Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Subtitle: A story of where I used to work. Power. Greed. Madness. Read by the author. Published in 2025.

This is a book about Facebook, but it starts so slow, is narrated rather boringly, and is so wordy - why do I need to know the childhood story of the shark attack? - that I skipped randomly ahead after the  detailed story of the New Zealand's prime minister's visit to the Facebook HQ for a photo-op with Mark Zuckerberg. I landed in chapter 46 - Myanmar. Now this was shocking. I knew that Facebook had a role in the genocide - I knew that those who incited it, used Facebook, but I didn't know how important Facebook was in enabling it, starting with: 

• Early on Facebook made deals with local cell phone providers, making access to the Facebook website unmetered, which in practice meant that for most people in Myanmar, Facebook was the Internet.
• Facebook let local users use unofficial Facebook apps, which did not have a way of reporting hate speech. 
• Facebook did not have any local physical presence.
• Facebook did not publish community guidelines in Burmese.
• Facebook had only one Burmese speaking content moderator in 2014, a contractor, in Ireland.
• The head of the Facebook content policy was denying the existence of the problem of accurate and timely moderation.
• Facebook was not interested in developing the Burmese language support, which would help with moderation, even after riots caused by Facebook posts in 2014.
• Facebook hired a second content moderator in Ireland in 2015, who, if I understood correctly, was removing peace activists' and civil society's posts, rather than anti-Muslim hate speech, possibly being in cahoots with the junta.
• A month before November 2015 elections, Facebook removed opposition candidate accounts, which were re-instated by Sarah's team after being informed about it by NGOs from Myanmar (Sarah's team set up clandestine meetings with civil society organisations in Myanmar). 
• To be able to moderate Myanmar properly, Facebook would need to hire hundreds of moderators, like they do in other countries. They hired two extra for the period of elections, also based in Dublin.

...

Sarah writes: to have the best chance for being hired for a senior position at Facebook: be male, older, white, Harvard graduate, and be friends with the few people at the very top. An old Republican, Capitol Hill veteran told Sarah once: "Sarah, you know your boss Joel? He's a Jew who went to Harvard. [...] And his boss, Elliot? A Jew who went to Harvard, and his boss? A Jew who went to Harvard, and her boss? [she answers:] A Jew who dropped out of Harvard? [...] You are not like these people, and you'll never be like them, and the sooner you grasp this, the better.". Sarah took that advice to heart and tried to hire a very good candidate, a Harvard man, hoping to get the senior management's approval for expanding the Myanmar operation. Facebook didn't hire him.

The military lost the 2015 election, but did not give up.

In 2017, Facebook security operations team and civil society groups reported that verified accounts with large following in Myanmar were being hacked and used to spread hatred and fear, so people would demand the protection by the military. Facebook's algorithm promoted these posts because they received a lot of engagement. Sarah's team recommended these posts to Facebook content management and legal teams, but they refused to take them down, arguing they didn't violate local laws.

In late August 2017, the military launched a campaign of atrocities against the Muslim population. At least 10,000 people were murdered. Over 700,000 Muslims fled the country. The UN later recognised it as a genocide. Reporter Paul Mozur wrote in New York Times that the military was using at least 700 people spreading misinformation and hate on Facebook. They took over verified accounts of celebrities, fans, a military hero, etc. to pump out false, inflammatory posts. Troll accounts ran by the military helped spread the content, shut down critics and fuel arguments between commenters to rile people up. 

Sarah's conclusion is that none of her bosses at Facebook - Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, Mark - gave a f*ck.

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Update:

I've listened now to the chapters that I skipped originally. I got used to the narration. The story with the shark is referenced later, so I understand now why it's in. The breastfeeding dramas are super weird to me, not because I'm a man, but because breastfeeding is a natural, harmless thing, and the Facebook's policy prohibiting employees to breastfeed in public is cruel. My wife breastfed our kids in public: on a plane, in a park, anywhere you can sit down. A few months ago I saw a woman breastfeed her baby on a crowded train platform here in Australia. Nothing wrong with that.

It's a very good book overall, and very important to understand Facebook and global politics. It's also important that the author read it herself. It makes it more like a witness statement. If you need to be convinced to stay away from anything ran by Meta, it will help you. 

Speed vs energy use in high-speed trains, or how fast is too fast?

This blog sat in draft for a long while now. It's not finished - I'd like to do more comparisons between existing boxy trains, and new aerodynamic high speed trains, but I also don't want to keep it in draft any longer. This is a very interesting, but also a complex subject with source data often being proprietary (hidden) or hard to calculate. 

