It is Christmas, again. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmm8UAwPAE5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Artificial Intelligence Thoughts

I am not a technologist, or a computer scientist, or an AI researcher, or an engineer. I don't really know how these AI platforms work. I understand at a high level what they do, but not how they do it. Here are some of my thoughts:

First, for-profit tax filing companies lobby to ensure that only they can provide free tax filing services. Then they make it really difficult to find the free version of the service and automatically upgrade customers to a paid version without telling them. In order to get back to the free version, you have to start your return over. And now, they've been caught handing out personal data from your tax return.

Maybe they shouldn't be the only option available for tax filing?

A public, free option for filing a simple tax return should be authorized by Congress and implemented by the IRS. The only parties hurt by this would be for-profit companies who would have to improve their services now that the average consumer has a real choice.

My ideas for Twitter

The $8 monthly fee to have a blue checkmark on Twitter is an idea that I don’t like. Identity verification in and of itself is not something that Twitter should be monetizing. Here’s a thread arguing one reason why that makes the case better than I could.

Adding to that thread, identity verification is not something which Twitter incurs a direct cost to maintain every month for each account it verifies. Making it a monthly fee is transparent to everyone as “we need to make more money off of you and we don’t have any real ideas on how.”

Verified Twitter users do create lots of content that benefits the Twitter platform; it’s important to keep them posting that content on Twitter and not somewhere else. The relationship between the company and its users does need to be rebalanced so that Twitter gets a fair share of the economic value created and doesn’t lose money every year. An arbitrary $8 monthly fee is not a symbiotic solution, it feels closer parasitic. Twitter does need changes to monetization, but this shouldn't be it.

Anyone can criticize, few can solve, so here’s an alternative idea for Twitter:

Celebrities and businesses generate real value for themselves from using the Twitter platform to post their content, influence their followers, and have their tweets go viral. Charge them a monthly subscription for that privilege.

Any account that has more than a certain threshold of followers would no longer be eligible for the free version of Twitter. Market research and internal analytics could provide insight on where that threshold should be. Maybe it’s 10,000 followers. Maybe it’s 100,000. Most accounts over that threshold will pay. If the account doesn’t pay the subscription, new people can’t follow them. Like Facebook maxing you out at 5,000 friends.

Charge these qualifying accounts a monthly subscription based on their follower count. This subscription comes with perks though: identity verification, that sweet blue public figure checkmark, and fewer ads and promoted tweets. Add some tools to help with replies and managing your feed. An edit button if you want. The ability to go LIVE or post longer videos or whatever.

Twitter would remain free with advertising for the average user, as it is today. 

Elon Musk hates bots, well add a faded white check for identity verification for users under the 10k followers threshold that publicly shows you proved to Twitter that you’re a real human being. You could use what Fintech services do before setting up new accounts as a model. Make that service free because it makes your product better and increases the value of your advertising product.

Anyone can sign up for the monthly subscription version of Twitter if they want to get rid of ads and see fewer promoted tweets. If Twitter adds new services like premium content or new features, your subscription gives you access to that too. Long term, Twitter can work on adding payments and shopping to the platform and take a commission on sales generated on platform.

There, we're on our way to solving Twitter.

This proposed $8 change doesn't help with identity and bot problems, it probably has the opposite effect. If you really believe that Twitter is the public square of our time, adding features to confirm more people's identity and improve authentic discourse seems a more appropriate path forward for evolving the platform. But maybe it was never really about that for Elon.

Two Billionaires walk into a blog

I've decided to write about the recent story that the Patagonia founder has given away his company. I've seen a lot of positive feedback on the news; a billionaire giving away his wealth to fight climate change. The New York Times was quite positive, in fact.

However, when news broke that a billionaire had donated his company to fight for conservative values, the reaction was much more negative. I think we need to take a deeper dive into both donations to see the trend forming; a trend for billionaires to use tax-exempt organizations to get what they want, without paying the taxes that they should be.

Here's your Big Summer Blog Blowout

What an eventful summer it has been, I'm not even sure what topics I should write about here. Elon Musk is trying to terminate his contract to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. Not gonna cover that; he's a silly rich man who thinks rules don't apply to him because 100 million people (and bots) follow his every posted thought. If that story interests you, I'd recommend finance blogger Matt Levine as a good source of analysis.

