Society

Microstrategy and the dark arts of 'volatility arbitrage'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html [Ross Douthat and Marc Andreessen in The New York Times]This podcast conversation with Marc Andreessen is very revealing. It's particularly fascinating to me that

And it is more open and more efficient, too

As age verification bills pass across the world under the guise of “keeping children safe online,” governments are increasingly giving themselves the authority to decide what topics are deemed “safe”

This man is a coward. And no amount of corporate jargon or performative masculinity can make that stain go away.

Research shows that humans are hardwired to work together, share resources, and build systems based on trust and mutual benefit.

He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.

archived 26 Jan 2025 23:05:40 UTC

Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

DeepSeek-R1, a new reasoning model made by Chinese researchers, completes tasks with a comparable proficiency to OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the cost.

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a nonprofit foundation headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, which promotes the libertarian views of its founder, Pierre F. Goodrich through publishing, conferences, and educational resources. The operating mandate of the Liberty Fund was set forth in an unpublished memo written by Goodrich "to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals".

A study of 323 uprisings against repressive regimes yields stunning insights.

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

The Puget Sound Socialist Rifle Association (PSSRA) is a Washington-based local chapter of the nonprofit Socialist Rifle Assocation.

Dear Mark,

An Important and Timely Guide to Supporting Vulnerable Communities

A strange essay reveals how Silicon Valley elites are creating an apocalyptic techno-religion to rule the future of civilization

Cybersecurity Research and More

A lost 1855 treaty map caused the state and settlers to encroach on reservation land. The nation wants it back — but legal hurdles slow the process.

Proportional representation could help restore American democracy.

In the United States, a two-party system means that candidates, who are supposed to represent their constituents, are forced to run as Republican or Democrat. For NYT Opinion, Jesse Wegman and Lee …

A lot has been said about Meta’s recently-announced moderation changes, so I won’t add too much to your reading backlog today, but I did want to comment on it after letting it simmer in my head for a bit. Let me just start by repeating the same thing

In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, the

Posted on Friday 17 Jan 2025. 1,231 words, 16 links. By Matt Webb.