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bernardoverda.bsky.social
BernardoVerda 🤔
@bernardoverda.bsky.social
1.5K followers 2.1K following 3.4K posts
Retired. Into science, environment, climate, literature, Proportional Representation, Esperanto, science fiction & fantasy...

More interested in "policy" than "politics"
-- but nonetheless prefers "woke" over "zombie".

"Live & learn, or die an idiot."
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bernardoverda.bsky.social
Patent trolls have hated IPR from day one, and they’ve fought it relentlessly. They challenged the process all the way to the Supreme Court—and they lost. Then they tried again. And they lost again. Losing twice at SCOTUS would stop most campaigns, but the troll lobby just pivoted: for years they’ve been pressuring Congress to change the law and kill IPR outright. Here’s what they want to do, and why each piece is bonkers: First, IPR would only be available if the patent isn’t being litigated. Which means all a troll needs to do to block IPR is… file a lawsuit. You’ve just created a massive incentive for more patent troll litigation. The cheaper, faster administrative process gets shut down the moment the troll decides to sue someone—which is exactly what trolls do. Second, if you file an IPR, you forfeit your right to challenge that patent in court later. Think about the game theory here: a troll threatens to sue you. You try to use IPR to kill the bad patent. But now, if the troll decides to sue you, you’ve permanently given up your ability to challenge the patent as part of your defense! The troll has everything to gain and nothing to lose by forcing you into this choice. Again, more incentive to sue. Third, if anyone challenges a patent in any process and it survives, no one can ever challenge it again. Ever. New prior art surfaces five years later proving the patent is garbage? Too bad. Someone else has better evidence? Doesn’t matter. One shot, that’s it. This effectively gives bad patents a shield of invincibility after a single successful defense. IPR has actually worked in killing off genuinely terrible patents, including the infamous troll who claimed a patent on podcasts. He tried to shake down all the top podcasters. Without IPR, that patent might still be out there. Or if you use a fitness tracker today, thank the IPR process. It killed off a ridiculous patent that was used by a troll to try to shake down every company in the space. IPR works. Don’t let the PTO kill it off to appease the troll lobby.
November 25, 2025 at 11:37 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully. A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example. This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive. Let’s be precise about the mechanics. The Trump Administration isn’t investigating Kelly for corruption or lawbreaking. It’s investigating him for defending the principle that law constrains executive power. The investigation isn’t meant to find wrongdoing—it’s meant to intimidate through spectacle of state punishment. The message isn’t “we enforce laws” but “invoke constitutional constraints and we come for you.”
November 25, 2025 at 11:27 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Why all this actually matters:
This is what a lot of new state laws are actually requiring, even when they use softer language like “age assurance.” Age verification doesn’t just confirm you’re over 18, it reveals your full identity. Your name, address, date of birth, photo—everything. Here’s the critical thing to understand: age verification is really identity verification. You’re not just proving you’re old enough—you’re proving exactly who you are. And that data has to be stored, transmitted, and protected by every website that collects it. We already know how that story ends. Data breaches are inevitable. And when a database containing your government ID tied to your adult content browsing history gets hacked—and it will—the consequences can be devastating. Why This Confusion Matters Politicians and tech companies love using these terms interchangeably because it obscures what they’re actually proposing. A law that requires “age assurance” sounds reasonable and moderate. But if that law defines age assurance as requiring government ID verification, it’s not moderate at all—it’s mass surveillance. Similarly, when Instagram says it’s using “age estimation” to protect teens, that sounds privacy-friendly. But when their estimation fails and forces you to upload your driver’s license instead, the privacy promise evaporates. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most lawmakers writing these bills have no idea how any of this technology actually works. They don’t know that age estimation systems routinely fail for people of color, trans individuals, and people with disabilities. They don’t know that verification systems have error rates. They don’t even seem to understand that the terms they’re using mean different things. The fact that their terminology is all over the place—using “age assurance,” “age verification,” and “age estimation” interchangeably—makes this ignorance painfully clear, and leaves the onus on platforms to choose whichever option best insulates them from liability. Language matters because it shapes how we think about these systems. “Assurance” sounds gentle. “Verification” sounds official. “Estimation” sounds technical and impersonal, and also admits its inherent imprecision. But they all involve collecting your data and create a metaphysical age gate to the internet. The terminology is deliberately confusing, but the stakes are clear: it’s your privacy, your data, and your ability to access the internet without constant identity checks. Don’t let fuzzy language disguise what these systems really do.
November 25, 2025 at 11:20 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Great intro. Great argument.
