Lazare

That does seem like the obvious argument, but...

Technically, storing chat history from 24 hours isn't really any different than storing it for 30 days. Or 30 years. Either it's on disk somewhere or it isn't, and if it is, then you can just...not delete it. The option to not delete it may not be exposed in the 24 hour option, while it is in the 30 day option, but courts tend to be skeptical of arguments of the form "we have carefully engineered this machine not to have a button to make it follow the law, thus we are blameless".

And of course, even if it really is difficult (obviously it's not impossible given Google's resources and that this is a Google created tool!) to stop deleting the 24 hour chats, Google had other options. For example, they could make a good faith effort to ensure that critical chats took place in channels or group chats where the history setting was enabled. But instead it seems they made an effort to move chats away from there.

> where would cause irreparable damage to the common offering both internally and externally.

I think you'll find that "being able to comply with the law" is generally seen as a positive. It's actually a feature that Google touts quite highly in the contrext of Google Workspace. :)

Also note that this is something that was totally supported by their chat platform when history was enabled, and if you read the PDF, a constant theme is people upset because they were being forced to avoid newer features (like threads) because you couldn't make it delete chats that should be preserved if you were using threads. So rather than the legal system asking Google to damage their offering by adding a feature to it, we see Google asking staff to use a less capable offering because it was lacking the feature.

It is certainly possible that a court may find that what Google did here is okay; that they didn't have an obligation to either not delete relevant conversations that took place in the channels with extended history disabled or hold those conversations in channels with extended history enabled.

But...I wouldn't bet on it. And note that this also came up with the Musk/Twitter saga:

> In McCormick’s letter today, she says she believes Musk did use Signal. “I am forced to conclude that it is likely Defendant’s custodians permitted the automatic deletion of responsive Signal communications between them and possibly others, and that those communications are irretrievably lost,” she writes. Twitter has requested sanctions against Musk, but McCormick hasn’t decided on whether she’ll sanction him yet.

(Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/5/23389568/musk-twitter-sig...)

Musk responded by folding and aggreeing to purchase Twitter after all. And although there were a number of factors there (his case was horrible) a decent chunk was his usage of automatically deleting Signal chats for communications he had an obligation to retain. And whether or not this was okay wasn't ever really an open question; the questions were whether it happened, and if so, what sort of penalties Musk would have to suffer.

> It would be a large precedent.

Not so much.

The brief answer is that if you know, or can "reasonably anticipate" legal action, you have to take steps to preserve evidence related to it.

So if Google has been sued about, let's say, how they negotiate Revenue Share Agreements (RSAs), then they need to 1) take active steps to ensure any records they have about RSAs are retained, including making sure they aren't caught by any document retention policies and 2) they need to preserve any future records that might be relevant. And they also need to do that if they can "reasonably anticipate" they might be sued, which means (at a minimum) that if someone sends them a formal note telling them that they're planning to sure about RSAs (or whatever) they need to start retaining evidence.

If all your communications are either unrecorded or are deleted after 24 hours, then when you get sued (or receive a notice indicating someone is preparing to sue) then:

1) You likely have almost no retained records you need to prevent being deleted.

2) And in fact you can very likely argue that it took you more than 24 hours to implement the legal hold, so actually all your existing recorded conversations will probably end up deleted.

3) But everything going forward will be covered. And since these lawsuits drag on for years, that's likely to be quite a lot of material. Unless you keep deleting most of them, of course. Which doesn't seem like a good plan, but I suppose we'll see how it works for Google.

This is....amazing. As I understand it:

Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.

That is, Google's theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don't need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.

Which is....a.....theory!

I think it's fine for Google to have a policy to delete chats by default after 24 hours, and...probably fine for some executives to strongly prefer to use the 24 hour history mode by default just in case they get sued sometime in the next 30 days. What I don't understand is what argument exists for why you can delete relevant records after you're under a legal hold.

I guess there's a little complexity here in that Google seems to have called (and thought of) these chats as being off the record - that is, they weren't chats with recordings deleted automatically after 24 hours, they were chats that had no recordings and just happened to have chat history that stuck around for 24 hours. From a technical point of view, that's nonsense; the chat history is absolutely a recording, and slapping a label on top saying "off the record" doesn't change that. But eh, maybe it'll be more convincing to the judge.

