The KHIT Blog: From the priority exigencies list: "Malign Technologies"

Sunday, November 13, 2022

From the priority exigencies list: "Malign Technologies"

Cryptocurrencies crash and burn.

Imagine my surprise. "Cryptocurrencies" morph inexorably toward classic Ponzi scheme frauds. (Highly recommend you follow this "CoffeeZilla" dude on YouTube. He's all over these scams.)

Sam Bankman-Fried

It seems like just last month — because it was just last month — that everyone from Washington insiders to Twitter fanboys were fawning over the pronouncements of billionaire crypto investor Sam Bankman-Fried. He was a “wunderkind,” the successor to banker J.P. Morgan. Stepping in to save one insolvent crypto company after another, he was feted by VIPs and sought after for his political donations and philanthropic thoughts.

Instead of a prophet of the blockchain future, Bankman-Fried, whose crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy Friday, is increasingly looking like Ozymandias 2.0. From a $32 billion valuation earlier this year, his empire is in a free fall following an exposé of its finances by CoinDesk. (The matter is complicated, but essentially they had the goods showing that Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, was holding a significant number of crypto coins issued by FTX. This undermined faith in both companies and ultimately led to a run on the crypto bank.)…[WaPo]

I viscerally hate this shit. See my 2008 post "Tranche Warfare." See also my follow-on 2009 post "The Dukes of Moral Hazard."

I did a 5-year stint in subprime risk management, 2000-2005. The tech has changed (e.g., crypto, blockchain, global cloud data archives), but the lure of financial grifting most certainly has not.

PERTINENT RECENT READS FROM THE BOOKSHELF

CUTTING TO THE CHASE

This story is moving as fast as a careening out-of-control driverless Tesla. Stay tuned.

OK, THIS IS JUST TOO RICH TO PASS UP

Michael Lewis Already Selling Movie Rights for Book on FTX's $32 Billion Meltdown
The author of Moneyball and The Big Short has been following around FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for the past six months

...Bankman-Fried gave an interview where he explained that he thought books were for losers. Seriously.

“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Tells us all we need to know, 'eh?

BTW, his parents are both Stanford Law School professors. What do we rationally and justifiably infer from that?

By the way: Disgraced Theranos founder & CEO Elizabeth Holmes is to be sentenced on Nov 18th for her felony wire fraud & conspiracy convictions.

Prosecution has asked for 15 years.

SAD PERSONAL ERRATUM

Frankie is 19. She was born to a litter at my sister-in-law's place in Vegas, was then first with our son Nick, after which she ended up at my late daughter Danielle's place (where he'd lived for a while). We moved Danielle over to Antioch CA after she got laid off in Las Vegas. Frankie has been with Cheryl and I ever since.

This week the vet told us she had advanced, unmanageable kidney failure. We have thus far avoided putting her down. She does not appear to be in pain, just extremely lethargic and wobbly. Monitoring her hour by hour since we got the dx.

They just don't live long enough.

UPDATE: Frankie is gone. Just slowly faded out peacefully Tuesday night.

MORE ON THE FTX CALAMITY

There will surely be more to come. None of it positive.

MORE COFFEEZILLA

COMMENT I LEFT ON THE NAKED CAPITALISM BLOG

There are no “coins.“ There are no “mines.“ There are no “wallets.“ There are no “blocks.“ There are no “chains”
It’s a gossamer Metaverse of babblelicious metaphors.
At the end of the day, there are no “assets,” only a huge pile of unenforceable signatures.
BTW: check out the “CoffeeZilla“ dude on YouTube. Kid is all over it.

Click the image

__________

No comments:

Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

The KHIT Blog

Search the KHIT Blog

Sunday, November 13, 2022

From the priority exigencies list: "Malign Technologies"

No comments:

Post a Comment