Elon Musk may have been kicking employees out of Twitter to reduce operating costs, but it's possible he couldn't have destroyed more of Twitter's value if he'd burned down headquarters.Let me explain...It’s common to use the word “capital” to mean money, as in capitalizing a corporation, but to an economist, capital refers basically to tools. That is, capital goods are … [Read more...] about Burning Down Twitter
Netchoice, Pruneyard, and the digital public square
The federal Fifth Circuit court has just released its ruling on Netchoice v. Paxton rejecting the argument that Texas's new social media law violates the First Amendment. Basically, the law is a response to the way social media sites blocked and disabled people's accounts over the last few years, often to the detriment of Trump supporters, Covid minimizers, and anti-vaxxers … [Read more...] about Netchoice, Pruneyard, and the digital public square
Trump’s “Declassified” Documents
Former President Donald Trump and his supporters claim that he declassified all the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago, although they can't quite agree how -- maybe he had a standing order that all documents removed to Mar-a-Lago from the White House were automatically declassified, or maybe he just did it with his mind.In any case, if all those documents have lost their … [Read more...] about Trump’s “Declassified” Documents
Twenty Years At the Keyboard
It was twenty years ago today that I wrote my first-ever blog post, and I figured I'd take a brief look back at my history here.That first post was on the on the subject of...wait for it...a young lady selling her used panties online. That post was just a quick one-off to get something on the site so I could say I started. I'm sure I'd handle the story quite differently … [Read more...] about Twenty Years At the Keyboard
No Ground Truth: Sex Trafficking and Machine Learning
A tweet last week by Carol Fenton led me to an article in the Vancouver Province by Nathan Griffiths which begins with a seemingly shocking statistic:Roughly 40 per cent of online ads offering escort and sex work services in B.C. included language indicating child sex trafficking, according to a new pre-print study from SFU.The article also includes this blurb from the … [Read more...] about No Ground Truth: Sex Trafficking and Machine Learning