#feat. we are all programmers and lawyers here

[strikeslip]

"State Legislatures are like Linux distros. Except, you cannot fork the state of Massachusetts to make OpenMassachusetts. Many people think New Hampshire is OpenMassachusetts, but they are incorrect." - a completely normal family thanksgiving conversation thank you

[mikejryan]

“Informing Ourselves To Death” By Neil Postman. The following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart, sponsored by IBM-Germany.

The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists -- protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why -- and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see.

Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I consider myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical gobbledegook as much as anyone. But I do not object if occasionally someone who does not know the secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the inner halls to express an untutored point of view. Such a person may sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even better, see something in a way that the professionals have overlooked.

I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the average person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of what excites a computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the descriptions of the presentations at this conference, I found each one more mysterious than the next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider.

But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an outsider who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders. And that is why I accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know something about what technologies do to culture, and I know even more about what technologies undo in a culture. In fact, I might say, at the start, that what a technology undoes is a subject that computer experts apparently know very little about. I have heard many experts in computer technology speak about the advantages that computers will bring. With one exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty.

After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.

Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and losers.

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers that they need, which is why they are losers.

It is to be expected that the winners -- for example, most of the speakers at this conference -- will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that they can vote at home, shop at home, get all the information they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary. They tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.

Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive. Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course, come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced?

Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy, as if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But this is not quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what they are doing, and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed that such a clock would provide a precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion they were required to observe during the course of the day. As a matter of fact, it did. But what the monks did not realize is that the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And so, by the middle of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours, and a standardized product. Without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. And so, here is a great paradox: the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose.

I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg was by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to hear Martin Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Gutenberg thought his invention would advance the cause of the Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.

We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of my talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will try to explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust you will be open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I can begin to get at this by telling you of a small experiment I have been conducting, on and off, for the past several years. There are some people who describe the experiment as an exercise in deceit and exploitation but I will rely on your sense of humor to pull me through.

Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York Times. "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague says yes, there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the experiment can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really? What's it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are limited only by my imagination. But I might say something like this: "Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best approach. It seems that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs -- encomial dioxin -- that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."

Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to be health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about this," I say. "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased, there was a corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They don't know exactly why but there it is."

I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to report something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond belief. Let me tell you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the second or third time I've tried this on the same person, most people will believe or at least not disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they say: "Really? Is that possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and reply, "Where'd you say that study was done?" And sometimes they say, "You know, I've heard something like that."

Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results, one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said, there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it. This is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any case I have tried this experiment on non-professors and get roughly the same results. Another possible conclusion is one expressed by George Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when he remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be drawn, related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I am referring to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact -- whether actual or imagined -- that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part, makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean to try my experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about it, but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know -- indeed, for all I know -- the skin of a Bismark herring could have made the seats on which you sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing some incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.

Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an analogy: If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the cards over, one by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their order is. After you had gone from the ace of spades through the nine of spades, you would expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if a three of diamonds showed up instead, you would be surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the cards over, you would not expect any card in particular -- a three of diamonds would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise to whatever card turns up.

The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.

In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person in the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like my brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C. That could be explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the satisfaction of anyone. So could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the head of a pin. It made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the revealed word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.

The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say, sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything. The skin of a Bismark herring makes about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.

Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of Cassius on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally in the stars. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and allowed Kepler to look as well, they found no enchantment or authorization in the stars, only geometric patterns and equations. God, it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a master mathematician. This discovery helped to give impetus to the development of physics but did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it was possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe, and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the universe, and we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. The ordered, comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to unravel because people no longer saw in the stars the face of a friend.

And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110 cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously not been available to the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are faced with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million TV sets; and over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.

And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.

Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has a quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost infinitely various but also because computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me to warn against every conceivable use of a computer. But there is no denying that the most prominent uses of computers have to do with information. When people talk about "information sciences," they are talking about computers -- how to store information, how to retrieve information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more usable form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I should like to put some other questions to you that seem to me more reasonable. Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the U.S., will it happen because of a lack of information? If children die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it occur because of a lack of information? Does racism in South Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals roam the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of information?

Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information?

I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah.

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.

Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time (although you all know it well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by quoting the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt Kelley. I commend his words to all the technological utopians and messiahs present. "We have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us."

[cryptofeedzposts]

Looking Backward to Build the Future: How Academia Is Shifting Its Blockchain Focus

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Reuben Youngblom is a programmer with a background in intellectual property law. He co-runs the RegTrax initiative at Stanford University and works with blockchain and other tech startups, providing engineering and legal expertise.

