[Plura-list] Pluralistic: Russian multiplication, qualified immunity, Bloomberg buys the DNC, private equity's delusion and more

[Cory Doctorow]

⏩ Today’s links

*    Russian Multiplication: turning hard multiplication into easy
addition with binary.
*    Cops’ qualified immunity: so long as it’s not identical to an
established atrocity, it’s fine.
*    Bloomberg’s Plan B: buying the DNC: I don’t care who does the
voting, so long as I get to do the nominating.
*    Private equity looters underperform the S&P 500: Believing that you
are accomplishing extraordinary things merely because you are paid
extraordinary amounts is top-grade self-delusion.
*    New podcast about the history of Gopher and adversarial
interoperability: It’s judo for network effects.
*    This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019
*    Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming
appearances, current reading

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⏩ Russian Multiplication

“Russian Multiplication” (AKA Ethiopian Multiplication) reduces complex
multiplication problems into a series of simple addition problems,
essentially by reducing the multiplier to a binary number.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ_PP5rqLg0

It was allegedly practised by Russian peasants as well as English yeoman
farmers and others — similar methods date back to ancient Egypt.

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RussianMultiplication.html

Here’s that Egyptian method:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication

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⏩ Cops’ qualified immunity

“Qualified immunity” for cops is weirder thank you think – as Tim
Cushing describes, all a cop needs to do is show that their human rights
abuse is not one that has been previously ruled illegal, and thus it’s
not “clearly established” as illegal.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200216/10501743927/not-clearly-established-jailer-cant-spray-prisoner-eyes-with-pepper-spray-no-reason-says-fifth-circuit.shtm

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court just found that a guard who pepper
sprayed a prisoner in the eyes between the bars of his cell for no
reason gets qualified immunity, because no guard had ever been tried for
doing this before.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6777194/Qi-Spray.pdf

A prison guard known only as “Mr Alamu” says he “went blank” when a
prisoner threw water in his face, and then came back later and asked a
different prisoner for his name and number, and then sprayed him in the
eyes when he approached the bars to answer. The court found that “Mr
Alamu” had violated the prisoner Prince McCoy’s rights, that he “crossed
the line,” but that “it was not beyond debate that it [crossed the line]
so the law wasn’t clearly established” and so Alamu gets qualified immunity.

Usually “moral hazard” is invoked to explain why we should let poor
people starve (“why work if the food is free?”) but this is real moral
hazard: “If you’re a cop, you can abuse people without limitation,
provided you do so in novel ways.”

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⏩ Bloomberg’s Plan B: buying the DNC permalink)

“Buying the presidency” is Bloomberg’s Plan A, but Plan B seems to be
“Taking over the DNC and waging war on President Sanders” so his
administration gets nothing done.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/bloomberg-wants-swallow-democrats-and-spit-out-sandernistas

Bloomberg’s pledged to pay the salaries of 500 DNC staffers through
November. Regardless of whether he wins the nomination, he’ll be running
the DNC during the election.

“Would you bet that the rich who rule us wouldn’t spark such a confused
and violent rebellion that even they would be forced at last to flee —
won’t do all this out of animus, pique and world-historical hubris?”

https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2020/02/is-mike-bloomberg-buying-dnc-if-so-what.html

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⏩ Private equity looters underperform the S&P 500

Over the past decade, private equity (who loot companies through
debt-loading, stealing pensions, ripping off suppliers and raffling off
real-estate/plant) has underperformed the S&P 500, largely composed of
businesses being run for the long-term.

https://www.ft.com/content/e73396be-54a4-11ea-8841-482eed0038b1

PE companies insist that their model “encourages operational excellence”
with a “top-dollar management team,” “carefully set incentives,” and the
ability to operate “outside of the highly-scrutinised world of public
markets.”

But PE earnings don’t reflect that story. For one thing, PE acquisitions
are REALLY bad at hitting their profit targets.

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/02/24/1582558861000/Three-charts-on-private-equity/

The PE story is interesting because it shows that people who claim to be
doing extraordinary things, and believe they are doing extraordinary
things, and are being paid extraordinary sums for delivering
extraordinary things, are often just wrong about their own performance.

This is a recurring motif, also seen in the world of ad-tech companies
like Google and Facebook (and their parasites like Cambridge Analytica).
Their sales brochures claim that machine learning and big data can
create mind-control rays. That is, given enough data about you, an “AI”
can figure out how to persuade you of anything. I think that lots of top
people at these firms believe that’s what they’re doing, and I know
their sales-force believes it. Their customers might believe it too!

