Big Bitcoin news →

Felix Salmon, Bitcoin Tax Ruling:

The IRS has spoken:  Bitcoins are property, not currency...

For a payments geek, the real lesson from the IRS Bitcoin ruling is that for a currency--or any payment system--to work, its units must be completely fungible.  One reason dollars work really well as a currency is that one $20 bill is entirely fungible with another $20 bill.  This means that when I pay, I don't have to make a decision about which $20 bill to use (unless I have some idiosyncratic attachment to the crisp ones or the like). It means that when I accept a payment, I don't care which $20 bill I am given, in part because I know that my ability to spend that $20 bill will not depend on which $20 bill it is...

The IRS ruled that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are property, not currency.  This means that they are subject to capital gains taxation.  And that means that Bitcoins are not fungible.

Japan to Let U.S. Assume Control of Nuclear Cache →

Japan will announce Monday that it will turn over to Washington more than 700 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and a large quantity of highly enriched uranium, a decades-old research stockpile that is large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons, according to American and Japanese officials.

The announcement is the biggest single success in President Obama’s five-year-long push to secure the world’s most dangerous materials, and will come as world leaders gather here on Monday for a nuclear security summit meeting.

FiveThirtyEight and the End of Average →

... This is the angst that fills those in the news business, and society broadly. The reality of the Internet is that there is no more bell curve; power laws dominate, and the challenge of our time is figuring out what to do with a population distribution that is fundamentally misaligned with Internet economics.

A Climate Analyst Clarifies the Science Behind California’s Water Woes →

Great post. Shows a little of the nuance in the debate. Climate scientists are quite aware that the issue isn't just "is/is NOT climate change", even if the media tend to make it seem that way by preferring soundbites.

'I Am Still Called by the God I Serve to Walk This Out' →

An interview with Jordan Davis's mother. The more I read about the Michael Dunn case, the more I realize the deck's stacked against black (or those perceived as black) Americans.

The internet is fucked (but we can fix it) →

Flowery language aside, this seems to be where we're heading:

In a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it now has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure monopoly built on fiber optics and kitty GIFs.
 

Fewer and fewer companies own more and more of the content, or communication lines across which that content flows, or both. The U.S. is already notorious amongst industrialized nations for its relatively low competition in this area. That the FCC, the one government regulator, tasked with watching out for consumers' interests in the communications industry, keeps mumbling about what it's going to do, is worrisome.

Breaking Up the NSA →

I regularly turn to Bruce Schneier for the latest on breaking security news.

The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission -- protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies -- has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.

I'd argue that many of the problems with the NSA were there well before the GWOT, though they have been exacerbated since (along with those in every other intelligence/security agency).

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA's missions...

Breaking up the NSA will certainly cause problems, but it sounds pragmatic, especially given "[t]hat the NSA can, in the view of many, do an end-run around congressional oversight, legal due process and domestic laws..." vis a vis domestic surveillance.

'Desert Inhabited by Nomads' →

IN my quest to gain all knowledge of what's going on in the world and why a great essay:

Mauritania has been overlooked for a variety of reasons that began even before the country achieved its independence from France. The country’s history of an altered social structure produced by colonialism and the consequent social tensions that this brought about along ethnic and tribal lines during the period following independence bears watching as an overlooked case study of the challenges that many states in the region faced following independence. The state looked to religion as a unifying force, but relied increasingly on a pan-Arabist outlook premised on the exclusion of the Afro-Mauritanians who were the very inhabitants who had experienced favoritism under French colonialism. Later, Mauritania’s period of limited liberalization, and the subsequent history following the abortive democratic transition in the mid 2000s, merits observation because it echoes – and has sometimes presaged – well-covered events elsewhere in the region, along with particularities unique to Mauritania.