Thursday Thoughts, May 20, 2021

The Department of Tech:

• Benedict Evans asks a great question: what if Apple transforms online advertising in the same manner it transformed music consumption?
• Foxglove is a flower that can be a poison or a cure. It's also the name of a four woman UK group that has already made a significant impact on tech policy (regarding algorithmic fairness/transparency) and is now working on issues relating to content review on social platforms. As they explain, tech is often used to mask poor policy decisions. Related: the Ada Lovelace Institute reminds everyone that 'garbage in, garbage out' applies to data and AI, and structural racism shows up in data which feeds AI (which then perpetuates the issue).
• By the end of 2021, TikTok users will outnumber Instagram users among Gen Z in the U.S.
• Antler has put together a good overview of the creator economy.
• As tech companies mature and become more important players in world affairs, some are finding that "making everyone happy" won't work, whether it relates to repressing voting rights in the U.S. (Google) or appeasing the Chinese government or leveraging forced labor (Apple).
• Amazon/MGM? TimeWarner/AT&T/Discovery? Tech and media continue to grow and converge. Axios has some good infographics on the topic.
• Non-profits are working hard to draw smart techies to help improve the world.
• The FTC is reporting that money lost to crypto scams is up 10x over the past 12 months.
• Wild: auto manufacturers, faced with chip shortages that will cause significant production delays, are stripping features from new vehicles to ensure they meet production timelines. Meanwhile, some are wondering whether the current chip shortage will lead to new innovation in the hardware space.
• Elon Musk, to the world: "Teslas drive themselves!" Tesla, to Cal DMV: "No, not really."
• Goodbye, Top Gun? Pundits are wondering whether AI will augment or eventually replace fighter pilots.
• So, the Facebook Oversight Board punted the ultimate determination of Trump's account status back to Facebook. What does this decision mean and happens next? Not entirely unrelated, the WSJ did a deep dive into the "Facebook Jail" for users breaking arbitrary Facebook rules, and flagged that the company is considering turning increasingly to AI to determine what content is permitted on the platform.
• Trend convergence: AI to power disinformation is increasingly robust and could overwhelm our ability to combat it.
• A large Oxford study has found no link between tech use and mental health in teenagers.
• Cool tech: the new Canon R3 takes still photos at a rate faster than that of theatrical video. It's not the first to do so, but Canon drives market trends in cameras.
• RIP: Internet Explorer.
• As many predicted, Twitter may finally implement a paid service. It'd have great features that, for many frequent users, would probably justify the low price.
• Bitcoin is getting crushed (which seems to happen every other season). This time, it's because of Elon Musk and China.
• Clubhouse has implemented a very interesting approach to user blocking.

Privacy Matters:

• Facebook took the Irish Data Protection Commission to court and got shellacked: the repercussions here could be significant for the company's efforts to transfer data from Ireland to the U.S. and could have major ramifications for the rest of the tech community.
• Google and Apple rushed to build contact tracing apps. Those apps faced lots of privacy scrutiny, but data now shows that the apps saved several thousand lives in Europe alone. This helps illustrate how privacy concerns do not exist in a vacuum and how things that may notionally 'violate privacy' can be engineered appropriately and thus respect data protection rules while providing tremendous societal value.
• Cookies are going away, ATT and FLoC are coming in, and tracking is coming in. The dust isn't even settled but people are getting to tough but good questions: what if there isn't a new normal that works for advertisers? And what happens to the advertising industry next? In other words, what if we can't agree to unify on new models? And, relatedly, Digiday suggests that Amazon has the most to gain from the changing advertising landscape.
• Long term data is in: in the three years since the GDPR came into effect, DPAs across the EU have issued 661 fining decisions for a total of €292 million in fines.
• Alan Raul at Sidley has a clever idea for an additional safeguard for trans-Atlantic data transfers.
• In the 16th century, England granted privateers free license to raid Spanish ships, fostering the advent of the golden age of piracy. Russia is now evidently doing the same thing, just for cyber attacks.
• At the same time, popular Russian hacking site XSS has banned conversations relating to ransomware following the Colonial Pipeline debacle. Even still, ransomware is still going to be a huge enterprise risk going forward, and the attackers are getting tougher to deal with. See, e.g., the ransomware attack on Scripps Health or the Irish health service.
• Love data and data breaches? If so, this is your week, as the annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations report is out.
• Can you tell which photos have traffic signs? It may not matter for much longer, since Cloudflare is trying to kill CAPTCHA.

