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Trucker Convoy
Last week the Canadian government used sweeping emergency measures to break up a protest that had shut down Ottawa for three weeks. It froze bank accounts of participants, arrested and charged people with crimes, and succeeded in clearing the streets of “around 400 trucks” in the capital and smaller protests at other US-Canada border crossings. How did a small number of COVID deniers turn their protest into an international incident? The answer, of course, is Facebook.
Ryan Broderick details the timeline at The Verge:
The convoy’s spread across Facebook didn’t gain any real momentum until a video about the protest was posted on Rumble, a right-wing video platform, on January 18th by a user named Ken Windsor and started to get a few thousand shares. In the caption of the video, Windsor shared links to a page called “Freedom Convoy 2022,” which had been started four days earlier, according to Facebook’s page transparency tools.
Before we go any farther, it’s worth noting a few things:
Over 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated
Canada’s two major trucking trade organizations disavowed the protests
The US also has vaccination / negative test requirements for truckers to enter
So, this grassroots “trucker” group was less about vaccine mandates and more about antivax COVID denial, white nationalism, and hatred of liberal government, but those are all perfect tinder for a Facebook conflagration:
On January 24th, a Facebook page run by four people based in the United States posted its first video about the convoy. And based on shares, the page has become so viral that it may be possibly the center of the entire convoy movement online right now. It’s called “2020: What’s the Real Truth,” and, according to Facebook’s page transparency tools, it was originally titled, “2012: What’s the Real Truth,” seemingly based on the 2012 doomsday conspiracy. It then changed its name in January 2021 and pivoted to hardcore anti-vaccine and anti-mask content, posting multiple times a day, advocating for a global revolution against COVID protocols.
So a page that had been a Mayan conspiracy theory hub pivoted to COVID denial, and seems to have been the avenue for the trucker protests to gain international attention. What I mean by “attention” is right wing blogs in the US got wind of it:
American right-wing publisher The Daily Wire, founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, latched on to the story at the end of January and published 66 articles featuring the keyword “convoy” between January 28th and January 31st. And the most popular story of theirs from this time period actually promotes a Facebook group that would eventually get shut down by the platform after barely four days for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies around QAnon.
From there it was a direct line to Fox News, the right wing movement’s mainstream laundromat:
Case in point, over the last month, Fox News aired over eight hours of programming about the Freedom Convoy, warning that an American version was on its way.
On Feb 5th, a GoFundMe that had raised over 9 million dollars for the convoy was shut down after the government claimed protesters were breaking the law and inciting violence. By now the protest was so integral to the American right that the state of Florida and federal lawmakers have called for investigations into the crowdfunding site for suppressing speech, or something. With GoFundMe out of the picture, a “Christian” site called GiveSendGo stepped in, collecting millions and refusing orders from the Canadian government.
Then, in perhaps the only humorous moment of the whole debacle, GiveSendGo got hacked:
GiveSendGo went offline Monday after the breach. The website had briefly carried an image from the Disney film “Frozen,” along with a ticker showing the names, donation amounts and email addresses of people who helped support the cause. The words “GiveSendGo is now frozen” appeared on the screen along with a link describing raw donation data.
Unsurprisingly, it turned out that the money behind the convoy was coming from a large number of Americans:
Analysis of the leaked data by extremism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam shows that while the majority of donors come from the U.S. (56%) and Canada (29%), there are also thousands of donations from overseas, including the U.K., Australia, and Ireland.
The Canadian donors outraised the Americans, but the large number of small dollar donations from the US mirrors many fringe right wing movements. Some of the convoy pages were for-profit endeavors, run by marketing firms in places like Bangladesh. Given the relative success of the Canadian convoy, multiple right wing groups in the US are attempting to capture some of that enthusiasm with their own “protests”. A google search for “trucker convoy” comes up with half a dozen stories about copycats here in the US, even though at least one of them is just one guy who drove to DC and got stuck in traffic.
None of this would have gotten out of hand, led to hundreds of arrests and shut down a country’s capital city if not for Facebook’s algorithm amplifying a very small number of people with loud, hateful opinions, and a right wing propaganda apparatus eager to amplify anything that furthers their agenda.
