Now I know why the right wingers hate George Soros. Good thing this young fellow Bankman-Fried is around. Oops, he’s broke. From Stastia.

Midterm Election Mega-Donors

From the BBC

KFC apologises after German Kristallnacht promotion

There is lots of this in Phoenix. Seems like a good idea, to distribute these panels around, in places where they can also give some shade. I’m not sure how “requiring” this works, but it is France.

In France, all large parking lots now have to be covered by solar panels

A good read on the reaction on the ground in Arizona to the Red Wave that wasn’t. Why is this an opinion piece?

In Arizona, a MAGA victory party takes a sour turn

Tomorrow is the big midterm election. I try to follow it, but not too closely. I’m going to go against the grain a bit here and first say I don’t see actual data for big gains by the Republican party. I even consider Texas a close call. Abbott is the incumbent and seems to be having trouble breaking 50%, even though he is ahead. Lots of undecideds out there. Same in lots of other places. And then there is the problem of “low quality” polls. Of course, I’m not too optimistic. But I’m still thinking of the 14 point (or was it 18 point?) surprise swing to the Dems in deep Red Kansas. That was quite a surprise, and only in August, though it seems like a long time ago. I cant recall anything even close to this as a polling failure. I don’t think this energy had dissipated. We will find out more tomorrow.

Biden fights to stop midterms defeat as Republicans poised for sweeping gains

Best US president of my lifetime. Still doing good stuff after all these years.

Jimmy Carter built a solar farm in his hometown and it now powers half of the entire city

Austin aint what it used to be. I suppose just about every place could say this. But Austin seems to be having a particularly brutal era of change, at least for the people who have been here a while. From New York magazine.

Austin Has Been Invaded by Texas

There seems to have been a rise in violence in America in recent years and the numbers support this. I was a bit shocked at the data for violent outbursts on airlines. American has always been a violent place but this seems to be a new phase. I have to add one of my favorite quotes, which happens to be about violence.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Isaac Asimov, Foundation

It’s not just politicians: American workers are facing a sharp spike in threats and violence

For many years I have watched or listened to BBC, mostly the World Service, for news. Local American news services have never been very good at International News and and it was always interesting to see the long distance perspective on American stories. Sadly, the BBC has been in slow, now rapid, decline. I like Al Jazeera, but it is a bit eastern focused. But this vacation the hotel had France24, the French news service, in English. It was very good. Maybe as good as CNN in it’s prime. Found the Apple TV app. It will be part of my daily news viewing.

France24

Elon Musk’s somewhat reluctant acquisition of Twitter is top of the news today. Lots can be said about this, but I have seen the cycle of free public communication spaces several times now, starting with the old USENET newsgroups in the 1980s.

The problem is basically the same as any other free, shared resource in a society. Think of parks. Without some level of policing and maintainence public parks quickly become places you don’t want to be. Completely free and open is an invitation to all sorts of abuse.

There seem to be multiple forces at work. First, commerce will seek to use these free public spaces for private gain. A park can easily turn into a trash dump. A social network can quickly get filled up with free advertisements, or “spam“. The solution here is rules and policing. This changes everything. Who are the police? Who gets to make the rules? Who pays for the policing and how?

The other, somewhat related problem is acceptable use. Is pornography acceptable on the platform? Most platforms clamp down on this early, or risk become a de-facto porn site. YouTube, Facebook and other large popular platform police this heavily. It is a business decision. You don’t want a small group to chase off larger numbers of users. But this opens the door to other similar policing issues. What about offensive speech? Again, who decides what is offensive and what are the remedies? Some policing in the form of content moderation becomes necessary.

Lastly, related to acceptable use is illegal activities. Do you want your platform to be used for drug dealing, fencing stolen items, prostitution, to name a few possibilities? More policing, this time maybe involving actual police.

In the old days, these platforms would start out completely free, go into decline and irrelevance, and eventually be replaced a new platform. In large modern social media, acquisitions changed this cycle. Facebook may have been wiped out by Instagram, if it hadn’t acquired it. Today it is being eaten alive by Tik-Tok, which is Chinese and can’t easily be acquired by a US company like Facebook. The cycle continues. It will be interesting to see if it is different this time with Twitter. Of course, there is no reason to think Twitter is any different from other platforms. If Musk’s claims of making Twitter more free and open are to believed, it seems it would only hasten Twitter’s demise. Of course what we can really expect is more moderation and policing, just a different sort of moderation and policing, for a specific audience.