I suspect the answer may relate to why "Flam Hill" is being so purposefully vague about how he acquired the shares. But you're right, the story doesn't really make a lot of sense.

See here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...

I haven't personally confirmed it, but it seems that there were only 1k shares outstanding, meaning that Flam Hill somehow had the original 1k created when the company was founded.

This would be a slightly more interesting story if someone found a company where, say, 90% of the outstanding shares were owned by inactive accounts, sneakily acquired 6% on the cheap, and then started and won a vote to become CEO, but it doesn't seem like that happened here. (Assuming that pseudononymous Reddit claim was correct, of course.)

This is a bit less interesting than it sounds.

When you create a corporation (aka guild, free company, etc.) in EVE 1k shares are created by default (you can create more, not everyone does). And this corproration hadn't, so if you have 1k share you own every share in the company (and thus have complete control over the company, if you choose to excercise it).

Now, nany corporations don't really care for the share mechanic, and just leave the shares in the posession of the founder, or place it in a locked down corporate wallet. But somehow "Flam Hill" got all 1k shares in this company. They refuse to say how. Some people suspect the original founder of the company quit EVE while still holding the initial 1k shares, in which case Flam Hill is likely the founder, or someone who obtained the account from them. Or perhaps they were a company officer who got access to the wallet and took the shares, etc.

Which means all the writing about how the directors were AFK or whatever is just window dressing. Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. In other words, there isn't really any obscure rule here or clever tricks. Or rather it is, but it all happened off screen, because the only thing that matters is how Flam Hill obtained control of the shares; once he had it, everything else followed.

It's as if Elon Musk wrote something about how he obtained control of Twitter by the clever gambit of walking up to the HQ carrying a sink. Actually, he obtained control of twitter by buying all of its shares, at which point he could do whatever visual puns he liked because he owns the company.

How come Flam Hill owned every share in the EHEXP? There might well be a fascinating story there of intrigue and theft and betryal there. But this story is just about the boring stuff that followed.

Yeah. Like, steelmanning the argument here:

1) Musk has come out in favour of shadowbanning, or "freedom of speach, not freedom of reach", as he once put it. Twitter isn't stopping you from tweeting a link to Substack, it's just sharply limiting the ways people might see that tweet, and trying to scare people away from following it if they do see it. Which in the most technical sense is arguably not blocking links to Substack.

2) It's possible Substack was scraping Twitter. Or much more likely, they've said they were using the Twitter API to embed tweets into newsletters. That's a perfectly allowed and legitimate use of the API, but it's possible some bug on Substack's side may have made the requests look odd or happen at an unusually high rate. Or alternatively, Twitter has made major changes to how the API works recently, and we know they have a skeleton crew these days. Perhaps (due to bugs or lack of resources) they incorrectly flagged Substack's API usage as malicious. If Musk saw a report that (rightly or wrongly) suggested Substack was misuing the API to embed Tweets, he might have assumed that they were using the API to scrape Twitter.

3) Taibbi isn't an employee of Substack, but he has a Substack and paying subscribers, and thus has a very slight financial interest in the health of the Substack platform. (Only slight because Substack makes it quite easy to migrate off their platform, taking your paying subscribers with you.) But that's still more financial interest than people who aren't Musk have in the health of Twitter. So if you squint, Taibbi could almost be seen as biased against Twitter in any conflict with Substack?

So sure, I can almost find a way to imagine Musk's claims as "technically true but intentionally misleading", "almost certainly false but perhaps Musk wasn't intentionally lying", and "Musk had to know he was lying, but perhaps he was morally very slightly correct". But boy do you have to work hard to force his statements into even that ambiguously positive a frame. :)

> Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.

Totally agreed. There's been a flurry of Twitter competitors, but Musk's actions so far have catapulted Substack's Notes into the forefront, which is hilarious for a product from comparatively tiny company that hasn't even launched yet. Spoutible and Post.news have to consider this little spat an existential disaster for them.

A Panamax cargo ship (which is small by today's standards...) can carry ~5100 20-foot containers (TEUs) with a crew of perhaps 20.

Sailcargo's under-construction flagship can carry 9 TEUs with a crew of 24. So replacing a single Panamax cargo ship means building around 560 of these ships, which will sail with a crew of 13k people.