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You may have seen arguments similar to this one:

We should be investing in regular trains, not high-speed trains, because high-speed trains cost too much to run, because their energy use increases exponentially with speed. A train going 2x faster, for example 320 km/h vs 160 km/h uses 4x more energy.

This got me interested. Is this true? How much energy are we talking about? How do different trains compare?

There is also another argument against going fast: the increased wear and tear of the electric engines, wheels, bogies, rails, sleepers, traction.

There are also costs of track design: turns have bigger radius, switches have to be longer.

There is also noise.

I will concentrate on energy consumption. 

The simple answer is: the first statement above, as a whole, is not true. It's true that the aerodynamic drag force increases with the square of the speed, but, just like with cars, train designers can improve the drag coefficient to make a train going faster use less energy than another train going slower. An old boxy train going 160 km/h can use more energy than a new, streamlined train going 320 km/h. There are also other factors that determine total energy use on the same route, with the same electrical system, the same atmospheric conditions: mass of the train, number of stops, acceleration, and even more factors that determine the final cost to the operator: number of passengers, cost of electricity - highly dependent on time of day (electricity can be practically free or even have a negative price during the day because of solar generation), line capacity, and even more factors that determine the cost/benefit to the society as the whole: alternative costs vs car or air travel, economic development, greenhouse emissions, particle matter pollution, impact on ecosystems.

 

A 2008 "Increasing energy efficiency of rail transport" article by Adam Szeląg (Adam Szeląg - IEEE Xplore Author Profile), a professor with the Electrical Engineering Department, Electric Traction Division, Warsaw University of Technology:

For example, analyses carried out by Spanish railways [22] regarding energy consumption by a locomotive train (weight 300 t) with a power of 5.6 MW, powered by a 3 kV DC network on a 442 km section (average speed 151 km/h) and a high-speed HST (weight 400 t) with a power of 8 MW (average speed 232 km/h) gave quite surprising results – the locomotive train consumed 9.41 MWh, the high-speed train – 7.93 MWh (approx. 15% less) of energy taken from the traction substation.

https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/253733

https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/253733.pdf

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https://infrastructure.aecom.com/transportation/how-fast-is-too-fast-for-high-speed-rail

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It is shown that, on average, high-speed railway systems usually consume 29% less energy than conventional railway systems. With a comparison of the levels of energy consumption and emissions of high-speed passenger trains with those of all other modes of transportation with which it competes (including conventional passenger trains), the net effects on emissions of high-speed train service on any corridor in the study can be analyzed. This is important because even if the difference in the energy consumption of the Spanish high-speed rail system, Alta Velocidad Española (AVE), and that of conventional rail system is not significant or even if AVE consumes more energy, the diversion of passengers from air travel ultimately yields significant reductions in energy consumption and emissions on a route. The study concludes that each high-speed train passenger accounts for an emissions reduction of approximately 30 kg of CO2 and that this reduction increased on the routes on which AVE reaches higher speeds.

Energy Consumption and Emissions of High-Speed Trains - Alberto García Álvarez, 2010

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Energy consumption relative to the Duplex train should also be reduced by 20%, a result expected by lightening the weight of the train, improving aerodynamics and installing more efficient traction equipment.

https://rollingstockworld.com/passenger-cars/alstom-unveiled-the-first-passenger-car-of-the-avelia-horizon-high-speed-train/

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Energy Consumption Analysis of High-Speed Trains under Real Vehicle Test Conditions

Qing Zhang, Hongjun Yu, Xin Su, Yao Li

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2022/1876579

Game of Mates, How Favours Bleed The Nation

By Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters. Published in 2017.

I wrote this review years ago and kept it as a draft. This book is important to understand Australia. It explains a particular kind of corruption that does not show in international rankings, but is very much real and affects everyone living here. The most recent examples being the AUKUS submarine deal (A$375B over 30 years for 5 boats), the gas exports (unlike Norway, Qatar and other countries, we are giving most of our gas to multinational corporations for free), and the Queensland Train Manufacturing Program (65 trains for A$9.5B).

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This book is a companion to Australian TV series "Utopia" and to a lesser extent "Rake". It shows the unique corruption in Australian politics and public sector, perhaps stemming from the culture of mateship, two-party system where one party is tightly tied to the worker's unions and the other to business, but political donations from big players often are given to both parties equally, and a system of single-seat local, state and federal elections ensures that both parties always rule Australia at the same time, just in different configurations.

Quotes:
"the story how groups of 'Mates' [...] managed to rob us, the Australian majority, of half of our wealth" - page 1.

