Tehdastehdas

I was horrified by the contents of one of my Finnish mutual funds when I looked into it after years of disinterest: USA is overweighted, and I hate some of those companies I've ended up owning.

I'm especially disgusted by UnitedHealth Group Inc - the health insurance company whose mass murderer CEO got shot recently, sparking nationwide cheers.

As a passive investor, you'll forget your money into the wrong hands when the bank won't remind you of developments in the political situation.

Ålandsbanken promises:

"socially sustainable"

You may assume your bank is civilised, but you should have a closer look. I'm a customer of S-bank in Finland. In this case, the fund ended up under a different bank twice due to buyouts, and the management of the fund ended up in a Canadian bank branch in the UK.

My other bank didn't recommend selling my Russian investment when Putin's reign had started going overdue after his full term as a president. Luckily I was awake and sold everything.

Investments drift out of balance over time. Within mutual funds, there are limits, but the funds grow at different rates. You should re-balance your diversification once in a while to avoid excessive country risk.

I don't know if fund managers are bribed to distort the balance within the fund's limits for the benefit of a third party.

My fund is managed by that guy. I sold everything. Will reinvest in Europe.

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How should you invest?

Profit comes with risk.

high risk, high reward (on average)

Don't take more risk than you can carry. For example, if you'll surely need at least 100% of your money back in a few years, don't put all of that money into stock (shares), because they are unpredictable in the short term.

In the stock market, even the duration of a "short term" is unpredictable. For example, if you invested in Japan right before the 1980s bubble burst, you would have had to wait 20 years to recover from the crash.

Japan bubble peak 1990

Owning your house is an undiversified, unhedged investment in real estate. What if there’s a bubble about to burst? What if the house is hit by a disaster that insurance won’t cover? If I owned a house, I’d probably take some debt and buy foreign shares not related to house prices.

Easiest way to invest safely:
Hire a fiduciary to craft a passive (cheap) investment strategy suited to your needs. My bank offers free advice for crafting a strategy.
(Don't buy actively managed funds with costly fees - it's a waste of money, except in a few special cases. The bank will happily sell you an expensive service.)

Easy way to invest somewhat ethically:
Put your money into ESG-compliant or highly EU SFDR-rated index funds (with really cheap fees) that don't invest in countries, industries, and companies you disapprove of.
(In some cases, switching between funds in the same bank allows you to avoid paying taxes from your previous winnings in the fund you want to get rid of, because the sell/buy -action is interpreted as an internal move.)

More ethical easy way to invest:
If the “responsible” ESG-labeled funds are too lax for your thirst for good, find a tailored fund / bespoke portfolio where you can set tighter criteria for ethical behaviour.

Do it yourself the right way:
Buy shares of companies you approve of - the most ethical companies trying to stay clean in a dirty economy. Makers of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, cable, bicycles, electric vehicles (trains and trams!), sustainable forestry, etc.
It's easy nowadays through many banks’ websites. Upkeep cost can be minimal.
A lazy strategy:
Store your money in various low risk financial instruments.
Once in every ~5 years, invest part of your savings in a diversified portfolio of 30 companies (and other high risk financial instruments) in at least 10 countries on at least 2 continents in at least 3 unrelated industries, and forget for 5 years.
Be sure to diversify in time by buying at different times to avoid accidentally investing everything on top of a global bubble.
If you’re feeling extra active, maybe prefer to buy in a depression and sell on a bubble, but you can't predict the future any better than all the other investors trying to outsmart you. Price/earnings ratio measures investor optimism that bubbles are made of.
Between investment sprees, save into a regular savings account.

Types of risk relevant in diversification and hedging:

If all your investments are subject to the same type of risk, they could crash at the same time.

Avoid participating in disaster capitalism with a moral hazard where companies doing disaster recovery cause disasters to pump up their share value.

If you think a company isn’t enriched by you buying previously issued, pre-owned, existing shares from someone else on the market, you're wrong, because the company sees the increased demand on the market and issues more shares, making more money from investors after you. Same as when you buy a stolen item, the thief reacts to increased demand by stealing another one.

If you think donating to charities is more ethical than investing, I somewhat disagree: it's good, but it's also unsustainable. You can grow more charity power by growing money in benefit corporations that are effectively profit-seeking charities. Example: Mozilla.

I think crypto money is a waste of computation that could be used for something productive, like protein folding. That said, Wikipedia: Proof of stake # Energy consumption:

In 2021, a study by the University of London found that in general the energy consumption of the proof-of-work based Bitcoin was about a thousand times higher than that of the highest consuming proof-of-stake system ... Ethereum's switch to proof-of-stake was estimated to have cut its energy use by 99%.

