Thursday, June 16, 2022

What Is Really Causing Our Inflation: “Inflation in a Time of Corona and War”

Tim Cook privacy-focused interview at the Time 100 Summit focused on why the issue matters so much to Apple’s CEO.

Cook was last month named one of the Time’s 100 most influential people of 2022, when we also learned that he would speak at the summit …

Tim Cook privacy concerns: Being surveilled changes our behavior, makes us less human


Help! My boss is telling me to work from the office or leave


The Birth and Death of the Office Is the office the height of bureaucractic efficiency, or an unnecessary evil?


Why you’re happier if you make friends at work

It can be uncomfortable to cross the rubicon from professional to personal, but usually it’s worth the effort



Last month we learned that it ain’t necessarily so. An extensive report published by a group of ‘white hat’ hackers – folks who try to break systems in order to alert their creators, who can then repair those flaws – exposed some deeply disturbing weaknesses in the Digital Drivers Licence (DDL) offered by New South Wales within its Service NSW smartphone app…



Obviously, Service NSW will fix its problems, but what about all those fake IDs? Can they simply be erased or invalidated? Or will we never really know whether a DDL is the real deal? Like that unknown caller trying to defraud me, will these fraudulent government-issued credentials be used to defraud the public? Surely the answer is yes, even if it never affects many people directly. These questions of identity – who determines what we can say about who we are – will only grow more acute in the years to come. We need to think about how we can have a voice in that conversation, so that we retain some say in how we present ourselves to the world.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” goes a famed New Yorker cartoon. While that may be true, it never takes long before everyone on the internet knows that you’re a nasty piece of work.

Identity

Identity crisis of the online age: From handles to scams, our identities are less fixed than ever


The Role of Identity Documents in the Holocaust and the Genocides of Rwanda and Myanmar (PDF) Fortify Rights


On Tuesday evening, Bill Gates warned that the Crypto sector was a bubble economy, “100% based on greater fool theory”, the idea that profit comes from finding someone dumber than you to sell your asset to. “I’m used to asset classes … like a farm where they have output, or like a company where they make products,” Gates said.

Cryptocurrency ‘bloodbath’ threatens multibillion-dollar hedge fund


How did civil service exams affect who gets employed by the federal government? p.s. Is there any chance here that “elitism” is good rather than bad?


YouTube censors New York Post interview.


I gather that some readers of this blog think that when I link to something I must agree with tit. Well, no. I link to things I think are worth reading and considering. What a narrow-minded bastard I’d be if I only linked to what I agreed with. That’s a great way of learning nothing. People nowadays are so preoccupied with proving that they’re always right. And who is YouTube to think they have the right to overrule the First Amendment? Find another line of work, assholes. Oh, and this some plausible, if not conclusive evidence that some vote fraud took place in the 2020 election. Some courts have handed judgements regarding. Read the news, YouTube, before you issue ex cathedra judgments. God forbid they ever consider an idea they already subscribe to.


New study shows welfare prevents crime, quite dramatically Oxford University Press 


Europol and CIA operate data mining in the SWIFT system FM4 (guurst). Original: Europol und CIA betreiben Data-Mining im SWIFT-System. Subhead:

European data from the SWIFT financial transaction system has been supplied in bulk by Europol to the US Treasury Department for data mining for years. This data ended up with the CIA.


What's most remarkable about our understanding of social media’s effect on society is how little we know  social media 


What Is Really Causing Our Inflation: “Inflation in a Time of Corona and War”

Finally! Evidence-based answers to the main (policy) questions concerning the return of high inflation.


 Comparing past and present inflation.