How to live in simultaneous Utopia and Dystopia
Cuz if you aren't already, you will be
TL;DR
AI might help you live to 120 and beyond.
Don’t trust Telegram any more
Anthropic’s sweeping its own offices for electronics
A Cybersec encyclopedia that will have you seeing code in your sleep
How public utilities with under-used resources can spring more cash
Codie Sanchez’ out-of-the-box brain
Contrary to popular belief, tech will NOT solve all your problems
But first:
HUMAN
Only one Human item in my inbox this week, and it is:
The distinction between ICE immigration control and people trafficking is getting blurry
Vancouverite Jasmine Mooney in San Diego went to renew her work visa on Mar 3 ... and found herself imprisoned 2 weeks.
Had she not had an outside friend who went to bat for her, she could have been imprisoned far longer. She is now back in Vancouver, and banned from the US for 5 years.
Deeply disturbing.
All at the hands of a private biz paid by US ICE to do it. They make more money by prolonging your detention, and moving you around. Only distinction between this and people trafficking that I can see is: ICE detainees aren't forced into prostitution or drug running (or are they?). The friends who fought like hell for her said the system all felt designed to keep her detained. She's lucky they knew HOW to fight. Just as troubling is the fact that American citizens willing to work for these companies, in exchange for a steady salary.
suggests there's more to this specific case than meets the eye; he could well be right. But Jasmine documented a lot of other detainees' stories while she was inside. (Including one Portuguese couple who were just out driving near the Mexico border their passports, and took a wrong turn towards Mexico.) So her case is not isolated.The borders were wide open under Biden; now it's gone whole hog the opposite way.
TECHNOLOGY
Fancy living to 120? 130?
's just posted about how AI may massively extend human life well beyond what we think is reasonably possible. He's smarter than me when it comes to the biochem, so I can't argue to the contrary. But I have reservations, down below. 
Telegram's abandoned its starting principles
says Telegram has handed over some data logs, IP addresses and phone numbers to the French government. I guess this was inevitable. With Pavel Durov detained, the guiding light was no longer there, and the remaining leadership have chosen to switch sides. Deeply disappointing, as it means Signal is now the only remaining messaging app (as far as I'm aware) that hasn't caved.
Anthropic searches its own offices for hidden electronics
Good move. No doubt they're thinking about CCP infiltration. Only thing surprising me here is that no other AI biggies have announced the same. I can't help but wonder if the bigger threat isn't hidden electronics, but Anthropic employees moonlighting for the CCP (or Putin, or whoever). LINK
Enough cybersecurity resources to choke an elephant
asked his cybersec community where they get all their info, and published it. V thoughtful generous of him. It's a big like sitting down alone to a table for 12, rammed full of food - way more than you can possibly digest even IF you had a 36-hour day. But I'm bookmarking this.
IDEAS & DISCOVERIES
Bitcoin miners are enabling utilities to put unused power gen capacity back into service
This is freakin' brilliant. Abundant Mines have partnered with a city utility to put a 13MVA hydro substation back into service. They run their mining rig at off-peak times, and fund 60% of the utility's budget. Before, the utility was short-staffed, they had no money to repair broken power lines, and costs were rising. Win-win for the miner, utility, and city residents (who are enjoying lower bills). I suspect a lot more of this is happening under the radar - Bitcoiners aren't ones to jump up and down a lot. LINK
Substacking from Reddit
I discovered that Bitcoin mining story by going down one of
's rabbit holes. He's got a whole Reddit channel to himself, and just pulls articles in from there to his Substack. Freakin' brilliant. He's got other sources as well, mind. But it just goes to show that you can create a resource on one platform and port it all over to another, and it'll work, just because an audience on one platform is very different from the audience on another. Wow.This lady thinks crazy big
Codie Sanchez is sumthin'. She exemplifies Jim Rogers' idea of investing by just picking up little piles of money that everybody else is ignoring. I'm a sucker for YouTubers who talk about new business models and hacks - my Watch Later feed has, I don't know, 70 yet-unviewed videos in it? (Urk, I just checked, its 131.) But most of them are all doing it with some kind of code or AI. Codie takes it up a notch, and explores brick-and-mortar businesses as well. She just bought several dozen acres of unused real estate in west Texas for $10k. And she recently interviewed a lady who bought a private jet biz for $8k down.
The thumbnails on her videos are clickbait-y, so be warned. And she's definitely hoping you'll buy into her community down the line (which is fair enough). But push past that.. It's how she thinks that's most interesting, not any one specific idea.
MY WORK
Did a very small consulting gig this week, helping a nonprofit in the transportation space home in on their value proposition.