I love America. You’re so fucked up. But I love you. You’re built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people—you and I—can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers and everyone has standing to speak. Some of us have gotten really rich. Really powerful. And they’ve decided the real problem is that we dare to think we’re capable of this endeavor. This experiment in self-governance. They want to replace your Constitution and its laws with a Terms of Service Agreement. They say the “customer service” will be better. They’re the cognitive elite, you see. And the commons—us—is a tragedy. Unrestrained, we’ll vote for regulations and taxes that will slow the march of progress.
November 14, 2025 at 12:05 AM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Rather than running a correction or retraction, they simply rewrote the article at the same URL, with the same timestamp, transforming a story about “SNAP beneficiaries threatening to ransack stores” into a story about “AI-generated videos going viral” even though the article doesn’t make any sense. The deception is in the architecture: casual readers following the original link would have no idea the entire premise had been fabricated.
November 4, 2025 at 7:52 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Again, I feel the need to repeat this because it is so incredibly stupid. Literally in the same sentence where he says CBS had to pay him “a lotta money” because it edited a 60 Minutes interview, he tells them to edit the interview not to air that section. Then he claims “you can’t have fake news.” Even though what he’s claiming is literally fake news. They didn’t pay him because they changed the answer. They paid him to get their merger done. Everyone knows it.
November 3, 2025 at 9:07 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
It is so fucking stupid. As you’ll no doubt recall, last year, Trump sued CBS over the show. Right before last year’s election, 60 Minutes had interviewed Kamala Harris. As every such news show does, it had edited the interview down to make it fit into the TV time slot. MAGA culture warriors, desperate for anything to culture war about, started screaming that 60 Minutes had edited Harris to sound more coherent. This was nonsense. What had happened was that in one question, Harris had given a long answer. CBS broadcast part of the answer on 60 Minutes. But it had broadcast a different part of that answer during the CBS Sunday morning show, Face the Nation. This… happens all the time. The full answer was too long. They edited it down to a shorter bit. The two different broadcasts chose different parts. That’s basic, fundamental, editorial discretion. Given how often Trump is edited to make him sound more coherent, he should appreciate this. But Trump will never, ever care about how much leeway he is given and will always seek to gain whatever advantage he can. So he sued, claiming it was “election interference,” which it wasn’t. And even if it was (it wasn’t) he still won the election. But Trump’s censor in chief Brendan Carr made it clear that the only way he’d approve Paramount’s (owner of CBS) sale to Skydance was if they first bribed Trump by agreeing to settle this frivolous case. So they paid a $16 million bribe just to get the case settled, while agreeing to install a Trump lackey as an internal censor at the network. Trump’s full interview was 73 minutes long, but 60 Minutes only aired 28 minutes of it. They then did release the longer interview online along with a transcript, which caused people to look at what was edited. And that included this segment:
November 3, 2025 at 9:06 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
60 Minutes is under new management and things are getting stupid faster than you might expect. Last night’s episode featured President Trump, which is currently being described as “nuts.” There are all sorts of crazy moments to call out, but let’s start with the recursively meta nonsense. 60 Minutes edited out a segment where Donald Trump tells them to edit out a segment in which he brags about getting CBS to pay him because of them editing out part of an answer by Kamala Harris, and he notes that CBS clearly did the wrong thing in editing Harris in the same fucking sentence he tells them to edit out what he’s saying.
November 3, 2025 at 8:56 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
"Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives any more. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?"
October 31, 2025 at 9:01 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
That’s worth highlighting, because we keep seeing it play out in nearly identical ways. Whether it’s a venture capital firm or a social media platform, the playbook is the same: invoke “neutrality” or “free speech” as a shield, refuse to take a clear stance on bigoted behavior, and then act shocked when the people being targeted decide they don’t want to stick around. This is the Nazi bar problem, and it keeps happening because people in positions of power either don’t understand it or don’t want to. If you’re not familiar with the Nazi bar analogy, it comes from a story about a bartender who learned the hard way that if you don’t kick out the first Nazi who walks in, you end up running a Nazi bar. Not because you’re a Nazi yourself, but because once word gets out that Nazis are welcome, they keep coming back and bringing friends. And everyone else? They stop showing up. Because who wants to drink at the Nazi bar? The key insight—the one that keeps getting missed—is that claiming “neutrality” in these situations isn’t actually neutral. It’s a choice. You’re choosing to prioritize the speech and presence of the people spewing bigotry over the speech and presence of the people being targeted by it. And that second part is what everyone claiming to be “neutral” conveniently ignores.
October 27, 2025 at 11:52 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
JD keeps using that word.
October 4, 2025 at 7:53 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
October 4, 2025 at 2:38 AM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Inigo Montoya would like a word (several words, in fact)
October 1, 2025 at 8:31 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Great opening paragraph -- and an excellent question.
