adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nightpool:

Ideas | I saw millions compromise their Facebook accounts to fuel fake engagement

Self-compromise was a widespread problem, and possibly the largest single source of existing inauthentic activity on Facebook during my time there. While actual fake accounts can be banned, Facebook is unwilling to disable the accounts of real users who share their accounts with a bot farm.

[…]

To quote one user who had self-compromised in an internal 2017 research study, “I’m extremely attractive! I’m extremely talented – but I don’t have all those followers I deserve.”

Tags:

#y’all are selling yourselves short #go work for romance novelists and parenting bloggers #I used to do fake-engagement gigs and they paid in raffle tickets for (usually) Amazon gift cards #expected value around 1 – 5 cents per gig #give me a nickel over [a like from a fellow bot] any day #also they *don’t* demand your fucking *access tokens*‚ holy shit #(note: I don’t *currently* work there because I was sick of [highly erratic pay] [averaging out to ~$1/hour]) #adventures in human capitalism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

rustingbridges:

controversial personal finance opinion: if you have enough wealth you should own some physical gold

financialized gold has most of the downside of real gold and also none of its special upside, so not that

gold does not, as a rule, gain in value, and it’s vulnerable to theft, but it also does not, as a rule, lose in value, and also the rest of your assets are vulnerable to theft too. gold might have a higher risk but diversification is still valuable

in the event you lose access to your financials and have to leave – maybe not likely, but not impossible, apparently something like 1% of humans in 2021 are or have been refugees – gold jewelry particularly is both portable enough you can take it and universally recognized as valuable enough you can trade it. just don’t get it in your teeth

*Is* this controversial, even in the broad form stated here?

I kind of figured that there was broad agreement that there exists *some* level of wealth at which diversification into gold is worth pursuing (for the reasons you give), but that different people’s estimates of what that wealth level is vary by orders of magnitude, and some people would put enough forms of philanthropy above gold on the to-do list that in practice no one would ever reach the gold stage given our world’s current amount of philanthropic fruit to be picked.

(I’m not sure where I would place the threshold: I think it’s probably somewhere feasible to reach, but far enough beyond where I am now that it’s not urgent for me to figure out the specifics.)

a lot of people would argue that you should at some point diversify into financial instruments which abstractly reflect the value of gold, but I think many of those people would say you should not buy actual physical gold.

to pin myself down a bit while still leaving a lot of wiggle room, here’s some points on my Gold Advice Spectrum:

  • if you need your money to be liquid in a normal economy any time soon, don’t buy gold
  • if you have enough money to retire indefinitely on, I think it’s worth having something like a month’s money or so in precious metals
  • if you’re bill gates you should actually should have buried a chest of treasure somewhere

What…what reasons do *they* give for wanting to diversify into gold? You can’t hedge against the collapse of your financial system by buying things that *depend on said financial system*.

I mean, okay, I guess you can hedge against *certain, partial* collapses that way, but it’s far more limited.

I should mention here that I literally wrote a post once titled “Diversification is an important part of building an investment portfolio” [link], in which I frame prepping as being essentially a way of shorting your civilisation: since almost everyone is very long civilisation pretty much by necessity, being also somewhat short civilisation is a good hedge (though I think you should still be net long). I also wrote a comment on a different post in which I called [maintaining stockpiles of soap and canned food and air filters] “pandemic insurance” [link].

—

That Gold Advice Spectrum seems pretty reasonable.

—

@cthulhubert​ replied: @brin-bellway there’s a certain degree of over-correction against physical gold buying because Alex Jones and some other right wing conspiracy nuts flogged buying real gold for ‘when the degenerate modern economy collapses’.

I mean, that’s traditionally how it works, right? If you think something is going to collapse, you short it and then write a report laying out your evidence and reasoning to try to convince others to do the same. Yeah, I disagree that one should be net short civilisation and think people who do that are setting themselves up for failure and pain, but short sellers are very often wrong and their existence is nevertheless a useful corrective.

(…yes, I think I *did* just draw a connection between the hate that Crazy Prepper People™ get and the hate that short sellers get.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #apocalypse cw?

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

controversial personal finance opinion: if you have enough wealth you should own some physical gold

financialized gold has most of the downside of real gold and also none of its special upside, so not that

gold does not, as a rule, gain in value, and it’s vulnerable to theft, but it also does not, as a rule, lose in value, and also the rest of your assets are vulnerable to theft too. gold might have a higher risk but diversification is still valuable

in the event you lose access to your financials and have to leave – maybe not likely, but not impossible, apparently something like 1% of humans in 2021 are or have been refugees – gold jewelry particularly is both portable enough you can take it and universally recognized as valuable enough you can trade it. just don’t get it in your teeth

*Is* this controversial, even in the broad form stated here?

I kind of figured that there was broad agreement that there exists *some* level of wealth at which diversification into gold is worth pursuing (for the reasons you give), but that different people’s estimates of what that wealth level is vary by orders of magnitude, and some people would put enough forms of philanthropy above gold on the to-do list that in practice no one would ever reach the gold stage given our world’s current amount of philanthropic fruit to be picked.

