I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate:
The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is going to be a vaguely accurate guess based on your IP address.
But also, location data is really important to ads right now because, contrary to common perception, per user tracking is very, very hard. Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique. Which is why you are often served advertisements based on what other people on your network is searching - it's much easier to just blast everyone at that IP address than it is to find that specific user or device again in the data stream.
Bidstream data in particular is very fraught. You're only getting the active data at the point the add is served, but it's not easy to aggregate in any way. You'll be counting the same person separately dozens or hundreds of times with different identifiers for each. The data you get from something like Mobilewalla is not useful for tracking individuals so much as it's useful for finding patterns.
I think it's pretty telling from the few examples shared about how agencies actually use the data:
>"CBP uses the information to “look for cellphone activity in unusual places,” including unpopulated portions of the US-Mexico border."
>According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS tried to use Venntel’s data to track individual suspects, but gave up when it couldn’t locate its targets in the company’s dataset.
>In March 2021, SOCOM told Vice that the purpose of the contract was to “evaluate” the feasibility of using A6 services in an “overseas operating environment,” and that the government was no longer executing the contract
Something is going to have to be figured out about this data - realistically the only way is a sunset on customized advertisements. However, I would personally not be worried (yet) that the government is going to be able to identify an individual and track them down using these public sources as they currently are.
I worked in ad-tech for a year before I left the tech industry as a whole. I've also done a fair bit of investigative journalism.
Let me share a thing:
Factual, a company that specializes in hyperlocal geofencing, uses geofencing much smaller than the self-regulation that their industry allows in their own rules. I learned this after a coworker quit because our company was allowing ad targeting to people using these smaller geofences. The whole company had an all-hands about it where the CEO of the company told everyone that we were not going to stop using Factual nor the smaller-than-allowed geofences because we, ourselves, were not the ones to produce those geofences. We were just a man in the middle helping to build a system to track people at high resolution.
Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.
>Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.
I don't see anything contradictory between your comment and the OP. Having an amoral CEO who condones breaking geotargeting self-regulation doesn't contradict OP's claim that it's hard to tie geotargeting data in bidstreams back to a particular person.
Only one person/company has to solve any given hard problem before they can sell it to interested parties. Who might lose it in a data leak, or package it up and re-sell it, etc, etc.
For example, it was very hard for me to identify myself in an anonymized public dataset of vehicle trips, but I did. It was also hard to FOIA for the documents showing them writing SQL to spot my trip.. but I did.
There are whole companies that de-anon ad data as a service. Which gives the lots of data brokers the ability to not do the last mile and feel good about themselves. It’s a joke.
I remember when the first article was posted. Their method requires two parallel corpuses e.g. people who write on LinkedIn (under their real name) and Reddit.
Also, people who post under their real name are likely to write with their real voice:
> Any deanonymization setup with ground truth introduces
distributional biases. In our cross-platform datasets, the pro-files are likely easier to deanonymize than an average profile: the very fact that ground truth exists implies that the user may not have cared about anonymity in the first place. Similarly, two split-profiles of a single user are inherently alike, whereas two pseudonymous accounts of the same person (e.g., an official and a pseudonymous alt account) might expose more heterogeneous micro-data.
But dude... just think of all the optimal personalized mattres sales they can do with that data. I mean, people that use the bathroom at 3:57pm for seven minutes are 0.00138% more likely to buy a new mattress within the next six months. They need that data. Think of all the unsold mattresses.
Well, in the case of a company trying to market to you, it literally _is_ their business. It makes them money.
The problem is that we have markets where we:
- Incentivize organizations to pursue profits at the expense of everything else, which includes social good and civic rights
- Rarely hold bad actors accountable (and almost never in a timely manner)
Which means, given enough time, we're always going to trend to whatever makes the most money. Targeted advertising makes money, and will continue to do so unless or until we collectively decide to make it a greater risk to profits than it is today.
i'm not confident they know where i am at all. i routinely get ads on social media for places (super random US states, cities, etc.) nowhere near where i live (SF Bay Area).
At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.
I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading:
Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location.
That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have finer grained data (esp around the US/Mexican border). Precision location info would only be needed if you need to track people in densely populated areas.
That location information is not available to apps or ad networks without user consent. The government can access it from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.
Carriers have also sold customer location data, no search warrant required. Though we can rest assured that the FCC has slapped the carriers' wrists with the utmost seriousness.
If you use Google Location Services, which is stock install on basically all Android devices, it absolutely is uploading "anonymized" GPS data all the time.
IP Address is all you need to get fairly accurate (town or neighborhood) location for most of North America.