Grocery Delivery
If you live in a major urban area (and are not in a food desert) it is probably easy for you to buy groceries. The “bodega” concept - a convenience store that also sells groceries - is ubiquitous in many American cities. Traditional convenience stores like 7-11 sell some grocery staples. So, I often wonder why American cities are rife with “rapid” grocery delivery companies, especially when they all seem to be losing money:
A venture capital-backed battle is raging in New York City in the burgeoning field of instant delivery. At least six startups, including Gorillas Technologies Ltd., Jokr SARL, Getir Perakende Lojistik AS and Buyk Corp., are vying to win the chance to ferry groceries to customers within 10 to 20 minutes of their order placement on an app.
Prices are similar to grocery stores, discounts are plentiful, and many services don’t have a fee or minimum order, allowing consumers to request a single pint of Ben & Jerry’s delivered to their doorstep. Food-delivery app DoorDash Inc., based in San Francisco, also recently entered the fray in New York City.
These startups are using the Uber model - light a lot of money on fire offering cheap services, and then??
Since 2020, investors have poured more than $5.5 billion into the six instant-delivery players competing in New York City, with over 90% of that funding raised in the past year, according to Gordon Haskett Research Advisors.
Rapid delivery has been something of a holy grail for investors and entrepreneurs for decades.
But…why? Perhaps I am biased as a city dweller, but I can walk a couple blocks to a store where I can buy groceries? And! Even if this were city bias, these startups are only in cities, where people presumably have easy access to things. I could see, like, college campuses or army bases or places with large concentrations of people but limited access to services. Or! Rapid alcohol (or weed) delivery could be useful for parties or events, but alcohol delivery services already exist in many places. What is the Silicon Valley obsession with making things ultra-convenient, but only in places where they’re already convenient?
Ironically, the one company that has managed to carve out a workable business model in this space is Gopuff, whose headquarters is a stone’s throw from my house - I have never used their service because, again, I have 2 bodegas and a grocery store within the same radius. My understanding is that Gopuff - originally founded with weed deliveries in mind, a concept that faces an uphill battle in conservative-run Pennsylvania - had a limited number of products on offer and did not promise super fast delivery, whereas many of the more recent startups are sending their workers to a store to shop and deliver.
The many billions in startup cash mostly flow to advertising agencies, programmers, and startup founders, not the delivery workers themselves, who brave dangerous road conditions, weather, lousy tippers, and any number of other indignities to eke out a living bringing people free pints of ice cream in an unreasonably short amount of time.
At least one NYC city councilmember is pushing back, proposing a ban on companies promising 15-minute delivery, which he - rightly! - claims creates risky incentives for delivery workers.
Clearly, all this VC money exists and needs to go somewhere, but I can’t understand why they’ve spent the last twenty years failing to make rapid delivery in US cities work, and have come to the conclusion they need to simply throw more billions of dollars at the problem.
NEMT
NEMT stands for non-emergency medical transportation, a way for low income patients or people without transportation to make it to medical visits. Transportation barriers are a big problem in the US health system, and private companies have stepped in to provide shuttle services for patients.
Unfortunately, Uber and Lyft are looking to get a piece of the pie:
Rideshare is a cheaper alternative for healthcare organizations, and some experts think it has the potential to fill gaps in what NEMT services are able to offer. But research so far hasn’t borne that out, and clinicians say they worry that Uber and Lyft drivers aren’t adequately trained to safely transport the types of passengers who typically use NEMT.
Since 2016, rideshare companies have been pitching their services to healthcare organizations. It’s not a marketing gimmick, the companies have developed significant technology around it:
Uber and Lyft now have their systems built into some electronic health record platforms, so doctors can schedule directly through a patient’s medical record. They also have specialized programs available in some cities, called Lyft Assisted and Uber Assist, where drivers provide light physical assistance walking riders door to door rather than just taking passengers curb to curb.
There’s one problem - many of the rideshare drivers expected to provide these NEMT services have little or no training to help patients who may need assistance:
Health rides through rideshare companies are done by contractors who drive for the technology platforms and who get limited training — if they decide to participate in physical assistance programs — or no training at all.
Of course! It is understandable that using Lyft or Uber’s app would be easier for healthcare sites, but they may be unwittingly putting their patients at risk by putting them in the care of an untrained gig worker. One driver who worked in both settings explains:
At [Tim’s] previous [NEMT] company, he had in-depth training, knew that his passengers had medical issues, and had a support system in place that could come and help him out if a rider needed extra assistance.
That’s not always the case with rideshare services. And riders he drove through the disability company often needed more help than was initially indicated, Tim says. “Some are very frail and can’t handle a lot of bumpy roads. We constantly had to adjust our routes to accommodate,” he says.
