Tag: usa

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“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

“Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT” (source, confirmed by Norways PM)

There is no way to actually respond to this, as there’s so much to unpack. The toddler crying ‘I wanna’ part, the ‘reasoning’, the lack of factual basis, the narcissistic false boasting, the fact this is how a US president communicates directly to heads of government (as opposed to tossing red meat on his social media account to his base), the scattering of capital letters, what it implies about his mental health, that his environment is enabling this.

There is no rational way to respond to any of it. At all.
Other than writing off the USA completely and fully for the foreseeable future.

And doing our damnest to prepare and build resilience with utmost urgency against the inevitable global consequences. While Nero is calling for his aides to bring him his fidicula. Or throwing ketch-up. Riddikulus!

(the misspelling in the title is intentional)

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Bought this book by German author Phillip Schönthaler (1976) last February in Switzerland, after already considering it while in Berlin the October before, on paper. The narrator (which is the author) explores various scientists around the development of rockets, atom bombs, and computing, and their connection to fiction writing. This was published in 2024, and it reminds me a lot of Benjamin Labatut‘s The MANIAC and When We Cease to Understand the World, from 2023, and 2020 respectively, which I read August last year. As a result I’m left wondering if I really enjoyed this or not, or that I was just reading the German language version of a familiar story. I also bought some of this author’s non-fiction to explore.

Bookmarked US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users (by Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica)

Apple may be misinterpreting what the EU Digital Markets Act and Digitale Services Act are about, so perhaps this example of how the US is working their own anti trust laws, here w.r.t. TikTok helps them realise what’s at stake.

If an application is determined to be operated by a company controlled by a foreign adversary—like ByteDance, Ltd., which is controlled by the People’s Republic of China—the application must be divested from foreign adversary control within 180 days.

Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica

If you pay a monthly fee for software (Adobe, Microsoft, Evernote, etc etc) realise you are not buying the software, you only have a monthly subscription with the company providing access to that software. Do not depend on it being there. You can be cut off at moment’s notice. (The same might be true for some things, like a John Deere tractor by the way.)

Venezuelan Adobe customers will be cut off effectively immediately and are only allowed time to get their data out of Adobes servers, because of an embargo by the US government. Being cut off here also means not getting a refund, as that sort of transactions are under embargo too.

Adding another datum to the urgency to get out of subscription model software.

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After California, now the Washington State senate has adopted a data protection and privacy act that takes the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as an example to emulate.

This is definitely a hoped for effect of the GDPR when it was launched. European environmental and food safety standards have had similar global norm setting impact. This as for businesses it generally is more expensive to comply with multiple standards, than it is to only comply with the strictest one. We saw it earlier in companies taking GDPR demands and applying them to themselves generally. That the GDPR might have this impact, is an intentional part of how the EC is developing a third proposition in data geopolitics, between the surveillance capitalism of the US data lakes, and the data driven authoritarianism of China.

To me the GDPR is a quality assurance instrument, with its demands increasing over time. So it is encouraging to see other government entities outside the EU taking a cue from the GDPR. California and Washington State now have adopted similar laws. Five other States in the USA have introduced similar laws for debate in the past 2 months: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Maryland.

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US Congress just before leaving for Christmas has voted to approve a new law, that mandates two key elements: public information is open by default and needs to be made actively available in machine readable format, as well as that policy making should be evidence based. In order for agencies to comply they will need to appoint a Chief Data Officer.

I think while of those two the first one (open data) is the more immediately visible, the second one, about evidence based policy making, is much more significant long term. Government, especially politics, often is willingly disinterested in policy impact evaluation. It’s much more status enhancing to announce new plans than admitting previous plans didn’t come to anything. Evidence based policy will help save money. Additionally government agencies will soon realise that doing evidence based policy making is made a lot easier if you already do open data well. The evidence you need is in that open data, and it being open allows all of us to go look for that evidence or its absence.

There’s one caveat to evidence based policy making: it runs the risk of killing any will to experiment. After all, by definition there’s no evidence for something new. So a way is needed in which new policies can be tried out as probes. To see if there’s emerging evidence of impact. Again, that evidence should become visible in existing open data streams. If evidence is found the experimental policy can be rolled out more widely. Evidence based policies need experiments to help create an evidence base, not just of what works but also of what doesn’t.

A great result for the USA’s open government activists. This basically codifies the initiatives of the Obama Presidency, which were the trigger for much of the global open data effort these last 10 years, into US federal law.