Thursday Thoughts, December 23, 2021

Happy holidays, everyone! This is likely going to be the last Thursday Thoughts for 2021. Hope you all can (safely) enjoy some time with friends and family in the coming weeks.

Department of Technology:

• Oxford Union invited an AI tool to one of their storied debates. The results were fascinating and somewhat worrisome (two takeaways: AI is a tool that can be used for good or for evil, and AI will be used to enhance surveillance tools).
• Maybe @Jack was too busy pivoting away from Twitter but he forgot a simple rule: when you rename your business, you might want to check and see if any well-resourced companies might view your new name as infringing their trademarks.
• Speaking of @Jack, he's not wrong that "Web3" is a really just a new way for VCs to cash in. I mean, just read about the motivating factors ($$$) leading staff from other tech companies to jump into Web3. A good deeper dive: "bitcoin is religion; web3 is greed." It could just be too early to get too excited, according to Tim O'Reilly. If you want to learn more about Web3, though, click here.
• Speaking of crypto, I thought the argument for bitcoin etc. was that the currencies are 'decentralized.' Nice in theory, but hasn't played out in practice.
• The U.S. should always foster efforts to bring high-skilled immigrants to the country.
• Getting mail in the future might be, well, pretty futuristic!
• Meta shareholders want to exercise more oversight. Too bad Meta is structured in a way that ensures Zuck, rather than other shareholders, decides what Meta will do. Meanwhile, Meta evidently can't find any prominent Democratic or progressive lobbyists willing to work for them, and the FTC seems to have it in for Meta's acquisition strategy.
• Oracle is getting big into (like, $28.3 billion into) medical records.
• At least one Theranos investor might get something out of his investment: Marc Ostrofsky is trying to sell his Series A stock certificate as an NFT.
• Most countries that are party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons want to put limitations on the use of autonomous weapons. But the U.S., Russia, and a few others are blocking those initiatives.
• Americans can buy DJI drones but can no longer invest in DJI: the U.S. has added the company to an investment blocklist for its alleged active support of the surveillance and tracking of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China. (Related: the U.S. is accusing a number of Chinese research institutes of attempting to develop "brain control" weapons...not sure how much to read into that.)
• Between U.S. blocklists and Beijing's own crackdown on homegrown consumer tech, it's no wonder that China's VCs are seeing significant drops in investments.
• Sheesh. AWS keeps having outages. Related: The Mercury News put together a list of the 'tech fails of 2021.'
• Using Spotify apparently means that you're old. Or, at least, that you're not in Gen Z. But if the alternative is TikTok, bring me my walker.
• Here's more evidence that, while Americans are generally politically divided, they're united in wanting more regulation relating to technology. In particular, Americans don't trust Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
• Coming to cars near you (and hopefully soon): AR HUDs (augmented reality heads-up displays). Which makes sense, unlike video games on the dashboard...
• Lots of small social networks are looking to IPO in the next year or so.
• Is Twitch bypassing Apple's payment system?
• The Internet (and technology in general) is not neutral and governments have always played a role in shaping our technological future. The U.S. should step up its efforts (perhaps in partnership with the EU?) to safeguard a more democratic future.
• Cool: Facebook has an AI-powered tool to animate drawings. How they'll use this information is an open question...

Privacy and Security matter:

• Toys are getting smarter. They're also invading privacy (in addition to maybe limiting imagination).
• Evidently, Facebook is planning new ways to circumvent the GDPR's requirements.
• Google's security team shared some of their data on the impact of the log4j vulnerability.
• DuckDuckGo is building its own desktop browser.
• More information on the FTC's potential rulemaking regarding privacy and AI.
• Worth a chuckle: Forbes has a bunch of 'experts' drawing (what they view to be) distinctions between 'data privacy' and 'data protection.'
• Cyber "mercenaries" have been spying on tens of thousands of Facebook users for governments and other organizations.
• The UK's National Crime Agency just turned over 585 million compromised credentials to Have I been Pwned?
• Frustration with the GDPR's limitations is leading some regulators to take other approaches to combat bad data practices.

Athletics are awesome:

• In case you missed it: MLB is on strike. Here's why. Related: nearly everyone loves Shohei Ohtani.
• It's like a bad case of deja vu: covid is causing mayhem for large-scale professional sports again. The NHL just paused their season.
• The game of basketball just turned 130 years old. And LeBron James has spent more than half his life in the NBA.
• What you listen to matters: Drake slowed runners, Beyonce sped them up.
• Your gut microbiome matters a ton for your athletic performance.
• The UTMB World Series is replacing the Ultra Trail World Series.
• Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament is going to turn Montana into a skateboarding mecca.

Covid is a battle we can win:

