Bloomberg: Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous

That all of this adds up to money is ridiculous, and we should probably mock it more than we do. Consider Bitcoin a grand middle finger. It’s a prank, almost a parody of the global financial system, that turned into a bubble. “You plutocrats of Davos may think you control the global money supply,” the pranksters seem to say. “But humans will make an economy out of anything. Even this!” To be frank, central banking never really ground my gears; it’s just another one of those vast enterprises that we cower beneath, like network TV or religion. But I can see how it would piss people off. Bits gonna coin. [...]

What Bitcoin actually accomplished is the financialization of a few genuinely joyous ideas. Shrug away the exchange rate, and you have a set of technologies that, for one, allows you to create scarcity. At least of a kind, because you can encode data and information into the blockchain in a way that lets you say, “This is the first one of these particular digital things.” It’s been applied to digital art, and you can see applications for patents, stock photos, things like that. With copies all over the place. [...]

People feel compelled to make predictions about blockchains. Here’s mine: The current wave of coins will eventually ebb, because it’s a big, inefficient, unholy mess. It’s more ideology than financial instrument, and ideology is rarely a sustainable store of value. Plus, transactions are slow (everyone says they’re fixing that), and you shouldn’t have to use an aluminum smelter’s worth of power to make new currency. [...]

Bubbles are melancholy things—swirls of lies and optimism used to hide a million unrealized yearnings. Bitcoin will crash because of course it will. Bubbles burst. The real estate and athletics management people go home, and the believers remain, meeting up, planning new markets. It could take years, it could take a decade, but the blockchain freaks have a world in their heads, and they won’t rest until it’s real. That the rest of us live here, too, is the least of their concerns. Some of the things they’ll do will be magical, community-building, economically thrilling. Others may keep us up at night.

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VICE: How Chemsex Helps Queer Men Find Their Place in Big Cities

In Vauxhall, for example, the local council had been encouraging luxury property development in a way that made it far too expensive not only for gay businesses but also for gay people. Looking at migration patterns in London, people are moving into areas where they would have historically relied on gay bars or clubs to meet new people, but they don’t have strong bonds or social networks. People are isolated by a lack of disposable income, and by their ability to get work and experience public space. [...]

Neoliberalism encourages us to think of ourselves as competitive individuals in all aspects of our lives—in our sense of self and in practices of intimacy. Chemsex begins to make sense in these conditions—it allows us to be together in very relaxed ways that have become increasingly difficult since the financial crisis. There’s a need to feel together, in historical conditions which do not encourage that.  [...]

Gay marriage is important, in terms of ensuring LGBTQ people are absolutely equal in law. But monogamous marriage, respectable jobs, and earning lots of money… aspiring to that has its implications. It’s foreclosing all the other sorts of intimacy gay men have been arguing for since the beginning of the gay liberation moment. One of the important interventions the gay rights movement made was precisely the idea of inventing new forms of intimacy that had nothing to do with marriage. [...]

Gay men build various sorts of intimacy. Previously, recreational drug use was a problem because it inhibited your productivity—now, under neoliberalism, you can pursue pleasure only if you’re consuming. Chemsex intimacy doesn’t fit either of those and so it’s difficult to convince mainstream society what good comes of it.

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The Atlantic: How Psychopaths See the World

Normally, people can accurately say how many dots the avatar sees, but they’re slower if there are dots behind the avatar. That’s because what they see (two dots) interferes with their ability to see through the avatar’s eyes (one dot). This is called egocentric interference. But they’re also slower to say how many dots they can see if that number differs from the avatar’s count. This shows how readily humans take other perspectives: Volunteers are automatically affected by the avatar’s perspective, even when it hurts their own performance. This is called altercentric interference. [...]

Of course, not all psychopaths are the same, and they vary considerably in their behavior. But Baskin-Sommers also found that the higher their score on the psychopathy assessment test, the less they were affected by what the avatar saw. And the less affected they were, the more assault charges they had on their record. [...]

To her, the results show that psychopaths (or male ones, at least) do not automatically take the perspective of other people. What is involuntary to most people is a deliberate choice to them, something they can actively switch on if it helps them to achieve their goals, and ignore in other situations. That helps to explain why they behave so callously, cruelly, and even violently. [...]

