Did you know you can buy a keyboard made in the US? It looks really nice. The thing is to build a keyboard in the US means it costs $3600!

Norbauer & Co.

the Seneca

the Seneca a keyboard dream from the future Learn about buying from $3600 682 custom parts. Built with two human hands. The Seneca is my middle fin...

For years when I lived in Uruguay we’d buy laptops and phones overseas and bring them back for ourselves but also everyone we knew. Uruguay like most countries in Latin America have very high tariffs on electronics. It’s a stupid tax which hurts the local economy a lot. There is no world in which it makes sense to manufacture high tech electronics in a tiny country of 3 million people whose economy is based on banking, tourism, and agriculture. Nor does it really make sense on Mercosur (South American trade block) level. So it was cheaper to buy a round trip ticket to Miami and buy your iPhone than to buy it locally. There are restrictions on how many devices you can bring in, and to be safe unboxed everything to show i wasn’t bringing in products for resale. But basically every time someone from Uruguay travels outside of South America they’ve got a list of things to buy and bring back for friends and family. There were attempts and making peer to peer market places for the informal tech mule economy but those got shutdown for obvious reasons. Now I live in New Zealand which is a country which strongly believes in free trade and I’m able to buy whatever I want locally or directly from overseas. I’ve got to pay the VAT (GST style sales tax) but other than that it doesn’t matter where I buy it. It’s great. The US is choosing to move towards the system that has failed to serve Latin American countries for decades. Ironically enough given Trump and republicans are pushing it but these trade barriers are really popular with a lot of Marxist economists. 😆 The thing is we know what will happen. The price of an iPhone in Canada and Mexico will be 40% cheaper than in the US. Same thing with laptops and everything else made in China. This will cause a booming retail business along the border. Initially out of reclaimed shopping centers, temporary pop up stores, etc… but there will be so much money in it that you’ll see it get established fast. It doesn’t require much to do a pop up electronics store. Then Americans discovering they can get their name brand consumer and electronics goods across the border will start rushing to get goods at the old pre-Trump prices. Fly to San Diego, take the light rail train to the border, go shopping, come home. At first it’ll be folks buying for personal consumption and friends. But we know if a tax on consumer goods is over 10% then there becomes an economic incentive to evade it. All of a sudden instead of having a problem smuggling drugs and people in to the US you induce economic demand for mass smuggling! Gangs control smuggling partially because it’s illegal and you need extra legal use of violence to regulate the market, but partially because you can control access to the supply. With electronics and other consumer goods, these will be imported and sold freely in Mexico and Canada. So anyone can buy them. And once inside the US then there’s a massive digital market to resell them, after all there’s nothing illegal about reselling that iPhone or Nike shoes you bought but never used or even unboxed. This is similar to the reason people steal Amazon deliveries. Fencing the stolen items is really easy. So it’s easy to smuggle stuff (especially at low volume), easy to buy the product, easy to sell it. The effect of these tariffs is going to be an absolute explosion of cross border smuggling in to the US. It’ll make focusing on drugs and people trafficking really hard. It’s is going to completely undermine effective border control. It’s ironic because Trump has built his political career around the idea of border security. But these protectionist tariffs will undermine that project. Large systems with strong economic incentives are complicated and hard. The global economy is the largest of these complicated systems.

Signal is the best private messaging system available to a non-technical consumer. But it’s not designed for classified communications. And you can get better security and privacy but there are real trade offs. This is all ok. View quoted note →

The people who build large electronics and other stores among the borders of the US are going to make a bundle. We’ve seen this story around the world. #tariffs

I’m excited to @Terry Yiu to take on the nostr signer extension task! View quoted note →

This prediction about potential futures of AI and the world are both fascinating and terrifying. I highly recommend you spend the time to read it.

AI 2027

A research-backed AI scenario forecast.

New Zealand gets a lot of rainfall in storms but this past few days it’s been particularly notable. For folks who don’t speak metric, that’s 13 inches in a 24 hour period, and over 16 inches of rainfall in some places over 36 hours. It did cause some flooding! It’s about as much rain in 36 hours as Los Angeles, Denver, Anchorage, Calgary, or Madrid get in a full year.

This car has an awesome license plate.

Live TV is so surreal… anyway, here’s a screencap of my live interview on CNN…. I got Nostr mentioned! Protocols are the future, we just need to build it.

I managed to focus on the protocol future! I got Nostr mentioned! These live interviews are so stressful. View quoted note →

I’ll be back on CNN live at the top of the hour, in 20 minutes, talking about the Breaking the Bird documentary. Twitter should always have been a protocol, and now we have that. We’ll see what i’m able to get in, these things go so fast.

This is what happens when we decide that the legal system and due process shouldn't apply. The government decides they're going to deport spanish speakers with tattoos because some gang members have tattoos and speak spanish. But then because there's not equal protection or due process rights, a guy with a rainbow autism awareness tattoo ends up in a salvadorian prision without any way to pleed his case. How does he get out of that prision? What happens if they don't like your tattoos? Or what some bot pretending to be you posted online? View quoted note →

Looks like they’re running some AI agent to try and match foreign students to social media accounts. If the US State department doesn’t like the politics of the posts the visa is being revoked. The thing is everyone in the US is protected by the constitution, not just citizens. So this is overturning fundamental rights to free speech and due process. There is no way for these students to contest this. Many people don’t put their full name on social media, often people have the same name. So not only will this violate students first and fifth amendment protections, it will likely be applied to students who simply share the same name or are confused with other students who expressed a political view the government doesn’t like. If this program continues it means that no foreign student in the US is safe from arbitrary deportation. All it takes is someone making a bot pretending to be that student making posts the administration doesn’t like. Since there is no process by which the student can even demonstrate the account is fake!

The Times of India

Hundreds of international students wake up to an email asking them to self deport for campus activism - The Times of India

US News: The US Department of State has asked hundreds of international students, including Indians, to self-deport over alleged campus activism. L...

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8-7-2/ALDE_00001262/

I believe we need some fundamental rights on any social media platform or protocol we use. The rights are: 1. Privacy & Security 2. Ownership 3. Interoperability 4. Algorithmic Control 5. Self-Governance I’ve created a little website to campaign for these rights at

Declaration of Social Media Rights

Five fundamental rights we need for a free, open, and humane social media ecosystem