The Offline Report

Nobody ate kale a few years ago. Now seaweed farming is pulling CO2 out of circulation in the ocean, and farmers grow muscles and oysters in the same sea "column." Please see this amazing story that was on 60 minutes last night. This week we'll try to locate "sea greens" for next week's "Meatless Monday." See also - seaweed can propel cars. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seaweed-farming-sampling-fresh-picked-sea-lettuce/

It's all in the public record. April 10, 2018 ( 45 second c-span clip, here ) Zuckerberg testified in a senate hearing that his company doesn't see messages sent through the WhatsApp application because WhatsApp is encrypted: Senator Schatz (D-HI): If I'm emailing within WhatsApp, does that ever inform your advertisers? Zuckerberg: No! We don't see any of the content in WhatsApp. It's fully encrypted. April 30, 2018: The Washington Post reports today that WhatsApp founder plans to leave over broad clashes with parent Facebook over decisions to weaken encryption and to use personal data: SAN FRANCISCO — The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption , according to people familiar with internal discussions. Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more...

Sunday April 29, 2018 For some reason Google is mirroring our blogger site to ones with other countries' extensions such as .co.uk, .ie, .fr, .de, .in.    offlinereport.blogspot.com "A 50-year-old founder is about twice as likely to achieve a successful exit as a founder at 30, the researchers discovered."    fortune.com National Bureau for Economic Research found that the mean age of  founders of the fastest growing ventures is 45 years old.    nber.org Bruce Schneier introduced us all to "security theater." Now the "dark patterns of design" are offering the world *privacy theater*    abc.net.au  

Take just one house in our neighborhood. It sold for $630,000 in 2008. Someone bought it, fixed it up and real estate sites estimate its value at $1.3 million. "Proof!" Cry the density bros and paid agitators. "Proof we need to remove regulations that keep us from razing family homes, so we can build non-rent controlled, dense housing everywhere, so we can cool the climate !" Real estate sites estimate this house in our neighborhood can sell for $1.3 million, but can it? This writer knows of a five-bedroom three-bath house in this neighborhood overlooking a park, with a two-car garage that went for just over $1 million. So can this smaller house get 1.3 million? Con: this two-bedroom house stands on a street corner, which makes it more prone to car noise than other houses not on street corners. Pro: it does have attractive contemporary landscaping in the front. Pro: As of today it's not for sale, but could probably collect an impressive sum in monthly rent :...

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Last night seven winners, one from each continent (including "island nations") were recognized at the San Francisco ceremony of the 29th annual Goldman Environmental Prize. With recent conversations on the futility of fighting climate change circulating this "Earth Week," the Goldman Prize winner from Vietnam is worth highlighting in this blog post. In this site's fourth meeting of DrawDown bookclub on microgrids , we noted the book's findings that under-developed rural areas had great potential to "leapfrog" toward renewable energy because their grids had not yet been built out, and financial interests had not yet taken too much hold. We said: "But building microgrids in urban areas will be more obstacle-ridden. Rural areas are better for breaking ground." The winner from Asia -- the first Goldman winner from Vietnam -- worked to persuade her government to divert investment away from coal and toward renewable sources like wind and ...

Friday April 27, 2018 RevealNews is suing the government for Silicon Valley diversity data.    revealnews.org February: Reality-distorting tools of the future, video editing and sound editing software that can make Obama say something he never said.    sciencefriday.com Thursday April 26, 2018 The Great Barrier Reef corals are bleeching in response to warmed oceans. Naturalists say money the country is spending on saving the reefs would be better spent pivoting away from coal mining in Australia.    motherboard.vice.com Wednesday April 25, 2018 An exiled leader barred since 1979 from appearing in the news media gave fiery sermons that "found their way to huge audiences inside the country through recorded audiocassettes transmitted through phone calls" and surprised authorities when his low-tech word-of-mouth campaigning technique brought about a surprising victory in 1997 Iran, where the Telegram blogging internet app is now threatened with st...