These new findings do not “explain” psychopathy; no single study would. Like most psychiatric problems, it’s a complex mess of genetic and environmental influences, all impinging on our most complex (and perhaps least understood) organ—the brain. Psychopaths may show a lack of automatic perspective-taking, but “the interesting question is: Why?” says Essi Viding from University College London. “What in the genetic makeup and rearing environment of a person makes them like that? We need [long-term studies] to answer these questions and to investigate how malleable these processes are.”

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Bloomberg: Putin Is Sure of Victory, But Little Else

Cruising to a fourth term in the March 18 elections, Vladimir Putin is relying on a deep well of support based on two main factors: the huge rise in living standards over his 18 years in office and Russia’s triumphant return to the world stage. When he came to power, he warned that “for the first time in the last 200–300 years, Russia is facing the real danger of winding up among the second or even third-tier of nations in the world.” [...]

Years of underinvestment and a business environment marred by predatory government officials and ever-expanding state companies stymied efforts to expand beyond Russia’s reliance on oil and other natural resources. Sanctions, which squeezed access to Western capital and technology, only made that worse, cutting as much as a full percentage point off growth by some estimates. Adding to the pain of cheaper oil, the ruble nosedived, eroding the affordability of imported goods or trips abroad. The travel industry was among those hurt. [...]

Putin’s initial economic ambitions now seem modest: to match the per-capita income of Portugal within 15 years. But even that has proved out of reach. Slow growth and a weak ruble mean Russia’s now falling further behind. U.S. sanctions will remain “at least as long as Putin is in power,” predicts Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research group set up by the Kremlin. [...]

In addition to the depleted resources to fund his assertive foreign policy, Putin now faces a Western world on guard for his next moves. Kremlin efforts to influence votes for pro-Russia candidates in France and Germany fell flat last year, for example, after both countries said they’d prepared for such efforts to manipulate news and the Internet. Other countries, such as Austria and the Czech Republic, count in his “win” column.

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Quartz: You can now 3D-print a house in under a day

At South By Southwest today, New Story, a Y Combinator-backed charity that works to build houses for people in developing nations, and Icon, a robotics construction company in Austin, Texas, unveiled what is believed to be the first 3D-printed house that is fully up to code and permitted for people to inhabit.

The two organizations came together to show that it’s feasibly possible to build an easy-to-replicate house in under 24 hours. They plan to take this proof-of-concept and start producing small houses for families in countries like Haiti and El Salvador. The 800-sq-ft house cost around $10,000 to build using Icon’s proprietary Vulcan printer, but the company plans to eventually bring that price down to around $4,000. Theoretically, it could soon print one of the houses in about six hours, a representative for New Story told Quartz. But the process is still being ironed out—the house in Austin is the only one built so far. [...]

After the walls are printed, New Story crew members come in and install windows, a wooden roof, basic plumbing, and electrical wiring which can be drilled right into the walls. The entire setup, including the finishing, takes under a day.

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America Magazine: One key to understanding Pope Francis? His approach to judgment

The pope’s question held obvious appeal for L.G.B.T. Catholics and their families. For one thing, Francis actually used the word gay—a first for a pope. (Many Catholic leaders employ the more clinical sounding phrase “same-sex attraction” when talking about gays and lesbians, often over the objection of the people they are talking about.) It also signaled an openness from the highest echelons of the church toward accompanying gays and lesbians on their faith journeys, something relatively novel in recent church history. [...]

In “Evangelii Gaudium,” or “The Joy of the Gospel,” which Pope Francis published during the first year of his pontificate and which serves as the blueprint of his papacy, he wrote what has become another of his famous lines. He said that he prefers a church that is “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.” One of the symptoms of the church being closed in on itself, he continued, is that it makes Christians fixate on “rules which make us harsh judges.” [...]

He laid out this argument in a homily delivered at his residence in 2014, as reported by L’Osservatore Romano. He said that being merciful includes seeking forgiveness for one’s own sins—rather than condemning the shortcomings of others. “Who am I to judge this? Who am I to gossip about this? Who I am, who have done the same things, or worse?” he asked.