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(This post was originally in You Should Know. It was justly deleted for pushing an agenda, which is banned there. Thanks for all the comments that led me to write the above investment guide.)

Black box feed shaping is sneaky propaganda, making undesirable messages effectively unseen. We shouldn't submit to it, or give credence to it.

European citizens' media feeds in the control of a hostile country enables the slow, strategic destruction of Europe by trillions of unnoticeable manipulations.

Every time Windows updates itself, my Linux disappears. Actually, it's just hidden, only the boot menu was overwritten. You need a computer maintenance technician to make a new boot menu. I use a USB stick with a live Linux with automatic boot repair tools.

Recently, Windows has become resistant to Boot Repair Disk. Now I have to open computer firmware by tapping "Esc" right after power-up, then select "Boot options", then "Linux".

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EU must ban all US-made smart products for its own safety. All closed-source software and electronics that can be used for strategic manipulation and sabotage -- Google, Apple, Amazon, all of it.

We have functional, clunky open-source software that could easily be fitted for any purpose with the money we waste propping up foreign monopolies sabotaging us. Europe has taken a huge risk. I suspect bribery.

The destruction of OkCupid by Match Group looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.

OkCupid used to be the best place to match diverse people.
They crowdsourced thousands of multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter:

• Which answers you accept
• How important each is to you
• Your answer for the other side of the match equation
• Voluntary explanation

The match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex. "Friendship" contained ethics and communication style, so it also worked for business partnerships.

Then Match Group bought it.
For a while they let it be, but then they:

• Removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
• Removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
• Removed keyword search - no more finding niche interests not included in the questions, like "furry"
• Removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
• Deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
• Deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
• Deleted all accumulated likes, which were the best matching people around the world with maximal couple/friend/sex partner potential except, for example, location for now. They broke the profile links, so bookmarks became useless.
• They delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven't been messaging in a while, as if that meant they're not a match - no, they have a temporary problem, such as life situation
• They police inconvenient statements in the users' introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer healthcare insurance CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing (for months) "fuck the healthcare system - make a better one" was deleted without sending me a copy to edit

Plausibly deniable attack: "It's just business."

Avoid dating services owned by Match Group.

It cheats you in through a back door, looking like an ad-covered kiosk. The main entrance is on the other side.

In stalls, there are two screens playing ads, sound coming from the one you're facing.

Toilet paper brands advertise on dispensers, all brands owned by the same conglomerate.

Softest toilet paper has printed portraits of the toilet company's political enemies.

Facial recognition measures usage, you pay at exit.

Exiting after 5 minutes is expensive, but a monthly plan is cheaper.

The whole wash was estimated 72 minutes when it started.

It weighs the clothes by inertia in the beginning, I didn't overload, and the water (hot and cold) comes in fast through thick pipes, so there's no excuse for this.

How dumb must the program be to estimate one minute left in the beginning of the rinse cycle with two rinses and a spin cycle to go?

The building and presumably the machine were made 2018, and the maintenance log on the side says many repairs have been made since, so the software must have been updated many times already.

I wrote this.

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[Preview]

Who invented the modern computer look and feel?

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1. Vannevar Bush invented the Memex crowd thinking desktop environment with redundancy-merging hypertext wiki 1939–1945.

He had designed analog computers and founded the Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear bomb.

Memex was to increase humanity’s collective wisdom enormously, comparable to the printing press revolution in science in the last few centuries.

“First do this,”

“then do that:”

“Massive progress in collaborative thinking!”

Memex as described by Bush in “As We May Think“

"enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory"

"mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility"

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

"The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."

(emphasis mine)

Memex remembers knowledge and its creation process to be immediately learned from and built upon. It self-organises, integrating added information to the common knowledge tree.

It was designed for crowd work on all human knowledge.

WWW does not remember - it works like a paper pile. You can’t see a mesh of associative trails running through WWW any more than through a paper pile. The mental scaffolding by which knowledge was erected is lost. You can’t drop a knowledge structure into WWW and expect any amplification to happen.

It was made for publishing, not processing.

Vannevar Bush squiggling alone in his outer brain about a shared outer brain:

He specified a desktop computer to host Memex,

and suggested a quaint working principle,

which nobody thought could possibly work.