"He now robs you of a hefty part of your superannuation [retirement savings]. He dodges taxes so you pay more. You pay higher interest rates on your mortgage, higher transport costs and higher medical costs" - page 2.

"[He] is not a solitary individual who finds a corruptible politician, but is a networker, able to forge coalitions with many individuals involved in different parts of the system leading to a Mafia-type hold on individual sectors" - page 7.

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What does not work, to stop the game of mates: more regulation, more transparency.

What works: removing grey gifts, for example from land rezoning: see ACT land system; introducing a public competitor.

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A few examples, not from the book, from Queensland:

1. NGR trains purchase: a 2014 LNP contract for A$4.4 billion for 75 trains (147m long, 445 seats, 140 km/h) and 32 year maintenance.

2. Airtrain - Brisbane Airport railway link - a 35 year concession given in 2001 by the Labor government to a private company for a monopoly of public transport access to the Brisbane airport in exchange for them building the link. The cost to build was $200m. The contract is secret. The only alternative to a private train is a car. There is no bus, no bike path, no foot path. There is even no foot path to a little air museum - Kingsford Smith Memorial. The get on or off the train at one of the two airport stations costs currently $15 extra compared to a same distance travel anywhere else on the network. 1.5 million people used Aitrain in 2011.

3. "NGR accessibility upgrades" - what is primarily, an A$4.47 million for an extra toilet on each of the 75 trains, a 2018 Labor government contract.

Compare with:

Austria:
15 trains and maintenance (150m long, 526 first-class seats, 200km/h) for €0.3B:
https://www.railway-technology.com/news/stadler-rolling-stock-contract-austria/

Italy:
Six years maintenance contract for ETR 500 Frecciarossa high-speed fleet of 59 trains for €0.15B:
https://www.railwaypro.com/wp/trenitalia-awards-hitachi-rail-a-maintenance-contract/

Poland:
71 trains for €0.53B:
https://www.railwaypro.com/wp/koleje-mazowieckie-signs-emus-supply-contract/

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor E Frankl

Read by Simon Vance. Released in 2004.


This short book was originally written in 9 days by a Viennese doctor Victor Frankl, shortly after his release from a German concentration camp. It was first published in 1946 in the author's native German.

According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, possibly in 1991, it belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in the United States."

This book is part a story telling about life in concentration camps, part a foundation for logotherapy - a psychiatric technique used to help patients by finding their reason to live, the meaning of their lives, in their specific situation/point in life.

It's a very good book. I listened to it a few times and probably should return to it a few more times in the future.

When our life has no meaning to us, we are miserable, get sick more often, or in extreme cases commit suicide.

There are three things why our life may be worth living:

1. Doing something that we think is worth doing. Having a goal, a calling, a mission.

2. Loving someone.

3. Suffering, when we think it is worth it, when it has a meaning in a bigger scheme of things.

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One thing that I don't like about the book: in large part it talks about World War Two and the concentration and death camps, but it omits the word "German". When Victor talks about arriving at Auschwitz, he wonders if the train is still in Silesia or already in Poland... Poland is not a well-defined geographical and cultural area. Auschwitz at different times, belonged to Poland, Bohemia (Czechia), Austria, and Germany. Poland was re-created in 1918 after 123 years of partitions. Poland's borders, together with millions of people, were moved west in 1945 by hundreds of kilometers. Poland, in the period described in the book, did not exist as a country with land under its control.

When Victor talks about Dachau, he says "Bavarian camp". He has no qualms to say Japanese or North Korean camps, just not German. 

There was no country named Nazi. 

Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and annexed it. Part of it outright - to Germany proper, and part - to Greater Germany, as a temporary "General Government", until the Generalplan Ost could be implemented. 

Most of the other half of pre-war Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union*, and never became Poland again. These lands are today in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. 

* - or Soviet Russia as it was sometimes called back then - my grandfather who was a young man during the war, was using the words: Niemcy and Ruskie to refer to people who attacked and occupied Poland: Germans and Russians.

On the ground, since 1939 to 1945, Auschwitz was within Germany proper. There was no border between Berlin and Auschwitz. Poles were expelled from the immediate surroundings of the camps. Poles or Poland had no say in its location or management. Poles' role was to die there, not just Jewish Poles, but also Catholic Poles.