Tuesday April 24, 2018 Ten Things I Learned From a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role:     fuzzyblog.io//blog What Happens When We Recycle:    subtraction.com     Monday April 23, 2018 A group is suing the federal government to make H1B data public, not hold it back only for people filing FOIA requests.    mercurynews.com Sunday April 22, 2018 "The fallout has become unusually personal for Ahalogy, which in recent weeks has been contacted by almost a dozen frustrated Facebook users demanding to know what the company is and why it has their contact information."    pressreader.com An enzyme that dissolves plastic pollution: discovered in "2016 by Japanese researchers, who subsequently found that it could completely break down a thin layer of low-quality plastic within six weeks."    citylab.com Great Barrier Reef Sun Shield Film Tested to Prevent Bleaching:     nationalgeographic.com ...

Sierra Club's former president says in a new book that Texas and Oaklahoma have reduced their carbon footprints more than other U.S. states because they've transferred so much of their power generation to wind turbines and natural gas. Former Sierra Club President Carl Pope, in town promoting a new book "Climate of Hope" on the KQED newsroom show , says we're actually making progress on combating climate change, though we need to do much much more. Pope aims to re-frame the climate change conversation away from "doom and gloom" and toward what individuals, businesses and local governments can do. Combating climate change is becoming a business opportunity. While the Trump administration's rollbacks on environmental protections have been "horrible" for the air quality, only 1 out of 42 utility companies are shifting investment away from the future back toward coal. Most utility companies are looking 10, 20 years down the line, past Trum...

Greetings friends! Earth Day is two days from now: Sunday April 22, 2018. While pretty environmentally 'woke already, we hosts learned a lot from our first four DrawDown bookclub meetings . We paused before DrawDown bookclub #5 to integrate our new knowledge - we're calling it " D raw D own I ntegration" with hashtag #DDI on twitter. Tomorrow is also Wrecka Stow Day, Record Store Day. And today is "Four Twenty Day," some holiday the tokers plan to celebrate today.  Monday is the Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony at San Francisco Opera House, and Wednesday is the Goldman prize ceremony in Washington, D.C. Fourteen years ago, I secured a poster of the six Goldman Prize winners from that year's ceremony. Goldman awards a prize to one person or group per continent . I mounted the poster inside of my apartment door and many visitors commented on it, uttering the word "reforestation." Next to the winner from Africa I wrote " reforestati...

Friday April 20, 2018 Friday fun scooter wars column: "It’s always kind of fun to watch the good guys/bad guys go at it. And we’ve got a ripsnorter going at it right here on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco."    sfchronicle.com Silicon Valley college, called a 'visa mill,' shut down with millions missing:     sfchronicle.com Mar. 2014: Founder of bogus East Bay college is guilty in 'visa mill' case:     mercurynews.com Oct. 2014: Center for Investigative Reporting series 'Techsploitation' runs in the Guardian.    theguardian.com   The Tradeoff Fallacy.    asc.upenn.edu Thursday April 19, 2018 On March 4, half of all California's energy demands were met by solar-captured energy.    marinij.com How innocuous third-party web bug trackers feed more information than usual to certain sites.    freedom-to-tinker.com Wednesday April 18, 2018 "Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes testifies in antit...

A  widely cited  report on H1B workers that Pew Research recently published  makes a very counter-intuitive claim that more H1B visas are awarded to East Coast and Texas companies than they are to Silicon Valley companies. But when looking at publicly available data, two very different pictures emerge depending on what one asks. When sorting H1B requests by "worksite city," the city where the H1B employees would show up to daily work, Silicon Valley cities and counties such as Santa Clara clearly appear at the top of a list of counties requesting the most H1B visas. However when sorting H1B requests by "employer city," possibly the company's headquarters, Texas and the Northeast cities appear to request more H1B visas than all other metropolitan regions. Sections and Charts Below: I. Pew Report: H1B Visas Granted in 2010-2016 Surprisingly Went to Texas and Northeast II. Sorting 2017 H1B Requests by "Employer City" Shows Texas and Northeast a...

