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"Finance has always been complex. More precisely it has always been opaque, and complexity is a means of rationalizing opacity in societies that pretend to transparency. Opacity is absolutely essential to modern finance. It is a feature not a bug until we radically change the way we mobilize economic risk-bearing. The core purpose of status quo finance is to coax people into accepting risks that they would not, if fully informed, consent to bear."
"You've heard the arguments already. On PBS News Hour, on NPR, and in shiny books published by serious-minded New York publishers, we keep hearing this refrain: Social media and CCTV have stolen our private lives, and we'll never get them back.
There are two reasonable responses to this assertion: 1) Who cares if they have? and 2) No they haven't. Both turn out to be true. Let's figure out why."
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The other problem is that transparent societies are more often societies where privacy is unevenly distributed. Most people have very little privacy, but the rich and powerful can pull the curtains to hide whatever secrets they don't want revealed. Already, we've seen how the political regime in Egypt shut down transparency technologies like the internet when they wanted to hide what they're doing from the world. On a smaller scale, police working for San Francisco's metro system, BART, illegally shut down cell phone access in their stations on a day when they suspected people might be gathering there to protest a BART police shooting.
To tackle this same issue more mundanely, consider this: Can you find out what corporations, law enforcement agencies, and politicians are doing with the same ease as you can find out what random strangers are doing by using Facebook, FourSquare, and Google? No? Then privacy in your society is distributed unevenly.
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The point is that privacy varies from situation to situation, and from group to group. There are stories I share with my friends that I would like to keep private from the general public. I might not suffer any specific harm if strangers find out that I'm dieting, for example, but I'd feel uncomfortable if everybody knew. The situation with a secret is very different. Governments keep secrets not just because it's more comfy, but because revealing them might get people killed — or might reveal the government was so corrupt that its citizens would riot and stage a coup. A secret is a piece of information that could get you fired, or prevent you from getting life-saving health insurance.
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"When all four of these design principles are embodied in a work, another design principle emerges: resilience. Something that is distributed, transport independent, secure and open is very, very difficult to subvert, shut down, or block. It will survive all sorts of disasters. Including warfare. "
In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.
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Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. You can look up the footnote, but that’s an expensive, time-consuming activity more likely to result in failure than success.
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In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.
These derivatives are the root of the credit crunch. Why? Unlike all other property paper, derivatives are not required by law to be recorded, continually tracked and tied to the assets they represent.
in list: Economic Crisis
HackingCongress is a new hub for projects at the intersection of civics & technology, fostering civic engagement and education, advancing government transparency, and supporting communication with government.
Abundant research, deep transparency, and global cooperation are the only ways to deal with geoengineering safely.
So how does Microsoft, or any large enterprise — e.g., the government — embrace a new architecture of communication and collaboration?
In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you'll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we'll also be watching the government...Except it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of po
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