(Or to put it another way, carrying 9 TEUs might earn you $10k for a trip at current cargo rates. Let's assume you can double that due to charging people a green premium, that's $20k a trip. At traditional sail speeds, you can earn that every 2 months, meaning each ship earns $120k/year, which needs to pay for building the ship, maintenance, food, power, sattelite internet, salaries, etc. With a listed crew of 24 people, that's $5k of revenue per person, per year.)

This isn't remotely economic or scalable, but I'm not sure it's even better environmentally. The amount of resources (especially lumber) that would go into making a fleet of almost six hundred, 150ft long sailing vessels is immense. And then youi think about the cost of having 13k people sailing around - the salaries, the food they'd eat, the medical care they'd consume, the waste they'd generate. And all that to replace just one of the smaller cargo ships still operating, out of the thousands and thousands operating.

There may well be a lucrative niche here; people will pay money for the damndest things! It's entirely possible you can make good money charging people to LARP as a 19th century sailboat crew, sure, why not? But whatever this is, it's certainly not the future of cargo shipping.

(Now the idea of using wind power on cargo ships is potentially promising. Just...not this kind of ship.)

Edit: I should emphasise, the ships they're building and planning to build use quite a lot of of very old trees. You're not building these things from radiata pine! Sailcargo stresses they're using lumber from sustainable forestry, which is great, but they're building one schooner, and replacing just a dozen container ships means building maybe 8,000 schooners. If you were hoping to have them operating anytime this decade, you're going to need to start clearcutting. But it's okay, you can use the land you clear to build the training schools needed for the 200,000 new sailors those ships will need. Because there absolutely aren't 200k crew who know how to sail a tall ship just waiting for a call.

Oh, and in case anyone was thinking, "well, maybe we should just ship less cargo", shipping freight by sea is actually the most environmentally friendly option. If sending cargo by sea becomes more expensive - and it would have to, given the economics of these ships - cargo will start being sent by land or (even worse) air. That does mean you'd need to build fewer schooners, but unfortunately means the environmental impact would be even more negative on balance.

I do love the idea of seeing the the Port of LA swarming with tends of thousands of tall ships. Aesthetically it sounds amazing! But in reality it couldn't possibly work.

I mean, yeah, they could be. Except:

1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database".

2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter.

3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes.

4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do).

5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi.

6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's.

It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.

Even better, if you search for "substacc" or other mispellings of substack, the search actually autocorrects it to "substack" and works correctly.

Especially after their staffing cuts. Even if Substack was doing something (doubtful), and it was so large scale as to show up in their reports and dashboards (extremely unlikely), who's left to look at the reports and notice?

Incomprehensible is the polite version.

1) Substack links are blocked and restricted. I've personally confirmed this, as have countless others. In fact you can't even search for the word substack (or tweets made by Taibbi!) right now. Musk is either attempting some sort of deeply disenguous argument about the meaning of the word "blocked", or he's just mistaken. At best.

2) I can't even parse the nonsense about Substack scraping twitter. It makes no sense on multiple levels. There's no real way they're trying to download a "massive portion" of Twitter's content, there's no way they're "downloading the Twitter database", there's no way they only have a single IP address, and this block isn't about IP addresses, it's about domain names, or in the case of the search bans, actual words. And also, there's no reason why they'd want or need to do whatever he's accusing them of to start their Notes product. This is so garbled is hard to even call it wrong.

3) Taibbi isn't a Substack employee. Not that it'd particular matter if he was, but he's not.

I'm honestly at a loss. This is so goofy and obviously wrong it's hard to figure out if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies, or if Musk actually believes this stuff.

Again though - let's say you do that, and then it turns out that someone has stolen a bunch of the cash - enough to burn through the overcapitalisation.

If the bank isn't insured, then depositors end up taking losses, which means that - certainly for people with less than $250k of deposits - this "safe" bank is strictly less safe than a traditional bank. (And realistically, almost certainly less safe for large depsositors too.) So why would you pay money for a strictly inferior experience as a depositor when a traditional bank would pay you?

