Medium: “A year in, how has Biden done on pandemic response?”

This tone was struck early, even before Biden assumed office. First, the transition team distanced itself from one of its scientific advisors who, in a New York Times op-ed, called for a national shutdown of four to six weeks. Later, after internal debate, Biden’s transition team decided not to warn the public against attending social gatherings during the 2020 holiday season, even as few were vaccinated and hospital beds were quickly filling. When Biden assumed office in January, he warned the public that, There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months. For his top pandemic policy advisor, Biden appointed Jeffrey Zients, a wealthy campaign donor with a background in private equity and management consulting, not public health. Zients has been known as the “ambassador to the business community” under the Obama administration.

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Who remained unvaccinated by late 2021? While the media often highlights the notable partisan divide in vaccination rates, it’s also notable that half of unvaccinated adults didn’t vote for Trump — many did not vote at all. The unvaccinated are largely low-income, uninsured, pregnant, incarcerated, and children (including those under 5, for whom vaccination has not been authorized). While vaccination rates are high for people ages 65 and up, those in their late 70s and older have lower vaccination rates than younger seniors, suggesting a lack of autonomy (i.e. needing to rely on others to access health care) may play a role. And while racial gaps in vaccination rates have narrowed considerably, huge inequalities in covid death rates remain. By my own calculations, age-adjusted covid mortality rates in the US between August 1, 2021 and December 4, 2021 were 30% higher for Black and Latino people, 100% higher for American Indians/Alaska Natives, and 340% higher for Pacific Islanders compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Finally, the Biden administration has exaggerated the proportion of hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the unvaccinated. For instance, Fauci claimed in July, 2021 that only 1% of covid deaths were among vaccinated people, but CDC’s data for the previous week showed the actual figure was 17%. By December, 2021 when Zients assured vaccinated Americans that they had “done the right thing” and “will get through this”, the share of vaccinated deaths had increased to 28%. Vaccines continue to provide powerful risk reduction for severe illness, but they are not a panacea. Amid high viral transmission levels, more than a thousand vaccinated people will continue to die each week (particularly those who are older, immunocompromised, or otherwise high-risk). But framing vaccination as a way to opt out of the pandemic, and understanding the unvaccinated to be political enemies, has helped absolve the administration of its responsibilities.

Justin Feldman

By January 20th, 2021, Biden’s inauguration day, the US had reported more than 410.000 Covid deaths, with a daily average of about 3100. One year later, the death toll more than doubled to over 860.000 (not even accounting for the likely higher figures because of poorly reported death causes) on a daily average of 2100 – in a nutshell, all you need to know about the Biden’s administration pandemic response.

Theta Thoughts: “Everyone on Wall Street is Wrong About Facebook”

Put all these problems together and Facebook’s future is essentially them betting everything on zero in roulette and hoping it somehow works. The metaverse successfully becoming cost-efficient and recapturing engagement with young people is the zero on the roulette table. Every other number means failure. With fading engagement in its most important markets, unsustainable ad price growth and continually declining user growth rates, it appears unlikely to me that Facebook can a street forecast 16.15% revenue CAGR from now to 2025. With Reality Labs likely set to face delays and higher than expected costs like most in the development space have faced as of late, it’s likely that Facebook’s margins decline at a rate higher than analysts currently forecast. And with Facebook’s losses to competitors mounting across the board and complete failure to turn around the trend of young users rejecting them, Facebook decided to take a gamble to right the ship. The metaverse is the all-or-nothing bet. But Facebook’s failure to retain young users, attract content creators, and make themselves aligned with the interests of developers has made it so their metaverse gamble is set up to fail before it has even started. While everyone on Wall Street sees a company set to capitalize on a new space, I see something different. A value trap that is facing a long and slow decline.

Strat Becker

Comprehensive analysis of Facebook’s competitive position and (narrowing) future prospects. After its most recent earnings report, where the company reported its first-ever decline in global daily active users and a weak forecast, it appears that Wall Street finally got the memo and reacted wildly, with the share value dropping more than 20% in a single day.

Alan Moore World: “Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!”

What was the impact of popular heroes comic books in our culture? Why are people fascinated by alternative realities?

I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand.

Raphael Sassaki

Interesting interview with Alan Moore, the author of multiple comic books including Watchmen and V for Vendetta. I have remarked and criticized this infantilization of modern society as well, of which the popularity of superhero blockbusters could be a (minor) symptom.

The New Yorker: “Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?”

In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today’s dollars—described as the “Maximum Effective Effort”—it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to “Fusion Never”. And that’s about what’s been spent, the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there.

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In 2015, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Fusion Engineering was held in Austin, Texas. Many key members of the plasma-physics community were there, and there were two especially noteworthy talks. The first was by the Austrian physicist Guenter Janeschitz, who not only sounds but also looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He gave a presentation on demo, a proposed fusion device that would be almost twice the size of iter and produce five gigawatts of power. Janeschitz envisions that, if funded, a prototype could be built in twenty years. demo is widely seen to be a clear-eyed, workable plan, and a step on the path to bringing practical fusion energy to your great-grandchildren.

Dennis Whyte gave a presentation on arc. He estimated that it could demonstrate net fusion energy in 2025 and bring fusion to the electric grid by 2030, with individual plants producing a gigawatt of power each—about what a conventional power plant provides today. demo would cost an initial thirty billion dollars; arc would be a million-dollar machine. It was very dramatic, Mumgaard said. The difference was so stark. The room was split. Roughly speaking, the younger people were buzzing with hope; the older people had perhaps been hopeful one too many times.