But it is necessary to send it somewhere, otherwise the internet wouldn't work.
Unfortunately it seems to have become accepted for our devices to communicate constantly and often with services we never explicitly started communication with (like Ad networks used in Apps).
Permission systems on devices should care about Network connections just as much as Location. Ideally when installing an app you'd get the list of domains it requests to communicate with, and you could toggle them. Bonus points if the app store made it a requirement to identify which Domains are third parties and the category like an Ad service.
I think the issue here is one of informed consent. You might say, "OK, this makes sense" when agreeing to location data for a weather app. In the context of whether it's going to hail soon, location is reasonable. What you only see in those GDPR-type banners is that the data is being re-sold off to 1001 "partners", none of whom are important for my hail-to-head concerns. Never mind all the cases where it's re-sold on to all the governments and personal-level creeps through aggregators.
- The Aid package is not immediately spent all at once. It authorizes up to $26 billion, but the CBO estimates it may take all the way into 2033 to claim the money.
- To that end, a lot of these costs are double counted. It's including the bill that authorizes these expenses, and then those expenses all in the same calculation.
More realistically, the $6.5M/day in theater operations for a Carrier Strike Group is probably pretty accurate (In reality, they already cost the US about $30M/day just operate normally). The flyaway costs for the Tomahawk missiles are going to be about $1M each (a lot of price estimates include the R&D costs divided per units).
In reality, the cost of a 60 day war with Iran using current methods at our current loss rates will get you closer to about $8-12B total cost. Which is still a lot more more incrementally accurate.
It would be interesting, but admittedly difficult, to have a comparative scale of what could have been achieved if the money had been used to hire more teachers, set up universal healthcare, reduce overcrowding in prisons, provide shelters and food for the homeless, subsidise doctors to work in places where no-one can afford medical care... In other words "at this point you could have provided shelter for every homeless person; at this point you could have halved the crowding in prisons; at this point ...".
It's really cool to see her back and making videos again.
After seeing her status updates 2 years ago I was honestly really concerned she would be gone for good. It sounds like she had a serious case of myalgic encephalomyelitis brought on by Covid.
Part of why we know so little about these types of conditions is they are incredibly unfair. Women are 4x as likely to have some sort of constant fatigue disorder as men, and you see this reflected in literature going back centuries when describing women who just flat out disappear from public life.
One of the things about being bedridden for a long period of time is that there is a high risk of becoming more or less permanently bedridden. Especially if you have a chronic fatigue syndrome, you become weaker and any activity can retrigger fatigue. So her pushing herself to make new content sustainably is important very encouraging.
Context: This refers to a particular Evangelical quasi-cult called the "New Apostolic Reformation".
Obsession with the end times stems from a particular Biblical interpretation called "dispensationalism" that was introduced into America in the 1800s. If you're wondering why certain Christian sects became more obsessed from retreating from society than improving it, these are the head waters. It's a successful theme that took off on radio, then with televangelists, and now on social media.
The New Apostolic Reformation is kind of the ultimate culmination of these beliefs. It's one of the key components of what is being called Christian Nationalism.
It's not even clear what parts of the movement are earnestly held and which are purely opportunists trading on the fears of the naive. Many Christians may cross-pollinate in these circles without knowing it - but it takes a very specifically indoctrinated person to think Trump is divinely anointed
Having grown up in churches that began to embrace NAR tenets in the 90s-00s, this particular eschatology gained a foothold across a wide swath of denominations from non-denom/charismatic/baptist all the way to methodist/CoC. In my experience it’s less a retreat from society, and more of a particular strain of religious fundamentalism that seeks to draw a line in the sand against “secular” culture. Most NAR organizations are lead by a “prophet” or leader who followers believe directly hears from God (aka a new apostle). A predominant theme among NAR churches is increasing christian influence in government (i.e. “7 Mountain Mandate” for example). I also recently learned about catholic integralism, which shares similar dominionist goals with NAR, and has gained momentum in the US.
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Slavery was already being abolished in the West when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. But what was notable was that Adam Smith was really the first to make a strong case and prediction that it was not just the moral thing to do, but would lead to prosperity.
Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.
It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.
And effectively it did: many people are kept in their place by the combined pressure points of debt and employment to stay (barely) afloat.
This is of course nothing compared to the cruelty of real slavery but the effect is much the same, a lot of people are working their asses of for an upper class that can ruin their lives at the drop of a hat. That there are no whips involved is nice but it also clearly delineated who was the exploiter and who were the exploited. That's a bit harder to see today.
Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.
For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.
True, but if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves, it's also worth remembering that most accounts of those regimes weren't written by the victors of a war that saw the other sides slavery practices as justification for said war.
