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Stay away, corporate shill

Revisado: 05-06-23

That was my reaction at least. His argument is pretty much "our existing industries only exist by burning lots of carbon, we need our existing industries, therefore we will burn lots of carbon, get over it." He's stuck in the 20th century and can't imagine that in the 21st century we might have whole new industries. Solar, phsaw, the sun sets at night. Wind, phsaw, sailors sometimes become becalmed. Tides, see sailors. Nothing will ever work except burning lots and lots of hydrocarbons. Unfortunately we run out of them a few decades from now, but hey, past my lifetime.

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Better than I expected - worth the time

Revisado: 05-05-23

I've read a lot of books about business and what works and what doesn't. Most of it is post-hoc reasoning, XYZ worked therefore Z must have been the reason. And very few acknowledge that dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time, is about 90% of the explanation. Microsoft lucked out because the guy IBM actually came to Seattle to visit was out of town that day.

Loonshots doesn't acknowledge the role of luck, but it doesn't matter from a reader's PoV. His stories are drawn from many different fields of endeavor, radar, aviation, bombs, commercial airlines, pharmaceuticals, to name just a few. He has so many interesting stories about ideas and companies that made it and ideas and companies that didn't make it, it leaves the reader with the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

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Cryptocurrency is anonymous - not!

Revisado: 05-05-23

A must read for those interested in the legal side of crypto (or the illegal side). Shows how the complacent narrative that crypto transactions are anonymous is entirely bogus. Every crypto transaction since the advent of crypto is stored publicly in the blockchain. As long as the transactions stay within the blockchain world, fine. But to buy or sell anything with crypto, users have to convert crypto to real money, and the conversion portals often expose the real identity. Then legal sleuths can follow the chain backwards, following the threads, and uncover cybercriminals.

Of course, there is a cat and mouse game of how the crypto networks try to obfuscate the records by combining funds and spreading them back out, but there is now a thriving industry in untangling the mess. Quite like computer viruses and virus protection companies.

One interesting side story is how many of the early law-enforcement agents were enticed into playing for themselves, much like drug-enforcement cops selling seized drugs on the side. Another side story is how important IRS agents are in this game. FBI and city cops tend to dismiss them, but who is better prepared to understand financial crime?

Highly recommended.

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Explains so much about what your see around you

Revisado: 05-05-23

Have you ever wondered why housing developments have no stores? Why strip malls have no apartments above them? That's because zoning made it illegal in the US for most of the 20th century. Zoning laws were heavily influenced by companies that wanted you to drive to the necessities of life.

This observation, and many other aha moments about the urban and suburban landscape are explained here. Everything happens for a reason, the say, but most of the time that reason is because somebody else is profiting from it. The book has many more examples, like how one streetcar company tore out all its own lines within 18 months of being acquired by a holding company owned by an oil company, a car company, and a tire company.

There is an especially interesting chapter about how fascist adoption of pseudo-classical architectural traditions in mid-century Europe made brutalists look good in the US. As a result, unadorned concrete, steel or glass slab buildings spread like kudzu.

One of the most influential books I've read in decades, right up there with, for instance, "The Power Broker".

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What a wild fun ride

Revisado: 04-18-23

One of those books I like so much that the moment I reach the end, I start right over and read it again to better savor the earlier words and actions of the characters that I have now gotten to know so well.

Ostensibly it's a thriller, pitting a lefty agricultural group against a billionaire property investor. That storyline and book would be just fine as it is. But the plot is just the framework to hang lots of artwork, like the parodies of both left and right, rich and poor-on-purpose. So many sly asides, like "acid vs booze is like condoms vs cigarettes for our parents, the one that used to be behind the counter has switched places with the one on the shelf" or "genZ name their pets like kids and their kids like pets". The local landowner thinking he's pulling a fast one over the silicon valley bandit (obviously modeled on Peter Thiel) who thinks he's pulling a fast one over the locals, but other locals are busy pulling a fast one over him... So much fun.

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waste of time

Revisado: 12-24-22

Bizarre, implausible, sophomoric, aimed perhaps at adolescent audience?

A dystopia where mob families fight over illegal chocolate. Who dances with whom at high school prom is still the subject of many words, though.

Ends when the author loses interest, just peters out unfinished.

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qanon thriller

Revisado: 04-19-22

if you want a fantasy about Christian ex military presidents defending their people with a pistol, boy do I have the book for you.

if they are funded by covert Russian operatives and it doesn't bother you, extra credit and fun!

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Wow. Just wow.

Revisado: 11-02-21

Every now and then you read a book you won't forget for a while. This is one of them.

An anonymous hoaxer created a fake sales page on AOL implying that a Seattle realtor was selling t-shirts and other merchandise mocking the Oklahoma City bomb victims. The realtor’s phone range off the hook for months with people berating him and issuing death threats. The realtor asked AOL to take down the page. AOL ignored him. He sued, and lost.

The mother of an 11-year old found that a stranger had induced her child to act out nude sex scenes with other children, and was selling the videos on AOL. She asked AOL to take down the page. They did not. She sued, and lost.