Rivka Galchen

In the spectrum of energy sources potentially available to humankind, nuclear fusion is essentially the Holy Grail: a very clean method of producing energy from widely available fuel and without the variability of output characterizing renewables such as solar and wind power. The trouble is… nobody was able to build a self-sustainable fusion reactor that generates more power than it consumes… yet! Having read about the topic on and off for the past two and a half decades, I’m mostly in the pessimistic camp on the question of how fast we can make progress on this technology. The article above presents a nice overview, but strikes an overly optimistic tone for my taste. I would love to be proven wrong, but I doubt we will see commercial fusion power before the middle of the century – we may well have solar power beamed down from satellites sooner than that.

Protocol: “Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?”

Users inevitably begin to feel hemmed in and controlled by the closed platforms, and yearn for open pastures. Then they go build something better. Something open. People’s natural desire for freedom starts to get more and more of the best and brightest in the world working on open, distributed, decentralized systems.

The seeds of this change are already everywhere, he said. Tesla has open-sourced its patents in an effort to speed up innovation in electric vehicles, because as Elon Musk said, the company’s goal is not just to sell cars but to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. There’s also the whole decentralized, Web3, blockchain community, which excites Mullenweg every time it comes up. There’s an inevitable gravitational pull towards open source affecting literally every field: finance, health, politics, he said. All the things that currently happen in closed ways, what if they were open? What if they were transparent? What if you could copy and paste it? Do your own version? Remix it?

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At this point, few companies have more influence over the way the internet works than Automattic. And few people not named Zuckerberg have more influence than Mullenweg. Beyond the whole “43% of the internet” thing, there’s the fact that both WordPress and Automattic basically belong to him. When Automattic sells shares to new investors, all the voting power goes back to Mullenweg. When he wants to push Automattic or WordPress in a new direction, he tries to do it as gently and collaboratively as possible, but one way or another he usually gets his way. Mullenweg generally tends to downplay this authority, noting that users can always fork WordPress and do their own thing, but there’s no question that where Mullenweg goes, the community — and the internet — follows.

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Even as the tech industry swirls around him, with regulatory fights and social media backlashes and the seemingly hourly shift in priorities, Mullenweg remains steadily on course. We aspire to create the layer that every other application on the web can run on, he said. Hopefully one day, 85% or 90% of all websites have WordPress as their base layer. Right now, the web operates largely on top of closed platforms owned by companies like Amazon and Facebook. But to truly be a platform, Mullenweg said, it has to be open. Otherwise it’s more like a trap.

David Pierce

This article strikes an awkward tone between asserting how much influence Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg have over the web and stressing how open WordPress is and how Matt strives to promote open platforms. It’s a bit of a logical fallacy – how can one man or company have so much influence over an open, distributed system? The more distributed the system, the less influence any individual party should have – and an obvious falsehood given the rather tangible power of closed platforms on the web. Despite the reporter’s framing, Matt also betrays centralizing tendencies when he talks about acquiring various internet services and even a web browser. And I can’t take anyone seriously who gets excited about web3 (nor anyone preaching open platforms, yet ostensibly using the most closed-off platform of all, Apple)…

Better AutoFit for Excel with VBA

After my annoyance that Excel couldn’t unhide multiple sheets finally got addressed last year, I discovered another area where Excel could use some improvement. This one concerns the AutoFit feature and can also be easily solved with a short VBA code. In my current job I started working with Excel files with considerable number of columns of various widths. This makes reading and navigating sheets cumbersome, as some columns are too narrow and hide important pieces of text in their cells, while others can be very wide so that users waste time scrolling horizontally to get from one place to the next. Theoretically, the Excel AutoFit feature should help, but this only fixes the first issue by making narrow columns wide enough to fit their entire contents, while at the same time exacerbating the second. What I would actually need is to run the AutoFit algorithm but restrict the maximum width to some value of my choosing, thus preventing columns from getting exceedingly wide.

Moxie Marlinspike: “My first impressions of web3”

Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.

So as an experiment, I made an NFT that changes based on who is looking at it, since the web server that serves the image can choose to serve different images based on the IP or User Agent of the requester. For example, it looked one way on OpenSea, another way on Rarible, but when you buy it and view it from your crypto wallet, it will always display as a large 💩 emoji. What you bid on isn’t what you get. There’s nothing unusual about this NFT, it’s how the NFT specifications are built. Many of the highest priced NFTs could turn into 💩 emoji at any time; I just made it explicit.

After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace):

Moxie Marlinspike

I saw this pointed out elsewhere as well – that a NFT is merely a link to a file, and while the link may be ‘crypto-secured’, the file itself may change at any point in the future and you’d be left holding something else than you originally ‘bought’ – but I think it serves to underline that the whole premise of NFTs is a massive scam. In the flurry of reporting about this latest craze, it’s easy to lose perspective – keep in mind that more people own items in Second Life than own NFTs. The article also explores the poor privacy of the protocols and the increasing centralization around a couple of companies that others use to interact with the blockchain – and recent news about a database outage at OpenSea confirm this covert centralization. This whole system feels like a ticking bomb of speculation and absurdity waiting to burst.