The predictions for 2019 were numerous: it was to be the year of the DAO, the year of the STO, the year of the decentralized exchange, the year of enterprise blockchain, and the year of dapps. All may have been true (or, at least, partially true), but while DAOs were enjoying the limelight, another thread was spinning in the background – quieter, but no less powerful. As it turned out, 2019 was the year that academics started to think about blockchain differently. Design-first thinking and interdisciplinary aspirations jumped out of the slide decks and into the collective consciousness.

Philip Schlump, a professor of computer science at the University of Wyoming, teaches a course called Blockchain Design and Programming through the College of Engineering and Applied Science. I had the opportunity to speak with him recently and, after getting over my fascination with his life (his answer to, “How did you first get interested in blockchain technology?” started with, “Well, I was raising my kids on a sailboat.”), I asked him about the structure of his class. It’s noteworthy that his course focuses equally on the “design” and the “programming” elements of blockchain, a setup that is fairly foreign to me notwithstanding my computer science background. 

“I didn’t want it to be, ‘here’s a blockchain – go program,’” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “We need to teach why it’s used and, more importantly, learn to contextualize it in terms of how it fits into a project. Why blockchain over a database?”

This design-first approach is exemplary of a shift among blockchain academics over the past year. In a lot of ways, it mirrors a more mature, more introspective industry, wherein it’s no longer enough to just build something and sell tokens. The product needs a place – a place in the market, a place in the regulatory environment, a place in people’s minds. Blockchain does not, and cannot, exist in a vacuum. Schlump is one of many long-time advocates who are actively seeking reasons to not use blockchain, recognizing that stronger use cases often come hand-in-hand with a narrowing of the playing field. With this in mind, academics have started to reformulate their questions. To be sure, we’re still asking how to improve protocols and whether boundaries can be pushed – questions that are as important now as they’ve ever been. However, the shift in thought has introduced new participants, new interests, and new questions. Who and what are we designing for? What are the future consequences of our actions? How does blockchain fit in?

It’s no longer enough to just build something and sell tokens. The product needs a place – a place in the market, a place in the regulatory environment, a place in people’s minds.

Summer Kim, an assistant professor at the U.C. Irvine School of Law, has thought a lot about this. 

“UCI Law operates almost like a startup. I have the opportunity to keep abreast of  all the current technology, as I’m sure you do,” she said. “I spend a lot of time considering how new tech can help solve old problems.”

In some ways, Kim’s statement is reminiscent of the ICO boom in 2017, when much lip service was paid to leveraging blockchain to solve everyday problems, many of which may not have actually needed a blockchain-based solution. But here, there’s a key distinction, and it makes all the difference. In 2019, academics are, ultimately, trying to build a better world – for others this time, rather than themselves. Kim’s focus is on using blockchain to find new channels for lawyers to create value that will benefit the legal industry at large. Among other things, she’s exploring how decentralization and economic incentives might help the shareholder regain their voice and recently, it seems like this might be possible without risking a tangle with the government. The most common question in academia now is no longer if, but how. 

“The big question?” Kim said. “How to turn these aspirational ideas into reality.”

Kim’s words were at the forefront of my mind as I met with Ari Juels, co-director of the Cornell Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3). During our conversation, Juels continually came back to one concept in particular – something already woven into the fabric of the IC3, but which is quickly becoming a primary consideration throughout academia. 

“What is the best way to move forward in the blockchain space?” I asked him, already knowing what his answer would be. 

“Interdisciplinary collaboration,” he said. This philosophy, at least for Juels, extends far beyond the nominal involvement of other departments. Of the five IC3 directors, three are from other institutions, and two of those institutions are based outside the U.S. The IC3 faculty is comprised of researchers from a diverse array of universities with backgrounds ranging from computer science to law to finance. Some disciplines function fine in a bubble, but blockchain, hovering at the intersection of so many fields, philosophies, and governments, simply cannot. Without these other perspectives, our blind spots would be enormous. 

Our world may be smaller than ever, but blockchain has destroyed so many barriers, and tied us so tightly together, that a ‘small world’ is no longer an adequate metaphor. Juels, then, thinks about design from the other side of the glass: how ought we build our world to best capture the potential of blockchain? To this end, the IC3 represents movement in the right direction for blockchain in academia. “A global, interdisciplinary organization devoted to the study of blockchain is quite a feat,” I said, and Juels paused, staring into space as one does when they consider how much there is left to do. “You know, one of our internal goals is still to promote more involvement from underrepresented minority groups.” 