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Vox: Rex Tillerson has been fired. Experts say he did damage that could last “a generation.”

His push to slash “inefficiencies” in the State Department and seeming disinterest in working closely with longtime staff were even more damaging. Under Tillerson’s watch, 60 percent of State’s top-ranking career diplomats resigned and new applications to join the foreign service fell by half, according to a November count by the American Foreign Service Association.  [...]

This can’t all be blamed on Tillerson: Even a skilled and experienced diplomat would have had trouble maintaining influence in the chaotic Trump White House, a place where foreign policy is often made over Twitter. As if to underscore the point, Trump announced Tillerson’s departure in a tweet — before the secretary himself could make a statement. [...]

The US bombed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in early April — just days after Tillerson suggested the administration would be fine with Assad staying in power. On June 9, Tillerson called on Saudi Arabia and its allies to end their isolation of Qatar; less than two hours later, Trump sided with the Saudis by labeling Qatar “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” [...]

But that excuse only goes so far. Defense Secretary Mattis hasn’t been immune to Trump’s bizarre management style — he was blindsided, most notably, by Trump’s proposal to ban transgender people from serving in the military — but on the whole, he has been far more effective at advocating for his department’s interests and gaining influence over the president’s decision-making.

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The Guardian: Rex Tillerson was disastrous for the US. Mike Pompeo may be worse

Donald Trump made clear his disdain for diplomacy from day one of his presidency, and that he views foreign policy as an endeavor for the military, not the state department. He proposed enormous increases in the military budget while attempting to slash the state department budget by roughly a third. Trump appointed generals to be secretary of defense, national security advisor (twice) and White House chief of staff, while appointing as secretary of state someone with no diplomatic experience. [...]

He has worked aggressively to gut the state department, not filling key positions, and implementing freezes on hiring, all of which have contributed to a hostile environment and low morale. The nation’s most senior diplomats have resigned over the last year, leading to a wave of exits of career diplomats at all levels that has depleted the ranks of the nation’s diplomatic corps. It will take years to rebuild the state department in the wake of the damage inflicted by Trump and Tillerson.

On leading America’s diplomacy with the world and running the state department, Tillerson has been an utter disaster – but his policy views were about as moderate as they come inside the Trump administration. He has been one of the administration’s strongest voices for diplomacy with North Korea. He was reportedly an advocate of remaining in the Paris climate change agreement. And he supposedly tried to keep the US in the Iran nuclear deal. [...]

And then there’s Russia. Tillerson has hardly been tough on Russia, prioritizing attempts at cooperation over pushing back against clearly destabilizing actions by Russia, including its interference in the 2016 election. While Pompeo held critical views of Russia during his time in Congress and has admitted that Russia interfered in the election, it’s unclear for which policies Pompeo will advocate.

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The Atlantic: Why Did Trump Fire Tillerson Now?

Britain and the United States share intelligence information fully, freely, and seamlessly. It’s inconceivable that the U.S. government has not already seen all the information that Theresa May saw before she rose in the House of Commons to accuse Russia.

If the U.S. government had a serious concern about the reliability of that information, it would have expressed that concern directly and privately to the U.K. government before May spoke. But the U.S. had no such concern—that’s why the now-fired secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom both endorsed May’s words. When Trump raises doubts about the facts, about American agreement with its British ally, about the accuracy of the British accusation against Russia, Trump is not expressing good-faith uncertainty about imperfect information. Trump is rejecting the consensus view of the U.K. and U.S. intelligence communities about an act of Russian aggression—and, if his past behavior is any indication, preparing the way for his own determination to do nothing. [...]

The United Kingdom does not find itself deprived of U.S. support because of some British mistake or rush to judgment. Most of the U.S. government shares the British assessment of what happened—as attested by Tillerson’s statement in support of Britain, which would have relied on U.S. intelligence agency reports. Only Trump stands apart, vetoing any condemnation of Russia and perhaps punishing his secretary of state for breaking ranks on the president’s no-criticizing-Putin policy.

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