Academic, technology and data protection law. She/her. š³ļøāš Kraut abroad. Maintaining her sanity behind her avatar since 2009.
Occasionally blogs at https://cybermatron.blogspot.com/
Academic, technology and data protection law. She/her. š³ļøāš Kraut abroad. Maintaining her sanity behind her avatar since 2009.
Occasionally blogs at https://cybermatron.blogspot.com/
Okay I'm a teacher so let me explain this to you in as simple a way as I can.
Let's say you're hungry for a sandwich. So you go to the local deli. You walk in the door, and your credit card is immediately charged $1,000. In return, the deli guy hands you a sandwich ticket - good for one sandwich. You don't get a say in this. You are required to buy this sandwich by law. What's more, there were no signs outside the deli, you received no text message, nobody called you. There was absolutely no warning that by simply walking through the door you would be forced to buy this sandwich.
The deli owner gives you a ticket and tells you your sandwich will be out soon. You don't care. You didn't want this sandwich. But you're not allowed to say no. Besides, you already bought the sandwich. So you take a seat at a nearby table and wait for your sandwich to be delivered.
You sit and watch as every person who walks through the deli door that day is automatically made to buy one of the expensive sandwiches, handed a ticket, and told to wait. Hundreds of people. The deli is starting to get crowded. Because of the demand on the sandwich, you watch as the deli owner starts raising the price of the sandwich throughout the day. It goes up to $1,150 per sandwich. Then $1,500, then $1,900. Before long, the price has skyrocketed to well over $2,500 per sandwich. And you still don't even have your sandwich. The deli owner informs you with pride that this is the single most expensive debut of a sandwich ever.
Finally, after several hours, the deli begins to close. You ask for your sandwich and the deli owner informs you that you won't actually receive it until tomorrow. Today was for BUYING the sandwich, he says. Not selling it. The selling part happens tomorrow. Again, you have no choice in this. This is just how it works. It's the law. Oh well, you think, at least once you have this really expensive sandwich, maybe you can recoup some of your $1,000 by selling it at the current price, which is valued now at almost $3,000.
So you go home, hungry, but with a sound financial plan to try to recoup your money. The next day, you're first in line at the deli. You have your ticket in hand. But before the store opens, the deli owner lets in all the employees. You notice some of them are carrying sandwich tickets of their own. Some of them have a lot of tickets. Some of them are hauling in tickets by the wheelbarrow. You try to get in, but you're not allowed yet. Again, it's the law. Inside, you can see the employees of the deli trading in their sandwich tickets for sandwiches. And because there are so many sandwiches going out the door, the price of the sandwich starts dropping again.
After the first hour, the price has dropped to $1,500. Then back to $1,000, and then, to your horror, you see it dip to $750. Then $450. Then $100. Finally, the last employee turns in their ticket and leaves. And the price of the sandwich has settled all the way down to $50.
THEN, the deli owner opens the doors and lets the general public in. You turn in your ticket, which you paid $1,000 for, and receive your sandwich, valued now at $50. Don't feel bad, the deli owner says. You came here for a sandwich. You're getting a sandwich valued well above market value. Why, that sandwich from any other deli would only be worth $20, he says. You should feel good about this! You basically made $30 today!
You look at the gigantic stack of money in the corner, from all those thousands of enforced buys yesterday. There must be trillions of dollars there. Yes, the deli owner says with pride. I am the world's first trillionaire. And I did it all just selling sandwiches. Doesn't that make you feel great? What's wrong? Can't you just be happy for me? I worked hard for this money.