And if the bank is insured, then you've got to cover the insurance fees out of the fees you collect from depositors. And the insurance is presumably either FDIC, or something which is some mixture or less generous and/or more risky (FDIC is backstopped by the US government; Joe's Discount Deposit Insurance Agency...isn't.). But even in the best case it's FDIC, in which case...what's the point? You're exactly as safe as a traditional bank, except you're refusing to make loans, so you have to charge your depositors fees.

> If this model were competing with traditional 10% margin banks, it might well be supported by stockholders due to its ability to withstand runs a priori.

It is true that while these models have no benefit to depositors, they nominally benefit shareholders, we are going to be wiped out in fewer cases. (Note, though, that a bank with this model can't neccessarilly withstand runs. Let's say a false rumour sweeps through that one of these banks has had money stolen from the vaults. People correctly realise that if this is true, and they're the last ones to withdraw money, there will be nothing left for them, so the race to withdraw first. Unlike a traditional bank, in this case all the deposits can be returned, but now you've got a bank with branches and staff but no depositors and thus no revenue. And the panicked depositors who pulled their money out and put it in some other bank will have no incentive to bring it back now that you've proven you could cover the deposits. Bankruptcy is likely inevitable at this point.)

But in any case, sure, given the same risk adjusted return, it's rational to always prefer equity in something like Custodia than a traditional bank! But since there's no benefit to depositors, there's no way a bank could make an equivalent return. And while plenty of investors do want low risk, low return investments, it's hard to imagine any of them taking a flyer on something like Custodia, which is likely to be the exact opposite of that.

None of this actually works.

Custodia would not have paid interest, and indeed, that's impossible. Functionally, Custodia was offering a "we'll park your cash in a safety deposit box in exchange for a fee" service, except offered by a dodgy outfit with a lot of crypto links.

Now narrow banks - as proposed by, among others, TNB USA - would be effectively entirely safe and could pay interest. Efforts to set one up were shut down by the Fed because they would, in fact, be too attractive compared to traditional banks. See, eg, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...

> You can't have one bank totally safe from bank runs in an environment where every other bank keeps less than 10% of your cash on reserve. This breaks the system. Either everyone has to be fractional reserve, or no one can be.

That's a somewhat absurd assertion. There's nothing about paying a bank a fee to keep your cash in a safe deposit box which is 1) novel 2) attractive or 3) at odds with a large system of fractional reserve banking.

"You can pay some oddball special purpose depository institution in Wyoming to hold onto your money for you, but they're a bit dodgy and have a bunch of weird ties to crypto. And if they lose it, it's not insured by FDIC. Or you can put it in JP Morgan, and they'll pay you interest, and balances up to $250k are insured by FDIC, although realistically JP Morgan is very, very much too big to be allowed to fail, so the odds of those limits very relevant is almost precisely nil."

If that choice seems at all tricky to you, much less if your answer is "Custodia", you need to realise what an incredibly tiny minority that places you in.

Now, what is a threat to the banking system are narrow banks; for more on that see, eg, Matt Levine a few years ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...

The Fed was pretty clear that they were refusing to allow this business model because it was, in part, too safe. :)

That's not correct.

> The assessment base has always been more than just insured deposits. From 1935 to 2010, a bank's assessment base was about equal to its total domestic deposits. As required by the Dodd- Frank Act, however, the FDIC amended its regulations effective April 2011 to define a bank's assessment base as its average consolidated total assets minus its average tangible equity. Therefore, a bank pays assessments on its total liabilities, not just insured deposits.

From here: https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/deposit-ins...

...no, I really don't think that follows.

It is a weirdly high number. I can only assume it represents some sort of conservative "worst case" estimate, but so far I haven't seen any comprehensive breakdown.

And yes, if it does cost $20b, it will be the most expensive single bank failure (exceeding IndyMac).

Seems like not only the obviously correct answer, but probably the only workable one.

No, I don't think it's the start, and no, it doesn't feel very similar. There's just no obvious asset bubble or other obvious overhang of risk. Credit Suisse and SVB feel like idiosyncratic outliers, not like the first pebbles of an avalanche.

SVB had two main risks:

1. Their despositors were overwhelmingly in tech, which meant they had tons of spare cash they needed to park when interests rates were low and VC money was plentiful, but would presumably need to pull that cash back out later when conditions changed. SVB was founded in 1983, and was presumably well aware that conditions in tech could change, which leads to the conclusion that they were just gambling that things wouldn't change.