Tuesday April 17, 2018 A Facebook patent application for software code that determines your socioeconomic level.    patents.google.com A decade after the bubble burst, house-flipping is on the rise:     npr.org The FCC last fall deregulated a large set of rules for television, print and radio on a premise that people now get their news from Facebook. A broadband adviser appointed by the FCC chairman has been arrested on fraud charges.    verge.com With few ways to escape smartphone alerts, people are returning to flip phones with separate iPods in a device divorce wave sweeping the country.    sfgate.com Monday April 16, 2018 Waymo applied for a driverless car testing permit through California DMV: "Waymo told the DMV its cars can handle city streets as well as highways up to 65 mph, and can navigate both day and night, through fog and light rain. The implication is that the cars are not yet ready for snow or torrential downpours."...

This writer is a computer programmer, who worked in ad tech, who wants people to enjoy the open web. I wrote yesterday how surprisingly well-prepared the senate was in Tuesday's Zuckerberg hearings on Capital Hill. However one topic that could be better articulated among congress, the press, the  public, is "ad tech." Some terms are being conflated in a way that could cement legislation deeply injurious even to ethical internet commerce: "targeted ads" conflated with "dark ads" and terms we need to create now "anonymized ad tech" vs "personalized ad tech." For interested readers, the end of this post defines two more terms "history wipes" and "boolean exclusions." Ad Tech - What is Ad Tech: 3 Things Impressions, click-throughs, and conversions are the three names in this ad tech game. *Impression An ad appearing once on a web page you load into your browser counts as one ad impression . *Click Th...

A second viewing of the Zuckerberg senate hearings from his first day on Capital Hill Tuesday shows two things: why the first impression that the senators were unprepared was patently false; and that it was one of the best performances of the senate in recent history. Whether that holds or Facebook's lobbyists gum up legislation to make Facebook more of a monopoly, only time and voter engagement in this debate will tell. A tweet from a young viewer added this to a journalist's thread : " it IS about age, one generation grew up with tamagotchi, nintendo and social media, the other one grew up before TV was invented . it's not about competence, it's a different world and that has nothing to do with #ageism, just a fact, not everything is an -ism & offensive" In response to the tamagotchi user and other early media reports that congress "doesn't know how the internet works" we're compelled to correct the record (for starters: Facebook ...

Thursday April 12, 2018 Facebook Wednesday dropped opposition to a California state ballot initiative that would stop companies from selling our data.    sfchronicle.com Senator Heller asks: Have you ever *not* sold someone an ad - have you ever drawn the line?    c-span.org Updated About page    offlinereport.blogspot.com Wednesday April 11, 2018 "No wonder Zuckerberg was so eager to talk about regulation: it’s not simply that it benefits incumbents, it’s that it is a whole lot more attractive than discussing a potential break-up!"    stratechery.com

This post is long, we broke it into embeddable parts: I.    Command vs. Control II.   Dr. George Simon "In Sheep's Clothing" III. Zuckerberg Testifies to the Senate IV. Timing Markers of C-Span Zuckerberg Footage I. Command vs. Control Successful people become successful through ability and talent and gradually corralling some command over parts of their environment and life. Having command over your environment is different from controlling other people. Command without control means you still submit to legalities, and recognize the need for your partner or customers to have their own will. And command without slipping into being controlling requires you only rarely or very judiciously resort to manipulation, and exploit information imbalance. An "unsubmitted will" is a personality trait infuriating for people to engage with and witness if they have no name for it. "This person, he won't take responsibility for what he's done." ...

G'morning flexitarians ! We took a week off our DrawDown bookclub to incorporate what we've learned. Accidentally last week for dinner we had vegetarian chili and for lunch, spinach and mushroom quesadillas. Without intending to we participated in the global " Meatless Monday " movement, which apparently is a way to fight climate change . It's still counter-intuitive that livestock emits disproportionate CO2 . But a lot of livestock is raised using extra hormones, and ingesting those too often is like pouring gasoline on nascent cancer cell embers. If we're not convinced meat causes climate change, we know vegetables which have antioxidants vacuum up free radicals inside our bodies. And less meat -- or more judicious meat consumption, selecting for quality hormone-free eggs and meat products -- could boost our health and quality of life . Bon Appetit published 35 Meatless Monday recipes and many ingredient lists include eggs (which don't count as me...