Sports are awesome:

• The vast majority of pro runners are just barely scraping by. Runners World does a good job diving into the brass tacks regarding the ways in which runners are compensated at different levels, looking at different success metrics, sponsorships, Olympic schedules, and more.
• It's last week's news, but football star DK Metcalf raced in a 100m championship and quickly learned that track speed > football speed. This kind of event is great for track, though, and can open up new audiences to the sport (particularly when they see another sport's super-fast stars, like Metcalf, fall behind the pace).
• Not a good sign: a majority of Japanese people want the Tokyo Games canceled. The billions of advertising and sponsorship dollars already invested--and the hopes and dreams of thousands of athletes--stand in the way of that happening.
• If the Olympics happen, remember that this year they'll include rock climbing and surfing.
• Are ultras the new triathlons? Mario Fraioli thinks that they might be. Even Eliud Kipchoge is thinking about giving ultrarunning a try.
• There was a very, very fast marathon last weekend in Milan. And John Kelly just crushed the UK's 420K Pennine Way FKT.
• Harvard Business Review has a good interview with Alex Honnold on mental training, teamwork, creativity and more.
• Kami Rita Sherpa just one-upped his own record for the most ascents of Mt. Everest, logging his 25th journey to the top of the world.
• Good news in the Bay Area sports world: Stanford reversed course and decided to not cut any of its sports teams, and Santa Clara won the NCAA women's soccer championship over Florida State.
• Want a massage gun without wanting to shell out for it? Here's a DIY hack (it's pretty clever).

Covid is a battle we can win:

• "Mask Liberation Day" occurred last week, as the CDC relaxed mask recommendations for indoor activities by vaccinated people. I suspect it'll lead to more unvaccinated mask-refusers engaging in unmasked activities and more spread of the disease among those who haven't had their shots. Most epidemiologists were apparently caught off-guard by the decision. In California (and some other states), the mask mandate will stick around a little longer (until June 15--as planned--in the Golden State).
• As the U.S. opens up, immunocompromised individuals (even those who are vaccinated, because they may not develop sufficient antibodies) may be forced to choose between an increased risk of exposure or continuing the relative isolation of the pandemic lockdowns.
• Which is why we need to get more people vaccinated. Ohio has the best approach I've seen: turn vaccination into a free lottery, where 5 vaccinated individuals will be randomly chosen to win $1 million. We also must come up with ways to combat the fear/misinformation and to make getting vaccinations easier for working people. Otherwise, society may turn towards some manner of compulsory vaccination.
• Speaking of vaccines, vaccine booster shots could be here as soon as September.
• We may never know the full toll of covid but there have been 7-13 million 'excess deaths' globally during the pandemic.
• 5 microns: the technical dividing line between a 'droplet' and an 'airborne' particle. That decades-old, somewhat arbitrary distinction based on faulty physics led to poor guidance that enabled the spread of covid.
• [Reposting from above.] Google and Apple rushed to build contact tracing apps. Those apps faced lots of privacy scrutiny, but data shows that the apps saved several thousand lives in Europe alone.
• Speaking of tech and covid, it turns out that the same tools that are useful for improving online search tools can also improve the dissemination of useful information about covid.
• There's lots of talk about the "Great After" and how we can start over once we emerge from the pandemic. One potential victim is 'flexible work.'

Climate Change is a challenge we must meet:

• Incredibly sad: U.S. National Park rangers are being forced to choose what to save versus what to let go of as climate change impacts parklands. From the Park Service: “it will not be possible to safeguard all park resources, processes, assets, and values in their current form or context over the long term.”
• There is money to be made in understanding how our planet will experience climate change.
• Ford unveiled the F-150 Lightning, which could significantly help to democratize and popularize EVs across the U.S.
• Good news! According to IEA data, renewables grew at the fast rate in two decades in 2020.
• Bloomberg has a great point: Beef is the new coal. Like coal, beef is harmful to individuals and to our environment (the ecological impact of mass-scale cattle farming is unsustainable).
• The USPS may spend $8 billion on EVs for postal delivery.
• Climate change is damaging humanity's cultural legacy, from Venice to 45,000 year old cave paintings in Indonesia.
• An unfortunate development: warmer summers are leading to 'zombie' fires in the boreal forests of the sub-Arctic region, as fires igniting in one season smolder in peat only to reignite the following year.
• Good news! In 2021, for the first time ever, financial institutions are funding green projects at a higher value than fossil fuel projects. Let's hope this keeps up, and that the banks can turn away from supporting plastics next.
• A different kind of recycling: kitchen grease to power planes.
• Bad news: the Greenland ice sheet is approaching a melting tipping point.
• There are droughts all over the world. Brazil is in a drought that is threatening global orange and coffee supplies. On the coffee side, it's perhaps a good thing that non-coffee coffees are being taken to market.
• Fire season is here in the West. And we're running short of hotshot firefighters. Congress should increase appropriations to the Forest Service for increasing capacity and pay.