“Oh.” Always happy, never satisfied.

Moving forward

Over the last year there has been incredible innovation in blockchain, much of it spearheaded by academics. We’ve seen, among other things, the first limited liability DAO out of Vermont, incredible legislative advancement in Wyoming, and an open blockchain ethics course at MIT. We have made tremendous progress.

That said, I hope that next year we take, counterintuitively, a step back. We’ve moved from thinking about how blockchain can circumvent existing infrastructure to thinking about how we might make it work within the confines of existing infrastructure. In 2020, we may want to consider which existing components of our current society will still work well in a Web 3.0 world. Recent scholarship suggests that blockchain may be an interesting way to, say, disrupt public company ownership structures – but maybe the very idea of a public corporation is less applicable in our future than it was in our past. STOs, for example, were once seen as a way to comply with regulatory oversight, but maybe it’s the underlying Howey Test and octogenarian Securities Acts that need to be modernized. Similarly, LAOs may be an interesting possibility for piloting change at the primitive levels of corporate structure. 

By reconsidering some of these foundational touchstones, perhaps academics can leverage blockchain to move us forward in our technological evolution. Ultimately, looking backward, at least for a little while, may be the best way to build the future. 

Disclosure Read More

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

[seekapk-blog]

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

THERE ARE TWO MAIN REASONS

And yet whatever argument you use to prove that startups don't need to move from social lies to real lies. How could we make something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of salesmanship. You also need to prevent the sort of conservatism that comes from making the company bigger? But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done.1 Oddly enough, it was working with startups that made me realize where the high-paying union job. It's unlikely you could make it. A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. We had ashtrays in our house when I was at Yahoo, so he was in a terminal decline.

If anyone should know this, Apple should.2 And as soon as these startups got the money, though. And the pollsters can't simply ignore those who won't, or their sample isn't random anymore. Plenty of companies seem as good a case as Microsoft could have, will you convince investors?3 And programmers build applications for the platforms they use.4 Only a few countries by no coincidence, the richest ones have reached this stage.5 And yet he seems pretty commanding, doesn't he?

One wrote: While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, you could presumably get them to give you enough money to pay a lawyer even to read it, let alone of Bayesian spam filtering in general. The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just something forced on startups by investors, but part of what it means. To say that a and b would be bad. A lot of them don't care that much personally about whether founders keep board control. Good design can copy. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid there were people born in Milan with just as much work as thinking about real problems.6 I did.

Nearly all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners. In a traditional series A round from a good VC fund, I usually advise them to take the trend too literally. Silicon Valley may not be quite as smart or as well connected as angels or venture firms; and they may not have to be very accurate. And the customers paying so much for them were largely the same government agencies that paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet seats. 9091 FREE 0.7 And yet in the very first filters I tried writing a Bayesian spam filter, it caught 99. So if you're a startup founder wondering why some angel investor isn't returning your phone calls, you can decrease how much you spend.

Which is particularly painful to someone who works on search at Google. The difference between the two is due mostly to some external wave they're riding, so to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask is this how I want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out what you could have done it. Maybe the best way to find out would be to try it. They happen rarely till industrial times there were just speech, writing, and printing, but when people go to the theater a treat. They're not pretending; they want to buy our product? In particular, they don't seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly.8 The problem is, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually have to move from social lies to real lies. The board will have ultimate power, which means increasing numbers of things we need it for. We'll suppose our group of founders know what they're doing.

Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of aberration, just spread over a longer period, and mixed together with the spin you've added to get them in exactly the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait. Seems unlikely. Some startups could go directly from seed funding direct to acquisition, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers.9 The Lever of Technology Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor. Society as a whole ends up poorer. There are no generally accepted standards. No, they may avoid publishing's problems. If you use a fixed number like this. These two senses are already quite far apart. Of course, prestige isn't the main reason to prefer a series A round needs to be tweaked slightly. What do you do if you're already in the fatal pinch.

Notes

They're an administrative convenience. Whereas the activation energy for enterprise software.

Startups can die from running Kazaa helped ensure the success of Skype. Innosight, February 2012. There are people in the definition of property is driven mostly by people who get rich by preserving their traditional culture; maybe people in the former, because they think are bad.