2. They had parked an unusually high percentage of that depositor cash in long dated treasuries, which were vulnerable to having their value decline if interests rates rose. Again, SVB was founded in 1983, and was well aware that interests rates hadn't always been roughly zero, and presumably wouldn't always remain so. Again, presumably this was just a gamble that things wouldn't change.

Are we to believe that SVB just totally missed these and, critically, that the reason was because they were all working remotely? Like, the risk management committee would have met, gone "wow, we should hedge our interest rate risk", and then they would have done that and there would have been no issues, but they were all trying to use Amazon Chime, and the sound just wasn't working for like, two years straight, so no hedging was done? The chief risk officer would have done their job, but they had to answer the door because a tradesman was fixing the plumbing...?

What about the horrible ways they communicated with stakeholders as problems mounted? Did remote work cause that tone deaf "don't panic" statement? What about all that lobbying SVB did to reduce how strictly regulated they were? Is the story that if there hadn't been so much remote work, then somehow they would have NOT done that? ...why? Like just mechanically, how is that meant to have worked?

If your story is "our execs will gamble the company away making bad interest rate bets unless their colleagues are physically there to prevent them", I don't think this is really making the executive team sound better!

Write access is a subset of all access, so I don't think we can really argue that the plain meaning of the original statement was about removing write access.

But yes, a missing word is certainly a plausible explanation for how they issued a statement that meant the opposite of what they apparently intended.

I understand you are in a difficult position, but this is a bit absurd.

> During that period you will maintain access to any of your public images.

The only reason that sentence would be in there is if after that period you would lose access to the public images! And from Merriam-Webster, "access", verb, definition two: "to open or load (a computer file, an Internet site, etc.) a file that can be accessed by many users at the same time".

> it wasn't clear what we were going to do about the images.

No, it was quite clear; after the 30 day period we would not be able to pull the images. That's what the announcement said. It was not ambiguous. That may not have been the policy or what was intended to be announced, but the issue here isn't a lack of clarity.

(Also, letting the images stay accessible but disallowing any changes is only marginally better than just removing them, so the current policy - whether or not it's the same as the originally announced policy - is still terrible.)

> At the same time, this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game.

Not exactly. Or rather yes, but the rules changed in 2008, not this week. Specifically after IndyMac failed in 2008, there was significant blowback on the FDIC from Congress, and an unoficial, unnounced policy was put in place to ignore the $250k limit and ensure uninsured depositors took no losses in (almost) all cases.

From https://www.americanbanker.com/opinion/will-fdic-keep-protec...:

> Of the 127 banks and thrifts that failed from Jan. 1, 1993, to the last bank that failed before IndyMac was closed [...] 71% of the total deposits of the 127 failures were in institutions where uninsured depositors suffered a loss, while 29% of the deposits were in institutions resolved through a P&A that fully protected uninsured depositors from any loss whatsoever.

Whereas:

> Since IndyMac, there have been 522 failures, excluding Washington Mutual [...] Of the 522 failures, just 31, or 5.9%, were resolved in a manner that only protected insured deposits — uninsured depositors were therefore put at risk of a loss. Those 31 banks and thrifts held just 4.9% of the deposits of the post-IndyMac failures.

(Washington Mutual is excluded because it was enormous compared to the other failed banks - although since uninsured depositors were protected, including it just skews the stats even further.)

So for the past 15 years, we've had a system where the overwhelming majority (well over 95%) of uninsured deposits were protected, and thus, it would have been legitimately very surprising if recovery for uninsured deposits in SVB wasn't 100%, because it's very clear that unstated FDIC policy is to aim for that, and they've got a strong track record of achieving it. (I will state that I find the hidden nature of this policy problematic, however.)

The only thing surprising about events so far is that there's been enough noise that some new policies had to be announced, instead of it all just being quietly resolved like normal.

The article is blaming people for creating and spreading panic, not (just) for moving money out.

(And in the context of a bank run, there's a pretty good argument that the author is correct too.)

> Insofar as the amatuer hour banks [...] will now be saved from going under [...]

That's the exact opposite of what's happening. Signature has, in fact, gone under.