This matters, because the use of such language as in this book, helped shift the perception for the responsibility for one of the biggest crimes in history from Germany to Poland:

In 2024, in Germany, an Ipsos poll of 2000 people conducted for the Pilecki Institute showed:
"Asked about responsibility for the Holocaust, 57% believed that Germans and collaborators from occupied nations were responsible to a similar extent. Only one third (34%) believed it was “mainly Germans” who were responsible and 9% that it was “only Germans”."

https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/09/02/gaps-in-germans-knowledge-of-wwii-nazi-crimes-finds-polish-study/

In 2024, in Israel: a poll of about 1000 people lead by Gisela Dachs from Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed:
"Asked whether “the Polish people [are] responsible for their Jewish neighbors being destroyed in the Holocaust,” 47% of Israelis replied: “Yes, exactly like the Germans,” and another 25% said “only partly.” Only 11% of Israelis surveyed said that the Polish nation was also a victim of the Holocaust, and another 18 gave no answer."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/france-seen-as-more-antisemitic-than-poland-in-new-poll-among-israelis/

Germans set up their administration in occupied Poland with German as the official language. Germans introduced terror. For each killed German, ten Poles were killed in reprisal (my wife's grandfather was killed in such a way). Germans killed tens of thousands of Polish leaders. Germans issued a decree that any Pole helping a Jew will be killed with the whole family. Germans told Polish Jews to move to ghettos. Germans starved Jews. Germans told Jews to get on the trains. Germans told Jews to take showers (enter gas chambers)... and now half of Israelis think Poles (Catholic Poles) are responsible for Jews (Polish Jews) being killed "exactly as the Germans"?

No reasonable person would say that a person murdered in an NKVD prison in Lviv in 1940 was killed in Poland, or that Poland or Poles as a nation are responsible. Or for that matter if the NKVD officer was Jewish, no reasonable person would blame Jews or Israel, even partially, for the crimes of the communist Soviet Union.

Nobody uses the adjective Cuban when talking about the Guantanamo camp. It's an American camp, not Cuban.

How widespread is that particular distortion of the Holocaust? Very. Most recent example: when Trump's government started kidnaping people in the streets and sending them to a prison in El Salvador (an independent country), a prison which some compare to a death camp, because there is no legal process to leave it alive, and the conditions there are inhumane, many posts on social media, said "Auschwitz was also not in Germany", or "El Salvador is a new Poland" gathered millions of views, and were NOT taken down by moderators, including by moderators of large Mastodon servers.

Why is this important? Because lies start wars. Lies are behind blood libel pogroms. Hitler's lies about Jews is what caused the Holocaust. Lies, secrecy, and scheming are causing immense suffering of innocent people all over the world. 

This is especially important for Poland, because of Israel's Samson Option policy, which could bring a nuclear attack on Poland if Israel's existence was threatened. This is not rational, but that's what lies do. I remember when someone stole the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from the gate to Auschwitz and a member of Knesset (Israeli parliament) called it an act of war (by Poland). Later it turned out the sign was stolen by common criminals for some collector in Sweden. I know of only one other case when a danger to a state's survival might result in a nuclear holocaust for the world. Russia. In some candid interview, Putin said that if the Russian state was to stop existing, why should the rest of the world exist.

Everything is F*cked. A book about hope by Mark Manson

Read by the author. Released in 2019. 

This is the second book by Mark Manson that I listened to. It's also very good. It's very serious though compared to the other one. There was maybe one bit that made me chuckle. The ending is surprising and a bit of prophetic. I listened to the whole book twice and probably should do it again in a few years or at any time I feel like I everything is f*cked. Which it is now. From the US to Poland, via Australia, Ukraine and Palestine. Everything is seriously f*cked. Lies, hate, and greed cause a great number of innocent people to suffer and die, and it does not look like it will get better... until the AI takes over?

Part I 

Chapter 1 is about the hero Witold Pilecki who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, and told the world about it.

Chapter 2 is about a patient named Elliot, studied by Dr. Antonio Damasio, who after a brain operation lost the ability to have any feelings, while retaining his thinking abilities. This is a chapter about the thinking brain and the feeling brain and their struggle for control over us.

Chapter 3 is about Isaac Newton's formative years and the laws of emotion:

1. When someone/something causes us pain, a moral gap opens up, and our feeling brain wants us to equalise.
2. Our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time.
3. Your identity will stay your identity until a new experience acts against it.

Chapter 4 is about finding a meaning, about religions.

Chapter 5 is about Meta von Salis and Friedrich Nietzsche, and also about religions and the nature of hope.

Part II

Chapter 6 is about Emmanuel Kant and the formula of humanity. Kids are driven by the feeling brain - they are learning what the values are. No empathy. Just needs. Adolescents apply what/if rules to decision making, but approach life as a series of transactions. Well formed adults do things that are good, because they are good, not for any gain.

Chapter 7 is about pain being constant. About the blue dot experiment. 

Chapter 8 is about manipulating feelings in marketing.

Chapter 9 is about the AI.