parasubvert

Nordhaus co-wrote the standard economics textbook taught globally, endogenous technological change is an exemplary growth theory that (with Paul Romer) was deserving of the Nobel, and was an early proponent of carbon taxes and created many of the tools used in environmental economics.

I mean, he's absolutely deserving of critique, even harsh critique, but you're going to have try harder than "his analysis is awful" and he caused "immeasurable damage" when he co-created the movement.

Eh, the tobacco companies were found very liable ($206 billion in the US alone), Meta has to pay $18 billion for the child safety liability findings, Visa+MC $38 billion, Amazon $2.5 billion over Amazon Prime, Opiod companies had a $25 billion judgement recently...

Shareholder liability is not the only way, but it is A way. There are many unlimited liability companies out there that get high privacy as a tradeoff to liability. Limited liability corps encourages investment but requires public disclosure and enforcement. Society has to decide it if wants to clamp down on limited liability corps (or not). So far they've voted "or not".

Solar + storage is on an exponential growth curve to largely entirely replace fossil fuels (coal mostly, but eventually natural gas) for electricity generation globally. It will take decades, but at this point the economics are undeniable. Which is in part why Texas (oil country) is blanketing with utility-scale solar farms. Energy businessmen have no particular ideological wedding to what will make them more money, and Solar is a far simpler business than oil.

Capital has plenty of desire to hold it accountable, to sustain the system. Capital is not a unified group of interests; many of them favor justice.

The people do have significant power at the ballot box, and chose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.

It is not a mode of production problem. The people do have that power at the ballot box, and choose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.

The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.

Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.

In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.

The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.

If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.

Humanity isn't doomed. Worse, it's going to survive, and have to deal with the messes we made.

This is a string of non-sequiturs that do not prove your conclusion.

According to haveibeenpwnd, my gmail address (which I too have had since invite-only) has been in 1 data breach. My Mac.com address which I've had since it was called iTools, 19 breaches. I've had to rotate my email account passwords I think 3 or 4 times over the last 20 years, and rotate most external accounts that use those email addresses a few times. I'm not sure what this proves other than "you should randomly generate your passwords & rotate them" which is what mainstream users have been doing for at least a few years now. Apple also notifies me if any password I use has been in a breach, and gives an easy link to rotate it.

SSN fraud predates the Internet and has little to do with online consumer services privacy (most don't have your SSN). When I was a young teenage cracker anarchist in the late 80s & early 90s, we got credit cards & SSN's through hacking the credit agencies, credit card companies, credit unions and regional banks (all of whom often had insecure dialup endpoints, or even better, insecure X.25 network endpoints), and through a BBS community that would disseminate these data breaches. Same as it ever was.

Mainstream end to end encrypted apps do not monitor your private messages. Cynicism is not wisdom. WhatsApp offering an on-app opt-in model to detect scans seems like a well thought through feature, though Meta's reputation is not good on this topic.

Clearly many do not care about privacy. But it is quite possible to be very online and have reasonable privacy. It requires discernment and discipline.

It strikes me that heavy AI agent users have an extraordinarily high risk tolerance for identity theft, privacy breaches and data loss vs. perceived productivity. Far beyond what any responsible medium to large size company would ever tolerate.

Overall the limits to AI productivity can be summarized in one word: discipline. If you're undisciplined in your security, your design constraints, your automated test coverage, your separation of the deterministic and indeterministic, you will be quite productive ... for a time. Until quite suddenly, you aren't, possibly due to catastrophe.

Similar to the early era of computers on the Internet, with lax security, we have a window where we can get away with this, but it will close quicker than many realize. Some things do seem to need to be learned the hard way.

Apple is trying to do the bare minimum here - not even introducing a new security model - and people are already freaking out. But a disciplined agent sandbox model is exactly what we need to get to.

Docker has an interesting approach lately with their sandboxes which are firewalled, proxied, and file system restricted microVMs (you can bind mount outside) with a docker daemon inside of it.

It is interesting you feel phones and OSes are stuck in the 70s when the real pioneering work of building a personal computer that wasn't designed for prefab apps but rather built for personal use in a fully programmable, reflective, extensible system was in the 70s with the Xerox Alto and Smalltalk.

The future is often rooted in the past that has been forgotten.

Many promising tech startups make these mistakes by thinking they're the first to come up with an idea, when really it was decades ago.

For entrepreneurs and explorers in this new AI age, rather than being kids again, which seems to be a way to quickly and repeatedly step on rakes, I might suggest being an old wizard. They retain playfulness and openness tempered by wisdom and experience and vast libraries of history. New things often rhyme with old things.

I have really enjoyed Arcs by Cole Wehrle as my modern Diplomacy-like asymmetrical war game - cutthroat, negotiating, area control, but also more randomness, variety and theme. And the campaign totally changes the vibe into a space opera!

Root was also very good but I think is harder to master as the factions are so different and so runaway games are common IMO.