix films for substandard theaters,” said Nolan in an interview with IndieWire last week. “We’re mixing for well-aligned, great theaters.”
Is Dunkirk Too Loud? Complaints mount, is Christopher Nolan to Blame? | IndieWire
Tom Ford, who said he was “a twinkie” at Studio 54 in the days when Halston hung out there with Liza Minnelli, Liz Taylor, Bianca Jagger and Warhol, was also impressed with Mr. McGregor and the show. When Mr. Ford was 18, a date took him to a gathering at Halston’s house, which inspired him. “It’s minimalist,” he said, “but it’s sensual and sexy.” Four decades later, he bought the house, and he’s now restoring it in the Halston image, reproducing the gray Paul Rudolph furniture on the bottom three floors and turning the top floor into a replica of Halston’s ripe-cherry red office in the Olympi…
Ewan McGregor: Dahling, He’s Halston! - The New York Times
compared Halston to Cole Porter, also from Indiana. “Two Hoosiers who took Manhattan and defined cafe society in their respective generations,” he said. “Both pretty out there with their sexual proclivities and both emblematic of the need for gays to flee and realize their cosmopolitan dreams.”
Ewan McGregor: Dahling, He’s Halston! - The New York Times
It’s a tricky role since he has to play someone playing someone. Like Gatsby, Halston, who grew up in Indiana, created himself. He slicked back his hair, slathered on Guerlain bronzer, donned dark sunglasses, pulled on a black turtleneck and adopted a Continental locution.
Ewan McGregor: Dahling, He’s Halston! - The New York Times
Under the Biden proposal, the capital gains tax on wealthy individuals would rise to 43.4%, which would mean net rates well over 50% for individuals in high-tax states such as California and New York. Overall, that change would send the message that the U.S. is not such a great place to accumulate and cash in wealth. As a result, America would lose some of its cultural and economic vitality.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
A society’s values and its tax regime have to be mutually compatible or they will undermine each other. So the first question about a taxation system is which values it promotes.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
The Dead Famous Gorbals Walk features historic local celebrities including flyweight boxing world champion Benny Lynch, tea magnet Sir Thomas Lipton and Allan Pinkerton, founder of America’s Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Allan Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals.
New app highlights the history of the Gorbals
“When speech got digitized, the town square got privatized and the First Amendment got euthanized.
What Should Be Done to Curb Big Tech? - Common Sense with Bari Weiss
a new type of asset class that is tied to the reputation of an individual
The Ponzi Career
Celebrities and online influencers are already using digital tokens to monetize their popularity and share the risks of being a star. Bitclout, for example, enables celebrities to sell Creator Coins that fans can buy and sell.
The Ponzi Career
owners could also benefit from value appreciation. As Alex (the person) becomes more successful and well-known, other investors might want to buy more $ALEX (the tokens) to own a piece of Alex's future earnings.
The Ponzi Career
investors would receive 15% of all income he would generate over the following three years, "capped at $100,000, distributed quarterly."
The Ponzi Career
receive certain rights over Masmej's future income and career decisions
The Ponzi Career
a $20,000 sale against 1M $ALEX (10% of supply) to fund my life as a founder in SF
The Ponzi Career
In April 2020, French entrepreneur Alex Masmej
The Ponzi Career
Lambda School enables students to sell a piece of their future earnings in exchange for tuition.
The Ponzi Career
In 1997, David Bowie issued "bonds" that enabled their holders to earn a percentage of royalties from his back-catalog for the next ten years. An owner of a $1000 "Bowie Bond" would receive a 7.9% coupon each year. Prudential Insurance bought the first batch for $55 million.
The Ponzi Career
Nutt has his own set of policy solutions, and I think they’d be great: taxing drinks by the amount of alcohol in them and increase that tax back to 1950s levels (i.e. triple it); stop selling strong alcohol in supermarkets; make it a law that all alcohol outlets must sell non-alcoholic drinks; install breathalysers in pubs and stop drunk people from buying more alcohol; banning all alcohol advertising; and many more.
Against alcohol - Fergus McCullough
The CDC estimated the cost of hangovers to the American economy as $249bn in 2010. The Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates a cost of £1.4bn a year for British productivity.
Against alcohol - Fergus McCullough
It’s estimated that alcohol contributes to 30,000 deaths a year in England, Scotland and Wales. And it’s thought to cause 5% of the global disease burden.
