Your Humble Blogger is the Probable Target of Penny-Ante Cyber Predation
I was hacked yesterday.
On the scale of hacks, it was simultaneously trivial but meant to intimidate. Or else hugely inept.
Read more...Category Archives: Technology and innovation
Wolf Richter: Cracks In The Tech Bubble (That Doesn’t Exist)
After having denied feverishly that any kind of bubble exists, people watch incredulously as the hot air hisses out of the very bubble whose existence they’re still denying. And afterwards, everyone had seen it coming. Because cracks had been visible for a long time.
One of the cracks is Twitter.
Read more...Martin Wolf Sounds Cautionary Note on Rise of Robots
Martin Wolf, the highly regarded chief economics editor at the Financial Times, has roused himself to take up the topic of whether robots represent a threat to the economic and social order. He takes the case for concern seriously and lays out a set of potential dangers.
Read more...The Supreme Position of the U.S. Dollar in New Financial Innovations and Instruments
New financial innovations and instruments contributed to halting the declining trend of the dollar as a debt-financing currency and reversed the falling role of the dollar in the 2000s.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: War Spikes in the Eve Online Universe – A Political Economist’s Account
Yves here. I must admit to being mystified and intrigued by Eve Online, which I have to confess I’d never heard of before today. First of course is the large number of people who find it appealing to spend significant amounts of leisure time in a realm designed to be ruthless and savage. Don’t they get enough of that at their day jobs? It used to be the most common narrative of entertainment was the hero’s journey. We now see rising popularity of amusements that celebrate ruthlessness and a breakdown or lack of social norms (such as the Game of Thrones)
The second curiosity is that 500,000 people have spent real money in meaningful amounts and invested time in a pseudo-economy where the funds are stranded. And now to add insult to injury, some have taken really big losses.
Read more...What Jobs Will Robots Take?
Yves here. One of the things that is bothersome about the ongoing discussion of robots (or more generally automation) taking jobs is the lack of precision as to how that takes place. And that lack may lead to overestimation.
Read more...Why George Lucas, Eric Schmidt, (and yes, Steve Jobs) Should Go to Jail: Conspiring to Reduce Wages of 100,000 Tech Pros
One big difference between West Coast and East Coast oligarchs is that a lot fewer people lionize the Eastern ones. But a pending lawsuit may finally tarnish some Silicon Valley halos.
Read more...How Bitcoin Plays Into the Hands of Central Bankers and Will Facilitate the Use of Negative Interest Rates
Bitcoin enthusiasts like to present it as a “power to the people” form of money, stressing its apparent lack of ownership (the “Napster for finance“). They stress the lack of need for a “trusted party” like a bank or broker to verify that a payment has been made. And many clearly relish the idea of launching a currency outside the control of central banks (plus this beats Cryptonomicon in geekery).
If you believe the hype, you’ve been had.
Read more...The Robots are Coming for White Collar Jobs
Yves here. Bad enough having to worry about offshoring eating into your employment prospects and compensation level. Alan Blinder, in Senate testimony in 2007, had argued that up to 29% of US jobs were “offshorable,” including many service industry positions. And now this….
Read more...Target, Neiman Marcus Credit Card Hacking Reveals Third-World US Payment Systems
Occasionally, we’ve commented on the shoddy state of US credit card payment infrastructure. One of the noteworthy aspects of the fiasco of recent US retailer security breaches is that the media has more or less ignored the question of what could have been done to forestall these incidents, which in the case of Target involved as many as 70 million customers, and Neiman Marcus, under (but presumably not much under) 1 million.
Read more...Ilargi: Everything Better Is Purchased At The Price Of Something Worse
Yves here. While I suspect the general thesis of this post will appeal to many readers, I’m bothered by the use of “price” and “purchase” to describe the idea that progress is not linear and in many respects may add up to less in terms of satisfaction than we’d like to believe.
Read more...“When You Bareback With the Internet, You Ride With the NSA”
You must watch this talk, even if some parts are a bit technical for mere mortals. No matter how bad you think the NSA’s information surveillance and capture is, I can just about guarante that this will show you that it’s an order of magnitude worse than you imagined.
Read more...Amazon Warehouse Workers Strike in Germany Over Pay, Sweatshop Conditions
Amazon is rapidly becoming the poster child for what is wrong with the so-called new economy.
Read more...Obama Kept His Head in the Sand During Healthcare.gov Fiasco
The New York Times has an instructive account, Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama, of the scrambling in the Administration to deal with the beyond-redeption-by-the-power-of-spin disaster of the Healthcare.gov launch.
Read more...Governments Will Struggle to Control Bitcoin
Yves here. I was extremely puzzled to see various US regulators make cautiously positive remarks about Bitcoin in Congressional hearings. But I now have a guess as to what happened.
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