I’m sure there are plenty of people in the Trump 2016 campaign who think
that Cambridge Analytica fashioned them a mind-control ray to turn
decent people into racists, though it’s infinitely more likely that they
found racists and turned them into Trump voters.

Because Big Data and machine learning ARE very good at finding people:
whether it’s people thinking about buying what you have to sell, people
who believe Black Lives Matter, people whose lived experience tells them
there are more than two genders.

But that’s connection, not persuasion. Connection is a great tool for
facilitating persuasion, but the idea that sending fridge ads to people
who’ve searched fridge reviews is the same as convincing people that
they need new fridges is obviously wrong. The point being: the fact that
you believe you’re doing something heretofore impossible (beating the
market, controlling peoples’ minds) is neither proven out by your sales
literature, nor by your customers’ satisfaction, nor by your own certainty.

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⏩ New podcast about the history of Gopher and adversarial interoperability

I’ve just posted my latest podcast, a reading of my EFF Deeplinks essay
about adversarial interoperability and the history of the pre-WWW
protocol, Gopher.

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Gopher’s such a good case study: a group of support technologists who
decided to circumvent the terrible ideas of the ruling mainframe
administrators. These techlords expected each user to memorize a
distinct set of command-line incantations to access their services.

Gopher used terminal automation and other “internet duct-tape” to bypass
these obscurantists and provide a menu-driven front end to every
conceivable networked service.

The best part is what happened next: Webspace swallowed Gopherspace, by
the simple expedient of adding gopher:// support to the URL bar. Gopher
both lived and died by adversarial interoperability. Try to do that
today: to create an itunes:// or a facebook:// or a tiktok:// robot that
can simply pull stuff out of the walled garden and Web 2.0 it into a new
service as a mere feature of that service, and you’d face unlimited
criminal and civil liability.

The same companies that waxed fat by adversarially interoperating with
the walled gardens that came before them have built new walled gardens,
and they have made wall-scaling ladders illegal with patent, copyright,
terms of service, contract, etc. Big Tech will tell you that it’s big
because of “network effects” and “first mover advantage.” Gopher had
both. The web swallowed gopher like a python swallowing…a gopher. It ate
Gopher’s network effect.

Blaming monopoly on network effects is a counsel of despair. It says
there is no hope of restoring the competitive, diverse web and invites
critics of the platforms to demand that they be converted into regulated
monopolies instead. (not coincidentally, this is just fine by the
platforms’ shareholders)

Here’s the text of the article:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

And here’s a direct link to the MP3:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_328/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_328_-_Gopher_When_Adversarial_Interoperability_Burrowed_Under_the_Gatekeepers_Fortresses.mp3

Here’s my podcast RSS:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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⏩ This day in history

#10yrsago Golden-age computer manual encourages you to break DRM, rants
against EULAs
https://www.ironicsans.com/2010/02/they_dont_make_computer_manual.html

#10yrsago Military Monitored Planned Parenthood, Supremacists
https://www.wired.com/2010/02/military-spied-on-plannet-parenthood/

#10yrsago Australia’s chief censor redacts official website to downplay
his role in censorship
https://www.news.com.au/technology/conroys-website-removes-references-to-filter/news-story/683232ff5f190d2769c890bd75b08a71

#5yrsago Emma Thompson on tax-strike until HSBC tax evaders are jailed
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/25/emma-thompson-greg-wise-tax-boycott-hsbc-scandal

#5yrsago Grim meathook future, Singapore style
www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html

#5yrsago UK Tory MP says astrology would improve NHS health outcomes
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/25/astrology-help-nhs-claim-conservative-mp-david-tredinnick

#1yrago AOC is the star of a new superhero comic https://www.devilsdue.net

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⏩ Colophon

Today’s top sources: Kottke (https://kottke.org), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/”).

Hugo nominators! My story “Unauthorized Bread” is eligible in the
Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

    Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis
Street, with CBC’s Sarah Penton
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, “The Canadian
Miracle,” for MIT Tech Review. It’s a story set in the world of my next
novel, “The Lost Cause,” a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. I’m getting geared up to start work on the novel now,
though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I’ve
been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world’s
prehistory.

Currently reading: I finished Andrea Bernstein’s “American Oligarchs”
this week; it’s a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families,
showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I’m
getting really into Anna Weiner’s memoir about tech, “Uncanny Valley.” I
just loaded Matt Stoller’s “Goliath” onto my underwater MP3 player and
I’m listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under
the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses:
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Upcoming books: “Poesy the Monster Slayer” (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we’re having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

“Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

“Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a very
special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

Permalink for this edition:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/



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