First time I'd done one of these. One of my superpowers is interviewing people. "Superpower" is maybe too big a word - I'm just insanely curious about other people, their stories, and what makes them tick. I inevitably hear incredible stories, and usually manage to accidentally say something that switches a light bulb on in their heads.
That I got paid to do it this week feels like laughing all the way to the bank. How did I get so lucky?
FROM THE SOURCE
When everything around you is changing faster and faster, it pays to tie in with the One Who Never Changes
I'm a fan of new tech, cuz that's what nerds do.
Technology development is really a large part of the human story - figuring out how to do more with less.
But we can get so excited about more with less that we forget Who the Ultimate CTO is.
There's a juicy story in the Book of Judges ch4 and 5, that shows what happens when you put too much faith in tech. The nation of Israel has fallen from grace, so to speak. (Not literally, because grace, i.e. unmerited favour, is plenty evident throughout Judges. But they had abandoned the God and the principles that allowed them to take possession of the Promised Land.) The slaves who had become the masters, had become the slaves again. They'd once dominated the Canaanites, but never destroyed them completely like they were supposed to.
And now the Canaanites had turned the tables on them, and ... were leveraging new tech. In this case, it was chariots "fitted with iron".
The tech wasn't actually all that new. If you back up into the Book of Joshua, you'll find mention of these Canaanite tribes and their "chariots fitted with iron" (presumably iron-rimmed wheels, allowing the chariots greater speed, endurance and reliability). This had intimidated the Israelites even back then, and they appear to have used it as an excuse for why they couldn't drive the Canaanites out of the land. Excuse is all it was - they had driven out the Anakites, that race of giants from whom Goliath would descend a few centuries later.
In Judges ch4, Deborah the prophetess is leading Israel, and she instructs Barak to take 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and go on the offensive. We're not told why she picked Barak - he appears to have had some military standing, yet he's also rather gutless - he won't go if she doesn't accompany him.
Fast forward. Barak attacks, and destroys Sisera and the Canaanites to the last man. v15:
"At Barak's advance, the LORD routed Sisera and all his chariots by the sword ..."
The LORD routed. Interesting choice of words. Was that "sword" metaphorical, i.e. was it the swords of Barak's 10,000-strong army? Or was there another invisible "sword" that kicked into gear only once Barak finally screwed his courage to the sticking place, and advanced?
We're not told outright, but there's a clue in the next chapter, where Deborah writes a song of victory. v4:
"When you, LORD, went out from Seir, when you marches from the land of Edom, the earth shook, the heavens poured, the clouds poured down water. The mountains quaked ..."
Sounds like another, less-visible army to me. And you can see the limitations of the new technology. "The clouds poured down water." Chariots and horses, fitted with iron or not, don't do too well in a muddy quagmire (understatement of the year).
In my late teens, I spent a couple of summers working the west Alberta oilpatch, out in the boonies. They had a term there for the ground when it had been raining soup: "gumbo". If you were driving through gumbo, better get chains on your wheels real fast, cuz if you started sliding sideways off the road, you warn't coming out without somebody bigger pulling you out.
So much for your chariots fitted with iron, Sisera. Shoulda had God on your side, instead. Same goes for anyone putting too much faith in technology.
Sisera wouldn't be the last to learn that the hard way. The King of France tried it with his cavalry at the Battle of Agincourt, where he outnumbered Henry and the English/Welsh five to one. (Nicely written, Mr Shakespeare.)
This morning, I read Judges ch13-15. Samson. (Before he fell for Delilah.) He's gone on several rampages, killed a bunch of Philistines (who are now rightly wary). At the end of ch15, he's very thirsty, and cries out, "You have given your servant this great victory. Must I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?"
Point being ...
When you walk in tight lockstep with the Boss ... you can call on Him, harness your emotions in the process ... and He will answer you.
VIEW FROM THE LAPTOP
The more I hear the latest news and learn about new technology, the more it seems like we're heading into a state of simultaneous Utopia & Dystopia.
That David Shapiro article (above) is super optimistic about the future. I lost my old dad to cancer. It's cool imaging a world where the thing that killed him, maybe just maimed him (and only temporarily).
But there's a fly in that ointment.
Because if all we focus on in this quest for new knowledge, and new technology, is the elimination of viruses and diseases ...
... then we vastly increase the likelihood we'll all die violent deaths at the hands of other humans.
That's one problem I don't see politicians or tech CXO's or VC's trying to solve.
Having Money will solve your Money Problems (and only those).
AI may well solve our Intelligence problems (and I lump physical health inside that category). It will only solve those.
Not money, nor tech, will not solve our deeper sub-conscious psyche problems.
Those require a whole different toolset.