If you're trying to decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what that means service companies are up there. The greatest damage that photography has done to painting may be the last place in the original source of difficulty here is that as to discourage risk-taking. According to the other sheep head for a future in which case immediate problem solved, or much energy would be worth trying to meet people; I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, because few founders are effective.

There is nothing more unconvincing, for the desperate and the company's present or potential future business belongs to them?

Believe it or not to feel tired.

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other people in Bolivia don't want to either.

Not linearly of course finding words this way that makes it easier to say incendiary things, they may prefer to work late at night to make it sound. The way universities teach students how to argue: they had first claim on the Internet. Do not finance your startup.

This is why I haven't released Arc.

Turn the other becomes visible. Convertible debt can be a constant multiple of usage, so had a killed portraiture as a test of investor quality.

Thanks to Peter Norvig, Trevor Blackwell, and Paul Buchheit for putting up with me.

[alanafsmith]

Booming in Bristol: Should junior lawyers shun the City for the West Country?

London’s six-figure salaries will boost your ego but little else

Famously, London was once described as “a splendid place to live in for those who can get out of it”. Now, with average one-bed rent a whopping £1,250 a month and the average London house deposit setting you back £100,000, the feat is as much getting into the City as it is getting out.

But fear not, trainees and junior lawyers — law is among the highest-paying professions in the country. A third of lawyers earn £100,000 and some firms even pay more than this on qualification. If you stick around long enough, partners in the City earn into the millions, so it’s a safe bet for Big Smoke domination, right? Right?

Not according to one trainee, earning about £50,000 and set to make in excess of £70,000 on qualification. She begrudged on her Twitter account:

With even top-earning lawyers unable to get onto the London property ladder, and in total contrast from City Hall’s ‘London is Open’ campaign, the capital has erected a sort of ‘financial fence’ around its parameters. Or, in the words of journalist and author Caitlin Moran in a column aptly (and sort of apocalyptically) called ‘LONDON IS DYING’, “no one new is being let in, any more — unless, of course, they are oligarchs, or of the bonus class, who may helicopter over the gates, at will. No one I know can afford to move here… They are locked out.”

Following a death comes grief and mourning, but not for Moran, she says:

“It’s good news for Britain. A million ideas a week that would, previously, have migrated to London will now remain in their home towns, and make those towns glorious instead. As London, glassy-eyed and compulsive, begins to eat its own heart out, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool, Cardiff and Plymouth will rise again.”

‘Rising’ too are these cities’ legal districts. There are major UK firm offices in the likes of Birmingham and Manchester, but note the sheer number of major corporate outfits inside Bristol’s borders, including: Burges Salmon, Osborne Clarke, CMS and TLT. Simmons & Simmons recently announced its Bristol expansion, while RPC just this week revealed it would be reinstating its Bristol training contract programme. Clyde & Co will be opening an office there soon, too.

The word ‘regional’ has strangely come to be used as an insult in the legal profession, yet the Bristol trainees we’ve spoken to had little but praise for the ‘City-quality work without the City-style hours hitch’ combo boasted by their firms. “Genuinely interesting work”, “independence earlier on in [your] career” and “a far better work-life balance” are all trumpeted by one regional trainee. Another adds:

“I had already worked for three years in London prior to getting my training contract in Bristol. Most of my friends trained at City firms and I also had an offer from one; I made the choice based on my own happiness, geography and the firm. I like the sea, surfing and cities, and in Bristol I can combine the three. It is a very easy going and cool place to live. London is cool, it is not easy going and I did not want to spend my twenties in an office. I don’t believe you become a better lawyer by staying later and I don’t believe you gain happiness or fulfilment from the inside of Liverpool Street Station.”

Perhaps it’s small wonder Burges Salmon won Legal Cheek‘s Firm of the Year gong in 2017 and is up for the prize again this year (alongside Osborne Clarke and RPC).

But, to some of you, all these perks are nothing on the absolutely mental salaries you can expect in London. As mentioned, some London firms pay in excess of £100,000 on qualification. In Bristol, a big corporate outfit will pay you half of that (if you’re lucky).

A basic comparison of the pay packets clearly crowns London the higher payer, but, to use a common phrase, it’s about quality, not quantity. A Bristol NQ’s approximate £50,000 a year salary, which is £3,065 per month after tax, will stretch far further. The maths, albeit very crude maths, bears it out.