An actress discovered that a dating site had a bogus web page pretending to be hers, saying she was looking for one night stands and hoping to be dominated, and giving personal details about her home phone, child, etc. She was bombarded by obnoxious calls. She asked the dating site to take down the page. They refused, saying only the (anonymous) owner of the page could change it. She sued, and lost.

An art agent had a dispute with a building contractor working on her house. He wrote to a museum saying she was a relative of Heinrich Himmler (of course she wasn’t) and had many stolen European artworks stolen from Jews hanging on her walls (they were American and painted 50+ years after the war). The museum spread the rumor to a mailing list of ~1000 people. The agent asked the museum to circulate a retraction. They wouldn’t. She sued, she lost.

A housing website hosted advertisements where prospective room-mates could list who they wouldn’t consider, based on race, age, having children, being treated for mental health, etc. They were sued, but after a ten-year battle up and down through appeals courts, the website was held blameless.

In several of these cases, the injured party who lost their court cases had to leave their home and sometimes the state where they lived, to avoid persecution from mobs who read and believed the baloney published about them online.

All these scenarios are enabled by the Section 230 protection afforded to websites, enshrined in the 1996 DCA act. The clause has been in the news recently for political reasons, but the above examples illustrate the extent to which websites can host anything, anything at all, including content that would be completely illegal in a newspaper (housing ads with “No Irish need apply”, anyone?). As long as the website can sufficiently distance themselves from the authors of that content, they have blanket immunity. That distance can be quite short -- the site can pay fees to those authors, they can encourage and solicit content from such authors, but it seems that as long as the author is not actually on payroll, the content is fair game.

The book author is a trial lawyer who makes his living defending tech companies using Section 230. He is an unabashed fan, and lists the above items as *triumphs* of the law, and justifies it all by saying it supported the growth of the internet. He’s amazingly oblivious to how the internet thrives everywhere else, Europe, Canada, Australia, without such blanket immunity for website owners.

An inadvertent eye-opener is that when he describes all the case law for Section 230, he makes a point of naming the president at the time the presiding judge(s) were appointed, at least twenty times. Apparently in his eyes, judges are highly partisan and can be relied upon to carry out the wishes of the party that appointed them. One wonders how much this is an open secret in the rest of the legal profession.

I purchased this book hoping for a philosophical or moral discussion of the issues around freedom of publishing. It’s been quite a different experience, something akin to opening the garbage can and finding it crawling with maggots. If the author is correct, and since he's discussing his job it seems he must, content that would be criminal anywhere else is legal on the web, and a person or people injured by that content have no legal recourse. It’s as if Congress had decided in 1996 that while killing people is wrong, except doing it with a Taser is ok, because a new technology needs to be nurtured. Any lingering sympathy I had for Section 230 is gone -- ironically, the exact opposite of what the author intended.

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Good Housekeeping version of a medical discovery

Revisado: 09-28-20

Maybe I was expecting too much after reading books like Sue Armstrong's book on cancer, P53, which is truly a gem.

Good Blood was about the discovery of a treatment for Rh disease, where the mother develops antibodies against her baby's blood. The counter-intuitive cure is to inject the mother with antibodies against Rh+ blood from other mothers. The book never tries to come to grips with the question why other mothers' anti-Rh antibodies are better than the birth mother's anti-Rh antibodies. Don't the other mother's antibodies also react with the baby's blood? If not, why not? How come the birth mother's blood doesn't develop antibodies against injected proteins from a stranger? After all, she's reacting against foreign proteins from her own baby, why not against a stranger's proteins? You won't get answers to any of these questions here.

A few minutes on wikipedia hints at an answer - IgM vs IgG antibody classes, but those are terms that are never even mentioned in the book. Instead we get stories of the dresses the doctors' brides wore on their wedding days, where they honeymooned, where they vacationed with their kids, and filler narrative that veers between gushing and maudlin. The men are all "married to the woman of their dreams" (yes, that's a quote) and the babies are all big bouncing blue-eyed and beautiful. Until the men are suddenly and without explanation getting re-married. The medical insight in the book, such as it is, is limited to a couple of paragraphs in the first third of the book, and after that it's all collecting accolades and awards and growing old.

All this, and you get to hear it in the chirpy tones of a morning commute newscaster.

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Book-length press release

Revisado: 09-09-20

The book reads like a long press release from the company, read in a chirpy newscaster voice. A lot of is breathless repetition of the founders' words, without a word of criticism from beginning to end. Much is made of the founders' reaction to the first time an owner has their place trashed by guests ("like a punch in the gut") . If only the unfortunate owner got the same sympathy for discovering their place covered in ashes from their incinerated furniture. Endless repeats of how they surmounted all the odds and what a miracle it was that they survived. Really? What about the other half dozen business in the same space, like VRBO, Homestay, etc? It was an idea whose time had come, and in the usual snowball effect, the sellers go where the buyers are, and vice versa, so one company runs away with the market, mostly by accident.

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