Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Project Gingerbread

    I made this eight years ago and it still brings me joy. Merry Christmas!

  • Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People

    Keeping comments up on our site was a guarantee of misinformation, because with an annual editorial budget as small as ours, one shrinking each quarter, we couldn’t afford the personnel required to patrol even one day’s articles for misleading comments, much less those attached to articles going back years that kept finding traction in Google search results. Social media companies, which were clearly replacing the role of magazines like mine, were the only ones with the money necessary to fight what I considered a holy fight against deception. And until recently, the heads of those companies did make some attempt to moderate dangerous misinformation.

    Jacob Ward

    Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People (The Rip Current)

  • Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago

    When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

    Lora Kelley

    Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago (The Atlantic)

  • The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”

    By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation,” as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West—especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better personfor focusing instead on more important things—risk that could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.

    Émile P. Torres

    The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” (Current Affairs)

  • Standard Ebooks

    Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

    Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

    Standard Ebooks aren’t just a beautiful addition to your digital library—they’re a high quality standard to build your own ebooks on.

    Standard Ebooks

  • Why Billionaires Obey in Advance

    The Trump administration is being actively taught right now that it can expect the full cooperation of the leaders of industry. Why are they offering themselves without being asked? Because that’s what they’re trained for.

    The myth of the moral billionaire has dogged me my entire career. For years I’ve been reassured by people inside and outside the power structure of Silicon Valley that the moral judgement of people at the top of major companies was so reliable that it required no real oversight.

    Jacob Ward

    Why Billionaires Obey in Advance (The Rip Current)

  • NC GOP Sore Losers

    On the brink of losing their supermajority in the state legislature, North Carolina Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto on Wednesday to enact a new law that gives them control over elections in the state and strips the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general of some of their powers.

    Sam Levine

    Unfortunately, Western North Carolina had to watch as every Republican in the general assembly shamelessly put their desire to strip political power away from recently elected Democrats ahead of the aid and relief their communities need. Using the guise of Hurricane Helene relief is a new low, even for general assembly Republicans.

    Anderson Clayton, Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party

    North Carolina GOP lawmakers override veto to strip power from Democratic officials (The Guardian)

  • Writing Down Every UUID

    I’ve been struggling to remember all of the UUIDs. There are a lot of them. So this week I wrote them all down. You can see my list at everyuuid.com.

    Nolen Royalty

    Writing down (and searching through) every UUID (eieio.games)

  • The Purpose of a System is What it Does

    When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed.

    Anil Dash

    The Purpose of a System is What it Does (Anil Dash)

  • The Case for “Single Stair” Reform

    Building only one staircase into a building means that builders can use more space for living area. It not only lowers construction costs (building more stairs adds costs), but it also increases the amount of available housing space, bringing down total cost-per-square-foot. Builders can also fit single-stair buildings into smaller or more oddly-shaped parcels of land. In urban areas where the housing crisis is often worst, that describes a significant portion of real estate available for housing construction.

    The bottom line: single-stair means more places to live, and they’re more affordable.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    The Case for “Single Star” Reform (Carolina Forward)