> if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves
Not at all. The fact that we have practically zero first-hand accounts from the slaves of antiquity speaks volumes to their treatment. My point is on scale (and with that, the institution's effect on the societies that hosted it).
That’s partly true, but it’s also the case that medieval Europe didn’t have any convenient sources of slaves. Conquests had dried up, Europe was effectively surrounded by stronger neighbors, and instead of being able to take their neighbors as slaves many of their neighbors were taking Europeans as slaves.
That didn’t change until the Age of Sail opened up new frontiers and the wheel turned again.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,
Except that of course it wasn't.
> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.
And many smart people do.
> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.
Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.
> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.
You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.
And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast.
and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
> You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
It's not just a war. The British Empire declared for moral reasons slavery illegal, and slavers could be hunted for bounty like pirates. The only place that remained in the Empire with slavery was India, because the British felt that the Indian culture could not be disentangled from slavery.
"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
Georgia
"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”
The full preamble of the Mississippi declaration is fascinating, and further shuts down doubters that the civil war wasn't about slavery and racism:
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin
Also, they clearly make the case that cotton was the most important good in the world, perhaps imploring the intercession of foreign powers.
I think it's worth pointing out though that these people were not being honest with themselves - nothing in their argument about the importance of cotton suggests it couldn't have been done with wage labor. They are dancing around the fact that only a very few benefit from slavery.
Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowing.
People often make the mistake that the labor was "free". It wasn't to the people who bought slaves. It wasn't even really free to the slave traders because of the cost of transport.
It was a horrible system in many ways, but it was also a outrageously expensive because of all of the banking and loans involved.
Reading this post made me wonder if there were "temp agency" type businesses for slaves. Having to own the labor would make your it very difficult to expand and contract your workforce.
Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.
The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)
It's true the first mills were in the north because they had some good sites, but there are good mill sites throughout the South as well. More tellingly, when the first steam engines in the US were imported from Europe - they could have been just as easily installed in the South.
I think more importantly, steam mills solved for a problem the south did not have. If one was to tell a southerner, I have a technology that will save on labor costs, the southerner's response would have been "what are labor costs?"
You still have to wonder why the south never built factories to compete with the north. They exported most of their cotton to the north just to buy it back again the the form of textiles, so slavery working by hand wasn't able to compete with factories on that level.
I'd venture that the north's earlier industrialization built up experience and supporting infrastructure which made it a dubious business prospect for any southerner that might have considered building a factory, along with the fact that making textiles by manpower alone made less money than picking cotton and exporting it.
> They exported most of their cotton to the north just to buy it back again the the form of textiles, so slavery working by hand wasn't able to compete with factories on that level.
My impression was that there was a lack of fast moving rivers which were suitable for water wheels. You could make some elevation, or build a larger wheel, but that can become prohibitive for the volume needed for a real factory.
It looks like the south does have some suitable rivers, but you wonder why they exported their crops to the north just to buy them back again in their more processed form...that just doesn't make much sense from an economic standpoint. Clearly slavery wasn't a suitable replacement for the type of production work done in the north. It must have been a mix of social factors, combined with the fact that the north specialized in industry early on and you couldn't compete very well with the lack of expertise and lack of industry which supported the local industry in the south.
Anyway this is all just wild speculation. Take it for what you will.
> It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
The enslaved people sure as fuck aren't prospering in that situation, so the only way one could possibly equate slavery with economic prosperity is by simply not counting them as people at all.
> Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization... and how hard regular (white) people had to work.
One way to think of slavery is that it's a far point on the continuum between equality and inequality. What they really hated was equality because that necessarily involves taking something away from them, the people who have the most.
- The difference between Ben Franklin writing about farming in the 1770s and the civil war was that industrialization didn't hit the US until the 1810s/1820s when the first steel mills and steam engines were set up.
- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.
- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War
These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine.
Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.
The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.
What makes you think the newspapers of the day are all telling the truth? Does the media today tell the truth? Did newspapers disclose when the equivalent of a billionaire bought them out and drastically changed the editorial bias?
I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:
> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:
> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
> Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves.
Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.
The issue (for the masters, and besides any ethical issues) is being a slave master is a very tenuous position, and prone to revolts.
Too capable (but also valuable!) slaves tend to be self sufficient and strong enough to throw you off.
Too weak (and therefore non-valuable!) slaves tend to be easy to control - but are a huge drain on the system, including ‘master’ management, which is often the most constrained resource anyway in any hierarchical system.
Yeah roving bands of murdering robots would be a problem in that scenario. We should be able to keep/maintain our current security and rule of law though.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too
Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.
Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.
And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.
> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.
The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.
> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.
But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)
And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?
"it was at least in part cultural."
Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.
> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.
> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
What we'd now call the developed world.
That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either.
I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria?
"The Russians you mention managed it in 1723"
Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles.
Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.
Serfs were essentially slaves. They could be traded without any real limits and could be punished at will. The families could be split, and serfs were officially prohibited from making lawsuits against their owners.
And it was one of the reasons for Russia's "misadventures" during the 20-th century. The serfdom abolishment came when other countries were already in the midst of the industrial revolution.
Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted.
When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.
In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity?
I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.
OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows.
Another fun anecdote related to Theremin:
> Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952.
> The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it.
Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process.
(This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.)
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.
I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold.
I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
It's worse than that because it takes something that should beg the question what modern things we peddle today because they make $$ are in fact morally wrong into a trite "hurr durr past people bad we smart now" that nobody learns anything from.
Offshoring generally improves the lives of the people who get the offshored jobs. Usually foreign companies pay more and have better working conditions than the local companies.
Consider as just one example the lawsuit over child slavery against Nestle, etc [1]. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Nestle can't be held responsible for the child slavery even though they have full knowledge of it happening. Go figure. In fact, that's what they pay for.
The whole shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is incredibly dangerous for those involved and couldn't possibly be done in any developed nation.
There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.
If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.
If you own a lot of slaves your life is better than the freemen who own less/none, much less slaves. However society overall could be muca better even if for you personally it is worse
The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
There are some really salacious things in the files that are probably not true - investigators were required to record all accusations, and there were a lot of tips provided during Trump's first run for office that are probably fabrications.
But there's some stuff that is really incriminating. Guiffre was arrested for prostitution BEFORE she was hired at Mar-A-Lago. Another underage survivor recalled a conversation with Ivana about Trump to her psychiatrist. Epstein regularly bragged about both having conversations with Trump and having dirt on him after he was elected.
The administration should not be let of the hook - they are still stonewalling on the actual FBI 302 files - AKA, the actual investigation. So far we only know the evidence the FBI collected - not what the evidence is evidence of. We don't know what accusations or stories they are supposed to validate or invalidate.
The good faith explanation is that one party ran on an independent DoJ and one did not. In which case it's a false equivalency if one party legitimately was letting the FBI cook.
The cynical explanation is that the people most implicated in the files are Democratic elites - that just so happens to include Donald Trump back when he was a Democratic elite.
Wolfenstein 3D was pretty squarely a WWII fantasy shooter. Only later does it get into the alternate history post-war stuff which does get somewhat more squarely political.
I think it cuts both ways. The Wolfenstein franchise has obviously relished in violence against Nazis, but also inadvertently is part of the trend of glorifying them.
Kavanaugh strikes me as principled, but in kind of a Type-A, "well, actually" sort of way where he will get pulled into rabbit holes and want to die on random textual hills.
He is all over the map, but not in a way that seems consistent or predictable.
His dissent in this case was basically "Don't over turn the tariffs because it will be too hard to make everyone whole" Which doesn't strike me as "principled" at all.
Wasn't it JFK who said "We choose to Not do these things bc they're kinda hard actually"? /s
This is nonsense, and the same nonsense as we heard in the insurrectionist ruling. Allowing fascism "Because it's inconvenient to do otherwise" is bonkers.
The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is going to be a vaguely accurate guess based on your IP address.
But also, location data is really important to ads right now because, contrary to common perception, per user tracking is very, very hard. Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique. Which is why you are often served advertisements based on what other people on your network is searching - it's much easier to just blast everyone at that IP address than it is to find that specific user or device again in the data stream.
Bidstream data in particular is very fraught. You're only getting the active data at the point the add is served, but it's not easy to aggregate in any way. You'll be counting the same person separately dozens or hundreds of times with different identifiers for each. The data you get from something like Mobilewalla is not useful for tracking individuals so much as it's useful for finding patterns.
I think it's pretty telling from the few examples shared about how agencies actually use the data:
>"CBP uses the information to “look for cellphone activity in unusual places,” including unpopulated portions of the US-Mexico border."
>According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS tried to use Venntel’s data to track individual suspects, but gave up when it couldn’t locate its targets in the company’s dataset.
>In March 2021, SOCOM told Vice that the purpose of the contract was to “evaluate” the feasibility of using A6 services in an “overseas operating environment,” and that the government was no longer executing the contract
Something is going to have to be figured out about this data - realistically the only way is a sunset on customized advertisements. However, I would personally not be worried (yet) that the government is going to be able to identify an individual and track them down using these public sources as they currently are.
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