Monkeypox has been a story, but I think collectively we're all trying to ignore that pandemics are a thing to worry about anymore. The Daily did a good episode on how we bungled that one.

There is a water crisis in the United States. The cause is a combination of climate changes and human behavior, we are using water, and have been for years, in a completely unsustainable way. The resulting problems are bad...sometimes even apocalyptic. For 100 years the states sharing the Colorado river have been using an allocation system that grants right to the water that add up to more than 100% of the actual water in the river. In Utah, the Great Salt Lake is drying up too. You may be thinking, "Silly Billy, that's a salt lake, we don't drink out of that one." That's true, but we are using up its tributaries and the resulting dust pollution from the dried up lake is kind of poisonous to living things. Also, migratory birds rely on the brine shrimp in the lake; humans aren't the only living things in the ecosystem. Here's your further reading from the NYT on that story.

It's June 2022 and I'm back I guess.

As I mentioned in my December 2021 post, I am not planning to do these posts with any regularity from here on out, but I do think it's a good exercise for whenever I finish a book or have something to say. Also, I had a very busy tax season (over 250 tax returns this year) and it just wasn't feasible to force myself to write during that time.

December 2021 - Think Again

This month I read Think Again - by Adam Grant. Grant is an organizational psychologist and has a podcast that I really enjoy, Work Life, so I wanted to give his latest book a read. The book addresses the practice of rethinking and how important it can be to our growth and development. Too often we approach what we think and what we believe as a final destination, not as a continual process. We instead should periodically re-evaluate what we think based on new information and data, keeping ourselves open to hearing new evidence even if it doesn't agree with the opinion we currently hold. By practicing this, we can engage more openly and productively with people who may hold different beliefs than we do.

Questions we should ask ourselves about our opinions: What evidence do I have that supports this position? What evidence would affect my position or change my mind? What are the strongest arguments against what I think? We can't ask others to change their minds about something unless we have, in good faith, considered changing ours first. Being a good listener goes a long way too.

November 2021 - Educated

This month I read Educated - by Tara Westover. I started this book thinking it was only going to be about education; my assumptions were very much wrong. The author tells her story of growing up in a survivalist family in the rural mountains of Idaho, never having stepped into a classroom or gone to school until she was seventeen. Her father preached fanatically that Doomsday was coming and isolated the family from the government and hospital systems as much as possible. In order to escape working in her father's junkyard or for her mother as a midwife, the author decided to teach herself enough to get into college at BYU, and then eventually studied at Cambridge and Harvard. It's a fascinating journey that the author tells really well.

October 2021 - The Ascent of Money

This month I read The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - by Niall Ferguson. I've been wrestling with the concept of cryptocurrency over the past year; what is it, what utility does it have, how will it affect finance, and what will its future be. I picked this book to look back to the beginning of financial history to learn more and maybe find some insight.

The author, Niall Ferguson, is very smart. I appreciated his ability to pare down entire financial systems and periods of history into concise stories and summaries. I can't begin to fathom the amount of historical knowledge that he has and didn't have space to include in this book. He covers the first units of payment and exchange in the ancient days of business, the adoption of rare metals as currency, and the invention of credit and bond markets in the city-states of Italy to fund trade and war. The first stock market, central bank, and hedge fund; all explored in-depth and how they affected the world. A couple pieces that I enjoyed in particular:

September 2021 - The Broken Ladder

This month I read The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die - by Keith Payne. Payne is a social psychologist who presents a great deal of statistical evidence and studies for us to use in the discussion about inequality in America. His arguments are well-researched, persuasive, and also nuanced. I've picked out a few highlights that I found particularly interesting.

- A 2014 study asked people from across the political spectrum how much more a CEO should make than their average worker. People from the right and the left agreed (without knowing it) that a CEO should ideally be paid about 4 to 5 times more than their average worker. They also thought that, on average, CEOs in the United States actually make 30 times more than their average worker. The perception of inequality in America is clearly there, from both sides of the political spectrum. In reality, the average CEO made 350 times more than their average worker in America in 2012 (it's probably higher now).