John von Neumann replied:

“Konrad Zuse already made it from ones and zeros - it’s fast and precise. Let me show you how to make one.”

Bush replied “It’s hideous and boring! Twiddling knobs is so much gayer than pressing buttons!”

"I tweak this - that there resists. I let go - it returns under the force set by this slider. I flip this clutch - these three start arguing, and it’s all chaos! It wiggles! Then you tweak the adjusters until order emerges. The point is collaboration.”

“It doesn’t matter which way you swing the data. All computers are born equal, so ours isn’t any worse”, explains Alan Turing.

“Also, we were being bombed when we made it, and beat Nazi Germany with it.”

“What will the machine do? Nobody knows. Is it thinking? Who cares? If it quacks, it’s a duck.”, says Turing.

“We’re selling them too. Can you afford to be without?”

U.K. Government drove Turing to suicide for his taste in companions.

Meanwhile:

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U.S. military chose von Neumann’s architecture and made SAGE air traffic control computer for Soviet Russian bombers.

Inside the computer, bits of electricity were beamed off of red hot metal wires all the way to the display, X-raying the user.

Outside the computer, workers parked their cars.

They wanted reliability, so a backup computer ran in the background, ready to take over.

Meanwhile:

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2. Ivan Sutherland liked the pointable display and invented interactive computer graphics.

“See, when I scale the main part, all the sub-parts inherit the change. Then I start the simulation and we’ll see if the chair can bear the weight. Easy as C-A-D.”

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3. Douglas Engelbart, who had been inspired by Memex, looked at the new computers and the state of Earth’s collective intelligence.

He had a worry:

“What if an unforeseen danger is about to hit us? Can we solve the problem quickly enough? Doubtful.”

He had a vision:

"We should use computers to boost mankind's capability for coping with complex, urgent problems."

He worked at ARPA IPTO with master craftsmen orchestrated by J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland (the CAD guy), and Robert Taylor. In 1968 they launched “The Mother of All Demos” on the oN-Line System (NLS), a collaborative desktop environment.

Douglas Engelbart mousing around with other users’ pointers while typing on a 5-bit chord keyboard.

Talking about the structure of knowledge in a real-time collaborative-editing wiki.

Team of programmers wiggling the server’s logic graphs with their mice. No twiddle knobs, only unfeelable pictures under glass.

Internet, then ARPAnet, has been up since then - it may be the most reliable machine ever made.

Moments later:

4. Alan Kay working at the same ARPA IPTO designed the handheld computer Dynabook 1968. (He writes on Quora.)

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Unimpressed, the U.S. Congress fired ARPA IPTO in 1972.

Earlier, over the decades where the congress representatives live:

The Principal contaminants in used oil are Aluminium Dichlorodifluoromethane, Benzene, Antimony Trichclorotrifluorethane, Toluene Arsenic, 1,1,1-Trichloroethane Xylenes, Barium Trichloroethylene, Chromium Polychlorinated biphenyls Other PAHs, Cobalt Sulphur, Copper Nitrogen, Lead, Magnesium, Manganese. Mercury, Nickel, Phosphorus, Silicon, Sulphur and Zinc.

http://www.materialsciencejournal.org/vol7no1/environmental-impacts-of-used-oil/

Luckily a rich company, Xerox, immediately grabbed the project. Whew!

At Xerox PARC Alan Kay (the Dynabook guy) made a user-programmable desktop development environment virtual machine Smalltalk on the first modern personal computer Xerox Alto (“interim Dynabook”) 1973.

Children loved its learnability.

Users loved its understandability: Transparent meanings all the way down to what makes it tick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw&t=157s

"Doing with images makes symbols!”

It was highly learnable, user editable, and crowd collaborable in an unlimited number of persistent, shared workspaces.

It was supposed to make everyone fluent in computers in the same way that Ford Model T with its complete manual for disassembly, maintenance, and repair had birthed a generation of Americans fluent in mechanics who then went on to win World War II, to the Moon, and higher up skyscrapers than ever.

“Learn this as a child:”

“Do this as an adult:”

“Let’s do the same with computers?”, suggests Alan Kay.

[End of preview]

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As there is no import function to Lemmy from Quora, and copy-paste removes formatting and links, this is too tedious for me to rebuild here entirely. Go read the original. More about boring dystopia further down the article.

https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

If you can't stand Quora, here's a copy with all videos broken and images scaled down, with scripts to "mail [dot] ru" for some reason according to NoScript in Firefox: https://archive.ph/4Ka2l The other archiving options offered didn't work.