In Bristol, one-bed rents will set you back an average of £818 in the city centre or £680 outside of it. It took me minutes to find a one-bed flat on Zoopla for £775 per month, this being a six-minute walk to the city’s main station, nine minutes to Burges Salmon, seven to Osborne Clarke or 15 to CMS (zero commuting costs). If you’re willing to travel a little further afield, here’s a one-bed flat for £475 that’s a 27-minute walk from the station, or another for £450 that’s a 35-minute walk from the station.

Sticking with our close-to-work Zoopla property above, a £50,000-earning NQ will be left with roughly £2,290 a month after rent. The average deposit needed to buy a house in the city is about £24,000. If you stowed all of your £2,290 away after rent (not realistic I know, but let’s keep the maths simple) you’d have a Bristol deposit saved in ten months. If you’re on £40,000 in Bristol — a city that recently won the ‘Coolest city in Europe’ award — that’s around £1,755 after rent. With that, it’d take you 14 months to save for an average Bristol deposit.

The London housing market, by comparison, is indefensibly expensive. One-beds range from £825 a month in Bexley to £1,950 in Kensington and Chelsea, with the average coming out at £1,250. (In Bristol, you could expect to snap up a two-bed riverside house or a detached four-bed for the same price.)

The riverside house you could rent in Bristol for £1,250 versus a student flat we found for the same price in London

On a £70,000 salary in London, you’d be on give or take £4,032 a month. If you were to live in the cheapest borough, Bexley, you’d have £3,207 left over, and it’d take you 31 months to reach the average, six-figure deposit. If you lived in an averagely-priced London property, you’d have £2,782 left over at the end of the month, so that’s 36 months of saving to do.

As for top NQ pay in London, you’ll earn around £5,481 a month if your salary is £100,000. You’ll be left with £4,231 a month after average rent, which if you saved every penny means you could put an average London deposit down in 24 months. If you’re on £140,000 — which crazily some firms do pay their London NQs — you’ll be on about £7,032 a month. If you saved all of this every month, you’d have £100,000 in 14 months. But, with average rent factored in, it would take you 17 months.

This means even an NQ on the highest wage in the City would be unable to save up for an average London deposit quicker than a Bristol NQ on £40,000 would be able to save up for an average Bristol deposit. Of course, none of these calculations have factored in: average commuting costs, bills and expenses, which will also be far higher in London. They also only look at one-bed flats (which aren’t very amenable to families) and average rents and deposits (I assume many of our readers would have their sights set higher).

The maths is stark but, of course, it cannot capture the multi-faceted reasons someone may want to train and work in London (in other words, God forbid, money isn’t everything).

The 2018 Firms Most List

“The idea of London as glamorous”, it offering “the most interesting and challenging work”, “job prospects in general” and “international secondment chances” are all mentioned by one soon-to-be lawyer in defence of the Big Smoke. And maybe, some people just kind of like it as a city. One trainee says:

“I think London is pretty cool; I’m a Tottenham Hotspur fan, love the theatre and a load of my best mates from uni are here now too. I’ve also been coming here since I was wee with my family…. I never really expected to be in a position to be in the house market until I was like 30 anyway, as it just seems a fact of life for our generation — house ownership was never a priority for me.”

Of course, a training contract and NQ role in London doesn’t mean a life led there, too.

“I don’t plan on staying in London forever. Quite frankly, I don’t even like it that much,” says one trainee I spoke to for this piece, “I decided to do my TC in the City largely for financial reasons. I’ve heard that if you train in London, you can be poached by regional firms for high salaries — higher than if you had trained in those firms. I think in ten years, maybe less, I’d like to move somewhere that can offer a better quality of life, even if that means taking a significant pay cut.”

On paper it’s a smart move but — as discussed in a recent Legal Cheek podcast, embedded below — a ‘work now, live later’ attitude to life can, unfortunately, sometimes prove misguided. (We have come full circle to my first line of this piece: that London is “a splendid place to live in for those who can get out of it”.)

That’s because it doesn’t work economically. Data shows there’s a strong positive correlation between earning more and needing more to get by, known as the ‘decreasing marginal utility of income’. “Once you’re half way up the ladder, it’s very difficult to come down,” the research concludes. Publisher Alex Aldridge, speaking in the above podcast, puts it in more real-world terms:

“What I’ve seen is that often people who have started on a certain path with the intention to do something later, ‘I’ll just get the money and then I’ll do something later’, it hasn’t worked out that way in the end. You get into your big, high-earning City job, and you get a big mortgage and then on top of that, perhaps the partner you’re with will have certain expectations and you get used to this certain lifestyle which is quite expensive and you’re reliant on your salary.”

