It’s grim - to start a new year, tweeting about the pandemic. But here we are.
I’ve spent the past months coming to terms with the fact that most of my neighbors - & a huge swath of America - know of Covid’s lethality, & simply do not care.
They know it’s a very real threat.../1

My little Jacob Wohl story: August 2016, we're sitting around the trading turrets at my office on a bored to tears slow day. Our receptionist said someone was here for his 2pm appointment. None of us had an appointment on schedule. Who is it? we ask? Some guy named Jacob Wohl 1/

Jacob Wohl, for those out of loop, gained quite a bit of notoriety for becoming the youngest guy to ever get himself barred for life from the financial industry. Now he's waiting in our lobby to pitch something. We're a large merchant bank. 2/

Send him in, we said. In walks young Jacob asking to be seeded with $25mm to start a new hedge fund in exchange for an ownership stake in it. Oh, & he needs an office. And a Bloomberg station. And needs to borrow staff until he can hire some guys. And he needs a leased car... 3/

And he needs an answer today. Right now. Because there's a competing offer from Izzy Englander's firm Millenium (we know those guys well). We fight the urge to literally start laughing, but do ask him...hey, you the same guy who got banned by regulators? He didn't even flinch 4/

He went on about that being untrue & handed over a letter he said was from his lawyer who had confirmed he was not barred, had been vindicated but it 'just wasn't in the system yet at the SEC, CFTC'...whatever that means. 5/

The numbers on their face for the @FCC RDOF auction are exciting - lots of Gigabit winners. But it’s important to remember the job is just starting. These rural areas don’t magically get Gig today or tomorrow. 1/

The job is only done and the celebration can really only begin once we see that rural Americans are actually going to get the broadband they’ve been promised. 2/

And that’s the rub here - at least from preliminary indications, there are LOTS of question marks clearly hanging out there once you look past the gloss and proclamations. And since we won’t know for maybe 5 years if it worked, due diligence is essential now. 3/

A number of big winners have offered some service but never done Gig. This would be like giving hundreds of millions of $ to firms that have repaved residential streets to now design & build our interstate highway bridges. 4/

A number of big winners are using tech that has done Gig (maybe) only in tightly controlled applications that don’t look anything like rural America. This would be like giving interstate highway $ to firms who’ve built lots of scale models but never actually built a bridge. 5/

1. I was walking in the woods yesterday and I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one I wanted to have. I was thinking about today’s class, where we are reading Kimmerer’s ‘Gathering Moss’. I’ve taught Braiding Sweetgrass in multiple classes every year since 2016. It’s eminently teachable

2. Both books are beautifully written. Students uniformly enjoy them as assigned reading. They do a great job communicating to non-Indigenous folks the contours of basic Indigenous relationships to more-than-human beings. They’re wildly popular with white readers.

3. I’ve found Braiding Sweetgrass to be a great entry point for non-Indigenous folks to Indigenous scholarship. But this is where yesterday’s epiphany comes in. Neither Braiding Sweetgrass or Gathering Moss tends to the deep deep lineages of Indigenous scholarship in Canada or US

4. As the popularity of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has soared, I’ve seen more and more white folks wax on about ‘braiding knowledge’. But they often don’t know any of the lineages of these concepts beyond what is presented in this one book. They confidently run with this.

5. Kimmerer does a commendable job of weaving in her own experiences, her family stories+nods to some very important knowledge keepers who deserve to be celebrated for their work. But Braiding Sweetgrass does not tend to the citational politics Sara Ahmed & others teach us about

THREAD: We filed RTIs on behalf of @no2uid asking the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare questions about how your personal data will be protected while you're using CO-WIN, the COVID-19 vaccination registration platform.

We got answers... kind of. Here's the new info.

1/n

Just like with Aarogya Setu, many Indians are worried that about the potential CO-WIN has to leak your data or threaten your privacy in the name of dealing with a pandemic. So, we asked the MOHFW some questions about data protection under the Right to Information Act.
2/n

In the responses we received, MOHFW said that it cannot provide us with a privacy policy on CO-WIN (?!).

Thankfully it was clarified that Aadhaar is not mandatory for registration on Aarogya Setu or CO-WIN, and that physical vaccine certificates will be provided to everyone.
3/n

The data it says it will collect will be your name, gender, date of birth, photo ID, and number.

National, State, and District level admins will have access to use the app, but there is not much further clarity on this point.

But most importantly...
4/n

The responses (or rather lack of them) related to your data privacy and protection are completely vague. We received no clear answers on which Ministries/Depts will have access to your personal data, the permissions provided, etc. This is a failure in terms of transparency.
5/n