Congratulations, now you understand how Elon's SpaceX IPO made him a trillionaire, and who that money came from. It came from you. On July 1, SpaceX will get two things that no other major IPO in history has ever been granted. First, they will be automatically added to the NASDAQ 100. And because of that, every single person with a retirement account, or student savings account, or mutual fund, will be forced - not asked, not suggested - required by law, to buy SpaceX stock. And you'll do it at SpaceX current July 1 prices. This will skyrocket the value of SpaceX stock through the roof. This isn't theory. This is basic supply and demand. The chair of the NASDAQ 100 said this will happen. Then, the second half of the trade will happen. Two weeks later, every employee of SpaceX who have been up to now paid in SpaceX stock, will be allowed to sell up to a fifth of their shares. They will do that at July 15th prices. This will flood the market with stock. And again, this isn't theory. This will drive the value of SpaceX stock down. Basic supply and demand Economics 101. The more supply there is, the lower the value. Then, and ONLY then will you, the general public, be allowed to liquidate any mutual funds or IRA accounts, that were forced, by law, to buy SpaceX. And you will do that at August 1 prices.
Elon isn't becoming a trillionaire from selling rocket ships. No more than that deli owner got rich from selling sandwiches. Elon is becoming a trillionaire because he rigged the game. He is forcing you, yes you specifically, by law, to purchase shares of a company that he, and every single other person from the CFO on down admit, in writing, in their IPO prospectus, that they are going to immediately devalue as soon as they can. It's a classic pump and dump con. And you're the mark.
Iāve lived in this country for just over 30 years and the FPTP electoral system that is allegedly preferable because it āprovides political stabilityā has just gifted us my 10th Prime Minister.
During the same time, Germany, which uses proportional representation, has had five Chancellors. Maybe itās time for a rethink.
Not only is there is an institutional crisis in higher education, people across the UK are increasingly unconvinced of the value of a university education.
Interestingly Green voters (36%) & Reform voters (42%) are the most sceptical... while much of the issue seems to revolve around student debt as an increased & ongoing cost, depressing income from work(ing).
Of course, this may also be the background condition that underlies Govt.'s lack of interest in the sector...
One of many things I'm concerned about is the growing trend of people using Gen AI in law, presenting to clients and to courts their Professional opinion, which may or may not in fact be based on existing precedent, nobody checked.
This is coming up today because there's yet another case of contempt of court: https://beige.party/@adub/115820660155470327
I noted in the comments that someone's compiling an international database where someone presented incorrect AI law in court: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
In my opinion it entirely undermines the legal system, which is theoretically based on precedent, meaning specifically "what that judge said in that prior case." Not "what judges might plausibly have said, in a format that looks like fact, as programmed by tech bros."
Generative AI, I would submit, makes a mockery of the law.
Using AI in court? Yikes. š¬ "In one notable case, a Toronto lawyer is facing a criminal contempt of court proceeding after including cases invented by ChatGPT in her submissions earlier this year, then denying it when questioned by the presiding judge. In a letter to the court months later, the lawyer said she misrepresented what happened out of "fear of the potential consequences & sheer embarrassment."" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/increasing-ai-use-canadian-courtrooms-carries-risk-9.7031131
Despite this faded prominence, the Bund is all but unknown today. I was only vaguely aware of it, even though I attended seven years' worth of Yiddish classes at the Workmen's Circle, a Bund-originated socialist fraternal organization, and was bar-mitzvahed at a Workmen's Circle hall. It wasn't until I read about the Bund in Naomi Klein's essential 2023 book *Doppelganger* that I first caught a glimmer of its significance:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
3/
"The truth is, tech doesnāt have an image problem. It doesnāt have a message problem. It has an intention problem. [ā¦] When you launch a product thatās designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnāt that you havenāt told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them."
https://www.theringer.com/2026/05/28/tech/pope-leo-xiv-ai-encyclical-tech-industry-problems
What do I think the answer is for preventing tech history from unproductively repeating itself? See pages 1758 et seq. for the federal part of my answer.
1. Threat meta-modeling and
2. A new Bureau of Technology Safety (BoTS) with computer security as part of its focus, whose job is to coordinate/fill gaps in other agencies' tech authorities, to help them play nicely with each other on tech, and to nudge fixes for recurring problems and blind spots in the economy.
https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk15026/files/2026-03/59-3_Matwyshyn.pdf