In response to my posts supporting repeal of Section 230 (https://t.co/ceZZWXyzi6 and https://t.co/af0rjlGTVF) I have a number of people give me horror stories about bad post-repeals hypotheticals (thread)

Let me say that none of these hypoetheticals sound that bad to me (I couldn't care less if Substack goes under -- sorry to all the Substackers out there), but let me give a hypothetical horror story allowed by Section 230
Imagine that some right-winger bought tens of millions of dollars worth of ads on Facebook, with a doctored photo, showing your favorite politician, activist, writer, academic etc, doing the the most disgusting thing imagineable
The target of these ads would of course have the right to sue the person who paid for the ads for defamation.
Suppose that "person" was the XYZ corporation, whose existence is a post office box in Lincoln, Nebraska, registered to John Doe.
That would be the end of the line, barring some serious investigative work to find the real person/people behind the ad.
What about Mark Zuckerberg, who pocketed tens of millions from this libelous ad? Well, Section 230 says that he has no responsibility.
That is in contrast to a print outlet like the NYT or broadcast outlet like CNN, both of which could be sued up the wazoo if they had run this ad.
Okay, that's my Section 230 horror story for the day.

More from Economy

Let's discuss how little you actually understand about economics and energy.

The first thing to understand is that energy is not globally fungible. Electricity decays as it leaves its point of origin; it’s expensive to transport. There is a huge excess (hydro) in many areas.


In other words, it can also be variable. It's estimated that in Sichuan there is twice as much electricity produced as is needed during the rainy season. Indeed, there is seasonality to how Bitcoin mining works. You can see here:

Bitcoin EXPORTS energy in this scenario. Fun fact, most industrial nations would steer this excess capacity towards refining aluminum by melting bauxite ore, which is very energy intensive.

You wouldn't argue that we are producing *too much* electricity from renewables, right?

"But what about the carbon footprint! ITS HUGE!"

Many previous estimates have quite faulty methods and don't take into account the actual energy sources. Is it fair to put a GHG equivalent on hydro or solar power? That would seem a bit disingenuous, no?

Well that's exactly what some have done.

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