Blockstream is mentioned multiple times, as is Back's wealth;
> It was the beginning of an era in which Mr. Back quickly amassed influence and became a ring leader in the still small Bitcoin community. To staff Blockstream, he poached the top Bitcoin Core developers from their day jobs at companies like Google and Mozilla, giving him tremendous sway over the digital currency. He also became very wealthy: Over the next dozen years, Blockstream and its affiliates would raise $1 billion in funding and Blockstream would reach a valuation of $3.2 billion.
> People in Iran had gained access to more than 1,500 accounts on the Binance platform over the previous year. About $1.7 billion had flowed from two Binance accounts to Iranian entities with links to terrorist groups, a possible violation of global sanctions. And one of those accounts belonged to a Binance vendor.
> After uncovering the transactions, the investigators reported them to top executives, according to company records and other documents reviewed by The New York Times.
> Within weeks, Binance fired or suspended at least four employees involved in the investigation, according to the documents and three people with knowledge of the situation. The company cited issues such as “violations of company protocol” related to the handling of client data.
[..]
> But internal warnings about the Iranian transactions surfaced last year, in the months before President Trump granted a pardon to Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had spent four months in federal prison in 2024 for his role in the firm’s crimes. The Trump family’s crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, has forged close business ties with Binance, and Mr. Zhao was a guest this month at a conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
Likewise. There’s this older woman who is trying to add some historical color to our local beach town FB group by using some terrible AI tool to colorize pictures from the early 1900s. She doesn’t accept any feedback that it’s problematic to share what are essentially fake pics in that way.. they often just randomly remove people, or add new ones. Buildings are changed, cars are remodeled, it’s crazy how different the before/after are. The comments are usually split as well, but I absolutely loathe how AI is used there. She means well, but the tools are so bad for this and so poorly explained.
I was looking for photos of NYC in the 1990s a few weeks ago. I eventually found some, but my search was greatly obstructed by AI photos of NYC in the 1990s.
The experiance made me certain that AI is going to to much more harm than good to the buisness of archiving historical photos.
As for the lady who is distorting photos to colorize them - I don't even understand why you would want to do that. There are other ways!
yeah, you're right. That's why she's doing it. But its a weird idea: I like this historical photo, so I'm going to distort in order to add color, which makes it not a historical photo anymore. I guess to her the distortion is so minimal it loses nothing, but to me it loses everything.
Its like saying "I love Da Vinci's art so I'm going to draw a moustache on everyone in the last supper" which you probably wouldn't do if you really loved Da Vinci's art.
There are some pretty obvious distortions when you closely look at the difference between the historical and AI-corrupted images. But I have to admit, the colorized one has a nice vibe to it, if you don't look too closely it gives a really nice feel for what the moment was actually like, more than the accurate black-and-white.
Which is to say, I think it comes down to what you value most out of historical photos; a forensic record of truth, or general idea of what it was like to live at the time, compared to today.
The photo is oversaturated and psychedelic. It seriously looks like what the world looks like on a dose of drugs. I much prefer the black and white one. They're both unreal in their "same same, but different" ways
I'm firmly against uncontrolled AI use. But as long as the edits are strongly labeled, I have to say I enjoy the effect.
Maybe it's because I'm too young and I've never had B&W content around, but the edited picture allows me to feel the photograph as real, as a place I could have walked around, which I can't really do with the original. I find that effect more valuable than a specific roof being deformed or whatever.
The effect bugs me personally mainly because the cars are implausible colors, there are a ton of small changes to e.g. the windows on the campers etc. But even more annoyingly, most of her posts are just the color photos without even the source pic. She clearly enjoys it, and many people in the comments do too, but I just have this existential dread that those will be slurped up in the next AI push and treated as historical truth in the future.
Then you pass both the original and the mustache'd photo across the table while boisterously announce: "look how absurd it is to love something so wholly and completely!" to the room instead of the person the photographs were passed to!
In the same way, so many current cameras (mostly phones) that do automatic post-processing of images, up to and including AI, is going to lessen their future archeological value.
I'm reminded of Samsung's "AI moon" debacle and how divided people were over it. At the end of the day, any photos with so many unknown variables wouldn't suffice for scientific purposes.