• Game changer? Pfizer's at-home covid treatment, paxlovid, received FDA approval. The only problem? A hugely constrained supply.
• Humans are much better at thinking about linear growth than we are with exponential growth. That's a problem when it comes to analyzing our Omicron risk. It is more communicable than past variants and has a shorter incubation period. It also now represents 73+% of U.S. cases, up from 3% two weeks ago. And, unfortunately for holiday travelers, infection risk on planes from Omicron is 2x that of other strains.
• Fortunately, Omicron is increasingly looking like it'll largely be a milder variant. And breakthrough cases may turbocharge immunity.
• Americans are largely tuning out covid at this point (at least as far as clicks are concerned).
• It doesn't matter how Biden tries to appeal to unvaccinated Americans if they don't trust anything coming from the government. Even Trump talking about getting a booster led to boos.
• Israel is going to start giving fourth shots to older residents. And China is discovering that the Sinovac shots will need boosters.
• A good visual frame of reference to show why covid is not just a bad flu.
• If you see a health care worker, thank them. Odds are, they could use the pick-me-up. Also, help them by getting vaxxed (and encouraging your friends and family to do likewise). Right now, hospitals are crying for help as they are increasingly overloaded (think hundreds of people waiting for a single ICU bed to open up). 2020 was bad, but 2021 has turned out to be deadlier (largely because of the unvaxxed).
• While covid is a risk to everyone in the U.S., it appears that it is much more of a risk to Republican voters and to fast food workers.
• The Build Back Better bill could dramatically improve America's public health infrastructure. But 51 senators stand in the way.
• What would possess people to go on a cruise these days?
• The Biden administration has been a vast improvement from the former guy's approach to the pandemic (which seems almost criminal as we learn more about it), but still has been largely reactive and missed opportunities to get ahead of the pandemic.
• The WSJ has a good article showing how covid migrated across the U.S.
• We should probably have policed pandemic relief funds a bit better. Nearly $100 billion was stolen.
• Folks in the Bay Area need to choose: are you on the Monica Gandhi side or the Bob Wachter side of risk tolerance?

Climate Change is a challenge we must meet:

• Joe Manchin delaying or killing BBB will be tragic for its impact on climate change and on the American economy. Even coal miners are in favor of BBB (because they see the writing on the wall and are interested in transitioning to green jobs).
• Climate change is going to lead to lots of 'gross' things happening.
• The sounds of endangered birds took the number one spot on the Australian music charts last week.
• The Philippines were hit hard following Taiphoon Rai and people are suffering from water and food shortages.
• More information on an idea I mentioned a few weeks ago: feeding seaweed to cows.
• No! Climate change is going to lead to much more poison oak in California and the West.
• Cool: a quant investor is using AI to track down corporate greenwashing. Now, train those models on China...
• Bloomberg has a set of year-end charts to contextualize where we stand in the fight against climate change.

California is a fascinating state:

• The KNP Complex Fire in the Sequoia National Park region is finally 100% contained as of late last week. Unless we have a very heavy winter, there's a risk of smoldering trees reigniting in the summer.
• SF Mayor London Breed is getting more serious about the quality of life issues affecting SF. And Chesa Boudin has a good essay out about what's really causing retail theft in SF. If we can tackle those QOL issues and work on housing prices, we might be able to stem or reverse the Bay Area exodus.
• Apparently Keanu Reeves spent a good part of early 2020 jumping off of SF skyscrapers.
• I'm looking forward to the completion of the Lost Sierra Route trail through the Northern Sierra.
• There's a grocery in SF that owes much of its continued success to 1968's Bullitt.
• Not sure how to feel about the plan to drop rodenticide on the Farallons. I get that there is a need to address the invasive rodent problem but this seems to be risking external impacts...
• The SF skyline is set to grow.
• We keep getting more snow and rain. And I hope it just keeps on coming!
• There's a crazy story of how the PCH came to be cut through Malibu.
• Every kid in Marin was sent home for the holidays with an at-home covid test.
• Surprising no one who's been there recently, South Lake Tahoe is Zillow's "most popular place" for 2021.

Everything else:

• The Putin/Xi summit is raising the specter of potential conflict with the West. The world certainly would be better if people in power didn't frequently see the need to unnecessarily resort to war to further their interests. A war involving the U.S. on one side and China or Russia on the other would, even if it's a limited conflict, be horrible.
• If you're an American citizen, voting in the 2022 elections will be very important. The potential for fascism is on the rise and the ballot box is the best way to thwart it.
• If the media were a bit more responsible, they would cover the war on democracy in the West as if it were an actual war.
• The New York Times reveals that the U.S. continually errs when launching deadly airstrikes. Congress should investigate.
• France is undergoing something of a debate about the principle of la?cité (something that might be a useful export).
• Amazing: two Masai TikTokers from Tanzania have become stars in India for their lipsyncing of Bollywood songs.
• The current labor shortage is also impacting mall Santas.
• Only in America: viral TikTok threats of school shootings and bombings. I wonder if the threats had dumb dance moves...
• American workers were burning out pre-pandemic, but the pandemic and work from home (with few work/life balance boundaries) are exacerbating the problem.
• The New York Times' 'year in pictures' is well worth a view. As is their list of the 'debates' of the year.
• When the 'cure' is far worse than the 'problem': 'anti-5G' necklaces are found to be radioactive.
• The New York Times argues that Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for brokering peace with neighboring Eritrea, used his new alliance with Eritrea to support his plan for a war against separatists in Ethiopia's Tigray province.
• Quartz is arguing that Senegal has "won" the jollof rice war. The rest of West Africa will, I assume, disagree.
• RIP free Hong Kong.
• Cool: a NASA probe touched the outer part of the sun.
• Poor tardigrades never get a break: now we're testing quantum entanglement on them.
• Good: the U.S. is planning to replace all lead pipes in the country within the decade.
• This might come as a surprise to some (like Joe Manchin) but studies show that when you give money to poor people, they improve their lives and often emerge from poverty. The U.S. has significant inequality and needs to seriously work on that to foster growth.
• You can feel good buying Pop-Tarts again: the Kellogg's strike ended after 11 weeks and, by and large, the strikers won.
• The ancient Greeks were far more advanced than many give them credit for.
• First the crowds came for books on school syllabi. Now they're coming for books in the libraries...
• A large portion of English people are actually...French?
• You Can't Do That on Television (in China).