Against alcohol - Fergus McCullough
10.8m Brits drink at levels posing some risk to their health, and 1.6m ‘may have some level of alcohol dependence’. Different figures, from the NHS, suggest around 9% of men and 3% of women show such signs
Against alcohol - Fergus McCullough
In the UK, alcohol is now the leading cause of death in men between the ages of 16 and 54 years, accounting for over 20 per cent of the total.
Against alcohol - Fergus McCullough
then Snyder cuts to the Flash subplot about a son’s imprisoned father, and this amazing parallel corrects Millennial folly about mass incarceration and defund-the-police activism. Flash’s father (Billy Crudup) advises, “You know what ‘criminal justice’ would be for me? My son not wasting his life.” From there, Flash (Ezra Miller) assumes the same mission as Cyborg: “Make your own future, make your own past.”
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
Joe Morton as the classically distant black father gets to redeem his demeaning role in Terminator 2
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
The son resents his elder’s detachment, the inability to prevent tragic fate. “You know a lot about monsters, don’t you?” he accuses. “Especially how to make them!”
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
Cyborg converts the Trayvon-Floyd stereotype that elicits white progressives’ pity into a complex, heroic transformation.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
This makes Cyborg the clearest exhibition of racial disorientation since the setbacks of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
he’s also Millennial Hollywood’s most recognizable young black male social type: Oedipally conflicted, fraught with anger, physically powerful, and technologically endowed. Yet he’s lost; his social identity worries him.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
Cyborg converts the Trayvon-Floyd stereotype that elicits white progressives’ pity into a complex, heroic transformation.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
he’s also Millennial Hollywood’s most recognizable young black male social type: Oedipally conflicted, fraught with anger, physically powerful, and technologically endowed. Yet he’s lost; his social identity worries him.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Cyborg Superhero Rejects Martyrdom & Vengeance | National Review
central bank digital currency (CBDC)
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
In 2020, some 58% of Chinese used mobile payments, up from 33% in 2016, and mobile payments accounted for nearly two-thirds of all personal consumption PBOC payments.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
As I argued in The Ascent of Money (2008), money is trust inscribed, and it does not seem to matter much whether it is inscribed on silver, on clay, on paper — or on a liquid crystal display.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
China is even more stringent. In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party restricted the ability of its citizens to buy Bitcoin,
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
is it actually true that the state should have a monopoly on money? That is a distinctly German notion, stated most explicitly in Georg Friedrich Knapp’s State Theory of Money (1905)
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
“We must do everything possible to make sure the currency monopoly remains in the hands of states,” declared German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz at a G-7 finance ministers
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar.” He added: “[If] China’s long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works.”
Peter Thiel Calls Bitcoin ‘a Chinese Financial Weapon’ at Virtual Roundtable - Bloomberg
Armed self-defense has been around at least since Cyril Briggs, who founded the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919. During the period after the First World War, when white mobs were shooting Black people and burning their businesses, many Black people considered peaceful protests (such as those organized by the NAACP) inadequate. Four decades later, the activist Robert F. Williams wrote the classic text of Black armed resistance, Negroes With Guns, which argues that violence against Black people calls for violence by Black people.
The Many Lives of Grandmaster Jay - The Atlantic
“I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation,”
Rising GOP Star Madison Cawthorn Peddles a New Trumpism | Time
Trump is a symptom of our decline, not the answer to it
Sohrab Ahmari Vs. David French
Certainly, Peterson has found a huge audience by telling uncomfortable truths. But he also tells them what should be comfortable truths too.
A star is born
Come for the tool, stay for the network
Come for the tool, stay for the network
If the demographics of assisted suicide look more like the demographics of regular suicide than, say, cancer—where whites and the college-educated are not overrepresented—doesn’t that suggest that the two are more similar than advocates would like to claim? That euthanasia is more of a psychological phenomenon and not just a rational response to unbearable pain?
On the Front Lines of Assisted Dying
Engelhart herself concedes that euthanasia is rarely about pain. “What surprised me most, looking through the Oregon Health Authority data, was that most people who ask to die are reportedly not in terrible pain,” she writes. “The vast majority cite ‘losing autonomy’ as their primary end-of-life concern. Others worry about ‘loss of diginity,’ loss of the ability to engage in enjoyable activities, and ‘losing control of bodily functions.’”
On the Front Lines of Assisted Dying