London, throughout history, has been described as “a world within itself”, “a roost for every bird” and “a modern Babylon”. If you like it, you like it; this piece won’t change your mind on that. But if you find the City smoke choking and the skyscrapers give you vertigo, know that Bristol is calling. And with its happy trainees, high-quality work and per-pound value, maybe you should answer.

The post Booming in Bristol: Should junior lawyers shun the City for the West Country? appeared first on Legal Cheek.

from All About Law https://www.legalcheek.com/2018/02/booming-in-bristol-should-junior-lawyers-shun-the-city-for-the-west-country/

[alisonfloresus]

The Chatting Holy Grail

As 2008 comes to a close, we can take a look back at the year’s biggest news stories, technological advances and discoveries. I have been watching my crystal balls and I can tell you that nothing hypnotised me like the spawning growth of social media networks. As a blogger I always trolled the net looking for cutting edge tools. I wasn’t disappointed, they came in leaps and bounds.

I admit that the year 2008 had many Firsts; ironically while scientists working for mission critical sectors such as NASA were breaking all human records with their escapades on the Martian surface and searching the heavens for life, most of us were glued to the more mundane technologies such as the Iphone and Blackberry, the tantalizing Barack Obama winning the presidency and Lewis Hamilton winning Formula 1. Yeah that is true otherwise tell me, where were you when it was announced that for the first time astronomers have spotted a planet 3 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting a star outside our solar system.

On the social side of things we saw the emergence of sites where you can load a bunch of vacation pictures into a set, write a good narrative about the pictures and send a link to family and friends. Or better still other sites allow you to create blog entries in a network of other travel bloggers. Social network sites have evolved just like most things do.

Now you can not only describe and tag photos but you can also create a large map that highlights the regions you’ve been to. Once you are satisfied with your carbon prints, you can then share this with friends by sending the url or by posting the map on your social network profiles.

Yes, social network sites were the newsmakers of the year 2008. Think about the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg, they all took a fare share of the year’s record books. If you don’t believe me, ask John McCain and Hillary Clinton. President Barack Obama was propelled to victory by money and votes generated by these social networks sites, a concept that was brutally denounced as a fad just a year ago. Well that is the positive side.

On the negative side, the economic doldrums dealt the social networks sites a deadly blow. Most budding sites that were poised to upset the apple cart by providing competition to those already established were bought off while others simply folded. For example companies like Imeem and Buzznet ran into financial trouble, Twitter bought Summize and Comcast bought Plaxo.

The twin-brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss settled a lawsuit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whom they accused of stealing their plan and business code while all three were students at Harvard and Zuckerberg was employed as a ConnectU programmer. If you missed the story here is a very short background. The brothers, who happen to be ConnectU’s founders, originally sued Facebook in 2004, claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg had swiped their code and business plan after being employed as a ConnectU software developer while the three were students at Harvard University.

The duo are slated to receive a mixture of cash and Facebook stock as part of the settlement. The brothers gained money but lost medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics where they finished 6th in the boating competition. Reaching the final at the Olympics is no mean feat though.

The other downside of social network marketing is that although these sites have connected millions of people, this has not translated to fat bank accounts. It is amazing that sites such as Facebook with over 100 million members are not making bucket-loads of money. Industry experts have voiced concern that social networking users do not view ads, no matter where you put them or how well you target them.

The year 2009 might see a slight change as companies such as MySpace put into place serious cash generation business models. The sites have helped rekindle old ties and friendship. However, they are making people more lazy to follow conventional human interactions besides eating away at homework times and employers’ time as workers continue posting even during working hours.

Something else less talked about is the breach of security and privacy for members of these sites. People have blindly decided to display details which should be kept private. Astonishingly an Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court in December 2008 approved lawyer Mark McCormack’s application to use Facebook to serve legally binding documents after several failed attempts to contact a couple at their house and by e-mail.That is the future of social network sites.

Not much is known about the other middle tier players in this sector on how they are doing. All we know is that, well the big shots have stolen their thunder. I am talking about social networks (forum scripts providers) supporting actors such as VBulletin, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others. We can only hope that they survived the economic crises. We would like to see them taking their place in the New Year.

I will keep watch here for you while you celebrate your success, failures and above all the sheer feat of surviving the 2008 economic crunch. I wish you the very best.

from JournalsLINE http://journalsline.com/2017/06/27/the-chatting-holy-grail/ from Journals LINE https://journalsline.tumblr.com/post/162303324040