California is a fascinating state:

• The California coast is a sui generis beauty. And now the decades-old dream of building a coastal trail covering the 1,230 miles from Mexico to Oregon is coming closer to completion.
• Speaking of the coast, Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia and an excellent essayist) has a great piece out on the importance of protecting Point Reyes. I understand the historic nature of dairy farming on the peninsula and the desire to find some way to have nature and agriculture coexist but, as Chouinard explains, it doesn't really work that way in Point Reyes and there are many historical and ecological reasons why the recent NPS plan to expand farming there is wrongheaded. Then again, the current drought is putting some of the dairies on the peninsula out of business, which may change things a bit.
• San Francisco has an organize crime problem: gangs are 'ravaging' Walgreens in a shoplifting epidemic, leading to the closure of 17 of the company's stores over the past five years, and CVS has also closed stores as well. As the SF Chronicle explains, this may be a direct result of the reduction in penalties for petty theft under Prop. 47.
• Julian has now become the second 'dark sky community' in California (joining Borrego Springs), highlighting the potential for amazing skywatching in the SoCal deserts.
• The drought along the Oregon border is the worst in recorded history for the Klamath region, leading to water cut-offs and mass salmon die-offs.
• People may be leaving SF, but not Hunter Pence -- he loves it here.

Everything Else:

• National parks in the U.S. are often scenes of sublime natural beauty. They are equally often the site of crimes against Native Americans. This includes some of the most beautiful places in North America (Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier). The Atlantic has a powerful article calling for returning these lands to their original inhabitants.
• This video is heartbreaking and illustrates the toll that the violence in Israel and Gaza is inflicting on the innocent, children first and foremost. "It's not fair" indeed, and the world needs to work harder to find ways to end the cycle of violence.
• Balancing police efforts to reduce and solve crimes with ensuring civil liberties is apparently more challenging and nuanced than presupposed: recent data shows that large cities entering into consent decrees with the DOJ to overhaul policing have seen violent crime rise, whereas small cities have seen it decline.
• It turns out that many tech companies that made BLM pledges don't have that many Black employees. But they did give a significant amount of money ($4.6 billion) to social justice causes.
• You don't see this too often: Speedway and 7-11 are going full speed ahead and closing their merger despite FTC opposition.
• There's considerable tension in certain political circles in balancing a "my body, my choice" ideology with respect to masks but not with respect to reproductive choices.
• There are toxic PFAS ingredients still in use in consumer food packaging, the Guardian is reporting.
• Outside Online has a great "good news list" of "48 reasons to feel optimistic today." It's awesome; give it a read.
• Idaho is foolishly aiming to cull 90% of the wild wolves in the state, based on false premises and misinformation.
• Apparently, "death awareness" is good for happiness and well-being.
• Satellites are now able to track 'dark ships' to help combat piracy.
• Not really shocking, but many of the interpersonal interactions that were common in in-person offices have not translated well to remote work.
• Some political economy theorists are arguing that it is time to move from neoliberalism to 'mutualism' to ensure that the rewards of increased productivity are allocated in a more distributed and equitable manner.
• Humans may have been shaping the landscape through prescribed burns 85,000 years ago.
• How should schools teach math - should they raise the floor or the roof for learners?
• Outside has a great read on the reemergence of the Ibex brand (top-flight merino clothing for outdoors adventures).
• The Suez Canal may never experience another logjam like it did a few weeks ago: Egypt is at work to widen/deepen the passage.
• 60 Minutes, by focusing on UFOs last Sunday, has opened up another national conversation about what might be flying around us.
• Drake is one of the latest investors in fake meat companies.
• There can be tremendous value in doing hard and humbling real things.
• As theorized for decades, science is now showing that LSD does in fact open up pathways in the brain that would otherwise be closed off.
• Azeem Azhar has another set of very interesting infographics. They make you stop and think.