Okay that before/after is fantastic. Really shows how normal the past is. No wonder she keeps doing it. It must be pretty good for her to be able to remember those moments. I love it!
Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.
Probably true, it's more likely that it's a variation on "there are only a small percentage of people willing to pay any amount of money for an article, so if we offer one-time options, a large enough percentage of people who would have otherwise subscribed with recurring revenue instead pay one-time so their lifetime value is lower"
This would be a great opportunity for the government to get involved.. Tell them to just make two of every order they have now and the government will buy the second one at whatever price the customer is paying. Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them. Would be a much better use of a few billion dollars than some asinine Star Wars II or another half a trillion into the war maw.
The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, which builds the US aircraft carriers, once ran a full page ad announcing that if Congress would order two carriers at once, instead of one at a time, they'd throw in a third carrier for free. The total shutdown between jobs was that expensive for them.
Liquidity is expensive. Selling a carrier one at a time is like a retail business where you're expected to hold onto stock. If you don't build up an inventory to sell from and just sell one unit, you have to markup the price to cover the cost of the factory when it is idle.
It’s a major cause of why the U.S. shipbuilding industry can produce such a tiny number of surface combatants per year, despite having the industrial capacity to do far more if it was steady work.
The US Government selling off the helium reserve at cost over two decades effectively capped the global price, even while exploration costs got higher. So exploration was killed, no investments made in better extraction, processing or recycling.
Now that it's gone we're ultra dependent on a by-product of methane extraction and liquification for LNG transport. But most of the helium we extract as natural gas is not separated, as it just gets piped as gas. Helium is getting very very expensive.
You can have the government buy the equipment with the economy goes down, or you can have the government manufacturing it and letting the factory go idle when demand dries down.
But amplifying the orders just makes the problem worse.
Have the government only sell these in times of crisis. They're not competitors, but vendors of last resort. For general maintenance replacement, the gov should tell prospective buyers to take a hike.
The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act and used $250m of IRA funds to increase production of grid transformers. Guess what happened when Trump took office.
This reads like you just desperately wanted to criticize, but couldn't really be troubled to research the background for a minute or two.
The IRA was a law passed by Congress. It set aside funds for grid upgrades, but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises, because it was understood that Congress couldn't move quickly enough to deal with sudden supply issues. One thing that happened was the investments into grid upgrades created a demand shock, and transformer pricing and timelines surged upwards. So at that point the President invoked the DPA and used a chunk of IRA funding to try to unsnarl the transformer pipeline so the rest of the project could proceed. Then Trump (for basically arbitrary reasons) decided to screw it up. (He's also screwed it up in ways that probably just plain violate the law, but he doesn't care about that either -- which is why "run policy purely from the Legislative branch" doesn't fix any of this.)
Given the context -- a broad law duly passed by the slower legislative branch, a crisis dealt with (according to the law) by the more nimble Executive branch -- I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable, even with the absolute maximal dose of charity. This is basically the kind of governance that we want a functioning Legislative and Executive branch to engage in; it was screwed up on purpose; and your proposed solution/excuse does not produce better outcomes.
> I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable
It's pretty straightforward...
> but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises
All the President needs to do is say it's not a crisis. If you want it to stick past the current administration, pass a law after the crisis.
Anything that's at the discretion of the executive is at the desretion of the executive. I'm not saying it's great or smart but there's zero reason to be surprised and I'll not be surprised when a bunch of Trump's orders get reversed too.
The problem expressed, I think, that it is not useful to scale up production quickly (or perhaps at all), because a factory catching up on all of their orders means that the factory goes idle. Idle factories can't afford to pay wages, so they lay off some or all of the workers -- and those folks go and find different jobs.
And when they leave, they take their institutional knowledge with them.
So the sustainable goal is to never be idle, and the way to accomplish this is to never catch up.
For an example of how idle factories can go sideways, look at the Polaroid film story: Polaroid closed. Everyone left. Some investors with a big dream eventually bought many of the physical assets that remained.
But owning some manufacturing equipment didn't help them much because the institutional knowledge of producing Polaroid film had already evaporated. They had to largely re-invent the process. (And they've done a great job of that, but it's still not the same film as the OG Polaroid was.)