(I’m not sure where I would place the threshold: I think it’s probably somewhere feasible to reach, but far enough beyond where I am now that it’s not urgent for me to figure out the specifics.)

Tags:

#probably I should obtain a clearer sense of which pieces of our current jewellery collection are costume and which are valuable #and know how to grab the valuable ones quickly #seems like a good short-term action #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #jewellery #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maryellencarter:

So I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but “overnight oatmeal” is this branded thing that comes in expensive little cups, and I just wanted to mention that it’s not specially treated oatmeal in any way.

You can literally just buy a normal canister of oatmeal, dump a serving or so in a bowl, add enough to cover of milk, water, milk substitute, whatever pleases you – I know I’ve seen it done with apple juice, I don’t think I’d recommend orange juice. Then you stir it up, let it soak in the fridge for 6-8 hours, and you have perfectly edible oatmeal. You can toss in dried fruit, spices, whatever.

In Scotland several centuries ago, this was called “drammach”, and you would make it with water when you were on the run, as sometimes happened in old-timey Scotland. It was handy because it didn’t need cooking, so your enemies could not find you by the smoke of your campfire. Also a bag of dry oatmeal weighs practically nothing and will feed you for days as long as you have water.

(I hear they just get water out of the sky in Scotland. Can’t relate. *desert dweller*)

These days, it’s handy because oatmeal is very cheap and reasonably filling, it requires no special cookware, you can prep it in like three gestures (dump – pour – stir), and if you forget it in the fridge for a day or so it’s still good and nothing catches on fire. So I thought I’d mention again, in case anybody would be interested and hadn’t known, that this is a thing you can do and you absolutely don’t have to pay three bucks for a lil half-cup branded container.

Tags:

#food #the more you know #adventures in human capitalism #I’ve been thinking about getting into porridges #I don’t get enough fibre in my diet unless I actively seek it out #and I’m worried about what my current popcorn-based strategy might be doing to my teeth

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

brightwanderer:

5e56095edb71c9611380e19d4a5fe2778d8956cb

….. Ea-Nasir is that YOU

Tags:

#when news of this got out all of Tumblr just looked at each other wondering who was gonna say it first‚ right? #that was certainly *my* reaction when I saw it in the Money Stuff linkspam #adventures in human capitalism #Ea nasir

ravenreyamidala asked: i saw a tweet about not connecting smart tvs to wifi and i’m trying to google to figure out what this is bad but why is it bad? the best answer i’ve gotten so far is that there are like, identity fraud issues?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

I don’t know much about smart tvs but generally Ethernet is preferred for connected devices just because it’s *faster* but also with everything you should make sure you’re not using the default username/password and also i’m not sure what kind of encryption standard smart tvs use these days so there’s a possibility of snooping traffic?

I can think of about eight reasons I wouldn’t want a smart tv on wifi and most of them honestly just have to do with functionality – streaming is going to be MUCH slower and flakier over a wifi connection than a wired connection – and if you’re bringing a smart tv into your house in the first place i kind of feel like you’re already accepting all of the security risks that entails (tv manufacturers aren’t known for their frequent security patches or user accessibility or ease of configuration).

Because there’s some commentary in the notes let me clarify:

if you’re bringing a smart tv into your house in the first place i kind of feel like you’re already accepting all of the security risks that entails

aside from a lack of user accessibility and a high likelihood of vulnerabilities due to manufacturers not patching and using default passwords IT IS A GIVEN that your smart TV is going to collect data on you and if you purchase a smart TV and put it into your home that’s something that you’re accepting. You’re accepting that the manufacturer can collect data from you, you’re accepting that whatever service you connect to it is going to track your viewing habits, you’re accepting that this is a device that is watching you more than you are watching it.

So my position personally is “smart TVs and smart fridges and smart appliances generally are not a good thing and if you are going to have them it’s better if they’re not connected to the internet and they should be able to function without being connected to the internet.”

ASIDE from all of that if you’re going to have a smart device that streams video it’s going to be much faster over ethernet than over wifi. And, hell, maybe the initial tweet was warning about the smart TV spying on what other devices were connected to the wifi.

But also in the comments it says “it’s better to get a standard tv and hook it up to a chromecast because better the devil you know (google, etc.)” and I would like to emphatically state for the record that nearly any other option is better than bringing Google into more parts of your life.

Our “smart TV” is composed of the following:

* A dumb TV

* An eleven-year-old third-hand ThinkPad running Linux Lite

* A couple of adapters to pipe the A/V output of the laptop into the TV

* A wireless mouse

* A wireless keyboard

Non-megacorp, patchable, modular, and also when somebody’s laptop is waiting on repairs they can commandeer the TV’s prosthetic brain to use in the meantime! Three out of four family members have now used this device as a daily-driver laptop at one time or another!

(Note: our setup is on Wi-Fi, but our TV is a couple decades old and has a correspondingly low pixel count, so it’s not like we’re looking to stream very high-quality video.)

Tags:

#recs #reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #adventures in human capitalism