Lyft drivers who want to join the Assisted program - picking up people who need some physical assistance - take an online training course and no other form of certification to serve the disabled. Drivers who don’t sign up for the assistance programs can still get assigned NEMT rides without their consent.
Ambulance services in America are largely privatized and can be cripplingly expensive for the uninsured. It’s bad enough that many people are using rideshares to get to the hospital during emergencies. It’s worse that the companies have spent years actively courting healthcare facilities to trust their patients to un- or under-trained gig drivers who may not have agreed to help people with accessibility needs.
ID.me
Last month, the IRS announced it was contracting with identity verification company ID.me for its online taxpayer portal. This upset a lot of people, because the government already has a verification system, cleverly named login.gov. Also, because ID.me has been linked to sketchy facial recognition technology, which its CEO sorta kinda lied about:
In interviews and printed statements, including a Sunday interview with Axios, Blake Hall described ID.me's system as purely a 1-to-1 verification in which users video selfies are compared to official documents, such as a driver's license.
[…]
However, Hall acknowledged in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that it also uses Amazon's Rekognition technology to compare the video selfie submitted to its own internal database of previous applicants to identify people who are applying using multiple names.
Privacy advocates voiced concerns that a private, for-profit company would be using proprietary identity verification software to service taxpayers. And then, in a surprise twist, the IRS announced it was dropping the plan, allowing people to opt out of the biometric data collection, and simply using the system they’d already built in the future:
In the face of the backlash, the tax agency abandoned its initial plans to use facial recognition services provided by identity verification company ID.me, an apparent victory for facial recognition critics.
The problem all of this was trying to solve is tax return fraud, which impacts millions of Americans each year. ID.me stepped in to help many states during the unemployment fraud crisis, which we have talked about a bit. No system is perfect, but using taxpayer-funded resources to verify filer identity makes a lot more sense than handing over millions of datapoints to a private company for it to use for who knows what.
Crypto Insurance
One thing about cryptocurrency is that if someone steals yours, it is gone and you can’t get it back unless the FBI or someone steps in and recovers it. Something interesting happened earlier this month when a crypto platform called Wormhole got hacked for $325 million dollars’ worth of Ethereum, and then the company behind it simply replaced the funds, which is a nice thing to do if you have 300 million lying around. I am by no means an expert on crypto, but this is the first time I’ve read of assets being fully restored, which is what would happen if someone stole money from your bank account - for reasons covered by deposit insurance, at least. So, it makes sense that if crypto companies want to be taken seriously as financial institutions, they would offer some sort of protection to their customers:
Binance Holdings Ltd. has built up a $1 billion insurance fund for its users amid a barrage of hacks on cryptocurrency trading platforms, according to a memo.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has been earmarking money for the emergency portfolio since July 2018 and just recently consolidated the funds into one place.
That seems…good? I guess? I mean, the next paragraph in the article says this:
Earlier this month, Crypto.com said customer accounts that held about $34 million in cryptocurrencies and cash were hit by unauthorized withdrawals. Hackers seized more than $80 million of digital assets from a blockchain extension by Qubit Finance last week.
When crypto platforms are being hacked on a weekly basis, it is a good idea to have some crypto in reserve for when you inevitably get hacked. Watching crypto people complain about getting their crypto stolen is a good and endless source of amusement, but crypto companies know that if they want to reach a mainstream audience they need to put some sort of protections in place for their customers. It’s a start.
Short Cons
The Block Crypto - “Over the past few months, users of the Chivo wallet in El Salvador have been reporting a variety of issues with the app, including blocked accounts, unauthorized charges and failed transactions. Meanwhile, phishing scams and bots are targeting people who reach out for help on social media.”
Decrypt.co - “The NFT market got a jolt this week when surprise new entrant LooksRare started piling up massive Ethereum trading volume numbers. But as trading rises on the OpenSea rival, it has become clear that some traders are manipulating LooksRare’s token-based rewards system via a form of wash trading—and the platform doesn’t appear to mind.”
The Markup - “The ads The Markup found—about 20—are from pages with names like “Metaverse,” “Web 3.0,” “Amazon coin,” or “MSFT Web 3.0 Metaverse.” Some ads ran for days before they were pulled down, even those that prominently featured imagery like Meta’s infinity symbol logo or Zuckerberg.”
Reason - “The cops made off with cash after three of those stops, seizing a total of $1.2 million, but did not issue any citations or file any criminal charges, which are not necessary to confiscate property through civil forfeiture.”
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