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So anyway, suppose the government steps in and simply artificially multiplies transformer orders x2, and pays them fairly for this doubled production. Since transformers are tangible things and we can't just spin up more AWS instances to cover demand, the immediate result is that the "short" lead time on new orders has increased from 2 years, to 4.
That's not seeming to be very ideal. It seems to amplify the problem instead of resolve it.
I suppose that the government could also offer safeguards that would help protect the businesses (including suppliers for parts) once they eventually catch up on orders, and that this might motivate them to scale production sooner instead of later (or never).
Which -- you know -- that isn't unprecedented. As an example: The Lima Army Tank Plant, in Lima, Ohio, is place where I've spent a fair bit of quality time. It still exists and continuously has employees largely because the institutional knowledge of how to build tanks (and a few other war machines) is considered to be too important to lose. During lulls, it mostly just sits there on its expansive site, loafing along repairing stuff that comes in, and waiting for the day when things to turn bad enough that we need to start increasing our number of tanks again.
It needs to keep operating (at any expense), and so with the magic of the government money-printing machine: It does. But it's one of the most actively depressing industrial sites I've ever been to; like the life just gets sucked right out of you before even getting past the entrance gate.
We can certainly extend that kind of thing to transformer production. But should we?
I mean: I've got some MREs in the pantry along with some other shelf-stable food, and I've got some water stored (primarily to fill empty space in the chest freezer for various practical reasons, but it exists). I keep some basic first aid and survival stuff in the car (bandages, space blankets, stuff to catch fish with, stuff to cook with). I've got my camping gear, including a small off-grid solar power system, stored in organized totes that can be loaded up very quickly. And I try to keep a minimum of a couple hundred miles worth of fuel in the gas tank at all times.
I do these things just in case. The bulkiest items see frequent use. None of this cost me very much to buy, or to maintain. And none of these things can replace the lifestyle I've come to expect, but they might be able to buy me some time.
Can we afford to have a spare copy of the hard-to-produce parts of the electrical grid sitting in a warehouse?
Would we even want to rebuild the grid in the same shape if the shit really hit the fan and we had to start it over from scratch?
It is important. We must not forget how to make transformers.
But the knowledge is already being preserved. Unlike the singular army tank plant (which smells like a combination of despair and naphthalene), there are a plurality of transformer factories in the US...and they are always operating at 100%.
As long as that continues to be the case (there's no sign that it will change), then the expertise is actively being employed, refined, remembered, and transferred.
So even if we do nothing, we're good on that front.
We just aren't keeping up with present-day demand. (Hence, the article.)
We're not talking about starting over from scratch, we're talking about replacing a bunch of parts after a major geomagnetic event or something similar. Yes -- we would very much want to do this. And hundreds of millions of lives would be at stake if we delayed longer.
Covid demonstrated that can't even successfully rejigger the distribution of toilet paper to adjust for a change in where people poop during the day. During the Great Bog Roll Shortage of 2020, the mills that make toilet paper didn't shut down, people didn't use the toilet any more than usual, and the hoarders and scalpers (while both present and despised) were a mostly-insignificant factor.
But yet: The store shelves were empty while the janitorial and institutional supply chains had a surplus. We were incompetent at moving things from Pile A and putting them into Hole B.
So, sure: In the event of an unprecedented geomagnetic event destroying big chunks of the grid, we're hosed. I agree. And people will die. It will be awful. If I'm sure of one thing, I'm sure that we'll somehow manage to completely fuck this up.
So maybe we should focus less on stockpiling a bunch of ludicrously-expensive parts that we hope to never have a use for. Instead, maybe we should focus more on making the grid less reliant on centralization, and instead comprise it of smaller parts that that can be operated more-independently.
Both things are very expensive.
One of them is a reactive solution to a problem we've never had -- and that we hope to never have. The other is a proactive solution we can start using immediately, and also into the future.
(An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.)
Lead times increasing to four years doesn't necessarily mean that every order will take that long. Since the additional orders are just there to cover idle periods, the government could omit an expected delivery time so regular orders don't get delayed.
I think that would mean that the factory would switch from operating at 100% capacity (and never catching up), to 100% capacity (and never catching up).
For that kind of sameness, it seems like it'd be easier to do nothing at all.
There's certainly the 'National Interest Exception' which the President / DHS Secretary can extend to anyone they determine to be deserving of skipping the $100k fee;
They also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)
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