There is a moment in every authoritarian takeover when the business elite must choose between principle and profit, between defending the system that made their wealth possible and accommodating the forces destroying that system. That moment has arrived for America’s capitalist class, and they are failing the test so spectacularly that they’re validating every Marxist critique of capitalism ever written. I have a question for my center-right friends sitting on their hands: what do you think is going to happen when all is said and done, when all the blood is spilled, and all the corporate leaders who bent the knee to this regime try to resume their lectures about the virtues of free market capitalism? Do you really think monologues about Milton Friedman’s pencil parable are going to resonate with a population that watched you collaborate with authoritarianism?
September 30, 2025 at 11:16 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
My fave:
CK memorial catch-22 I heard they were trying to make plans for a Charlie Kirk memorial to go alongside the MLK Jr, Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials in DC, except unlike those other ones the architects can’t chisel any of his quotes on it without being accused of attacking him.
September 21, 2025 at 7:20 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Demsas’s argument represents a broader problem: the learned helplessness that has infected how we think about the internet. We’ve been trained to believe our only options are to beg tech billionaires to be nicer, lobby the government to regulate them better, or hope a “good” billionaire swoops in to save us.
September 15, 2025 at 5:17 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
It seems that under the present administration, simply doing good, meticulous, verifiable science (even legally mandated science) is now considered a political act -- and potentially even an attack against the government itself.
While the Trump administration has continued to refer to efforts to avoid the worst impacts of climate change as a scam, it has done almost nothing to counter the copious scientific evidence that demonstrates that climate change is real and doing real damage to the citizens of the US. The lone exception has been a draft Department of Energy report prepared by a handful of carefully chosen fringe figures that questioned the mainstream understanding of climate change. The shoddy work and questionable conclusions of that report were so extensive that an analysis of it required over 450 pages to detail all of its shortcomings. But its shortcomings may not have been limited to the science, as a lawsuit alleges that its preparation violated a law that regulates the activities of federal advisory panels. Now, in an attempt to avoid dealing with that lawsuit, the Department of Energy is claiming that it dissolved the committee that prepared the report, making the lawsuit moot. Meanwhile, Congress is also attempting to muddy the waters. In response to the DOE report, the National Academies of Science announced that it would prepare a report describing the current state of climate science. Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight have responded by announcing an investigation of the National Academies "for undermining the EPA."
September 13, 2025 at 9:37 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Really, by rights this should be the lead paragraph for more than half of news articles published in the USA these days. (Make that 'over three-quarters of' for opinion pieces.)
This is the sort of thing any organized government would consider truly embarrassing. We don’t have one of those at the moment, so if there’s any embarrassment to be had, it has to be experienced on behalf of the Trump administration because this administration is thoroughly incapable of feeling shame itself.
September 10, 2025 at 10:24 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Sometimes proposed solutions are worse than the problems that inspire them?
A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I’d reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard—until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world, people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now cheering as that same internet gets locked down, walled off, and restricted. Their reasoning? If it hurts AI companies, it must be good. This is a profound mistake that threatens the very principles these advocates once championed. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about LLM/AI tools these days, in terms of how they can be overhyped, how they can be misused, and certainly over who has power and control over the systems. But it’s deeply concerning to me how many people who supported an open internet and the fundamental principles that underlie that have now given up on those principles because they see that some AI companies might benefit from an open internet. The problem isn’t just ideological—it’s practical. We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone else...
September 8, 2025 at 8:00 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
September 6, 2025 at 5:11 AM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
September 6, 2025 at 5:08 AM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
' "You're just making stuff up, senator," Kennedy replied.

Hassan noted that nothing she said was made up, adding: "Sometimes when you make an accusation, it's kind of a confession, Mr. Kennedy." '
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), meanwhile, hammered Kennedy for unilaterally changing COVID-19 vaccine recommendations without providing scientific evidence to explain the move—a move which scientific evidence does not, in fact, support. Hassan went on to note that since the Food and Drug Administration altered the labels of COVID-19 vaccines to match Kennedy's recommendations—an unprecedented move—it means that doctors and pharmacists now need to provide the vaccine "off-label" if they give it to any healthy children or adults under age 65. This is one of the key points causing uncertainty about access. "When have you produced the data that you relied on and that this FDA relied on to change those parameters? You did it behind doors," Hassan pressed. "You're just making stuff up, senator," Kennedy replied. Hassan noted that nothing she said was made up, adding: "Sometimes when you make an accusation, it's kind of a confession, Mr. Kennedy."
September 4, 2025 at 11:45 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
September 4, 2025 at 8:02 PM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
Benjamin regretted having chosen to avoid the risks of smallpox variolation for his children, because he lost a young son to smallpox anyways. In his autobiography he included this advice to parents:
“In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if the child died under it: my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
September 4, 2025 at 4:39 AM
bernardoverda.bsky.social
August 31, 2025 at 7:12 PM