A lot of it seems to come down to very, very agreesive regulation. Eg, plant designs got approved, work started, then the regulators came back and said "actually, you need to make some major changes to the design", so everything paused and some completed work was torn up, new designs were made, approved (slowly), and then work restarted from scratch. Then it happened again. And again.

The changes weren't bad per se; in one case the regulators decided that the plant needed to be resistant to aircraft impacts; in another that it needed to be more resistant to tornados. But when you have a fantastically complex and expensive engineering project, going back and requiring retroactive changes after approval and after bg has already started is going to blow the budget to hell. And it did.

From the Federal Register notice for the aircraft impact change:

> In making these additions, the NRC is making it clear that the requirements are not meant to apply to current or future operating license applications for which construction permits were issued before the effective date of this final rule. This is because existing construction permits are likely to involve designs which are essentially complete and may involve sites where construction has already taken place. Applying the final rule to operating license applications for which there are existing construction permits could result in an unwarranted financial burden to change a design for a plant that is partially constructed. Such a financial burden is not justifiable in light of the fact that the NRC considers the events to which the aircraft impact rule is directed to be beyond-design-basis events and compliance with the rule is not needed for adequate protection to public health and safety or common defense and security.

That sounds pretty reasonable. As the US government said, applying this rule where existing construction permists exist could result in "unwarranted financial burden" which is "not justifiable" and because the rule is "not needed for adequate protection". It's just a "hey, if you haven't started building yet, why not make it extra super duper safe?" rule. And why not!

But the Georgia plant, at this point, didn't technically have "construction permits", but it did have certified designs, and signed firm contracts for engineering, procurement, and construction, had already submitted its certified costs and schedules to state regulators, and begun manufacturing long lead time components. The cost impact was enormous, but they were still required to go through it.

This regulatory environment is excellent for ensuring that nothing dangerous gets built, because nothing will get built. Is that wise? I suspect not.

See:

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...

https://atomicinsights.com/nrcs-imposition-of-aircraft-impac...

My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled").

And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another when they speak or when people refer to them (although again, in my experience, the overwhelming majority prefer the clarity of "disabled"), the only time I've ever run across someone making a universal dictate about how everyone should speak about all disabled people everywhere, the speaking has been non-disabled. And invariably backing a viewpoint which is tenditious at best among actually disabled people!

And to what end? It sometimes feels - certainly to my partner, hence her anger - an attempt to just sort of pretend the issue dosn't exist so that nobody has to be uncomfortable. Her disability is, at the moment, entirely incurable. She has experienced significant grief over her disability; she would love not to have it. But she does, and relabelling her as "differently abled" or a "person with a disability" doesn't suddenly remove the physical limitations she is struggling with.

Feels fairly simple. A decent chunk of people always disliked SPAs, due to their very obvious disadvantages. Another chunk of people always liked them, either due to novelty or to their, again, fairly obvious advantages.

Depending on who you talk to or what online forums you frequent, you may have had an impression that the first group was far smaller (or larger) than the last group. Due to changes in the media you consume, or changes to the culture of various online forums, it may seem to you like the first group is now larger (or smaller!) than the second instead.

On the margin I suppose a few people who liked SPAs due to the novelty may have got bored with them, but most people, I think, have had pretty static views about SPAs, because the pros and cons are pretty obvious.

Yeah, okay, some prominent engineer tweeted something bad about SPAs last month and it went semi-viral, but prominent engineers have been tweeting and writing bad things about SPAs for the entire existence of SPAs. And more than a few of those have gone pretty viral.

Better question might be "How come I saw this tweet on my feed, but didn't notice all the earlier ones?", but I don't think that's super interesting.

That's not really unusual for Hersh - he's always been prone to being a bit free with the details. Which hasn't stopped him from getting the big picture right in some very famous stories!

...but he also seems to have gotten it wrong in some other cases. Hersh is a fantastic investigative journalist (and a good writer and speaker to boot), but he has very limited credibility because he will make fantastic claims regardless of whether he has the ability to back them up.

I mentioned them in one of my other comments but this is a decent (but long) roundup of Hersh's history: https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11719/

Or for quick summary (but without a lot of the details) see: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/whats-the-story-with-se...