Author: polistra
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BRAVO!
I was wondering if some of the D-brand supporters of Bankman-Fried would start to regret their suckerdom. Yes. Jeff Roberts at Fortune magazine is asking the right questions about the political connivance, but still not perceiving the TOTAL PERFECT COMPREHENSIVE FRAUDULENCE of the ENTIRE blockchain enterprise. Gary Gensler blew it again. After his agency failed…
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Wrong kind of flail
Vox discusses Elon’s first week and completely misses the point. Not surprising considering the idiotic source. Vox thinks Elon is incompetently flipflopping because he doesn’t know what he wants. It is sad to see @elonmusk expunge and drive away so much talent at @Twitter and push safety aside. He is totally flailing and causing way…
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Superstition
Just adding one empty item to get past a superstitious number in the count of published items. = = = = = Later adding a random thought so it’s not quite — THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK — When I got word that the courseware was due for a new edition, my first step was…
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Division of labor
Civilization formerly mitigated the natural force of status and attractiveness by setting up a division of labor, and judging mates on their capacity for the appropriate type of labor. Civilization is long gone, so this is irrelevant. One of those supershort Ripley features mentioned a highly specific test for brides. Ripley described it as a…
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Exception to the delta rule
Following on previous and especially pivoting from the discussion of money as DELTA of value. Whether we’re talking about a clock mainspring or a storage battery or a capacitor or a dam or a grain elevator or a bank account, we are always storing a DELTA produced by work. The work comes in many forms.…
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More pointless rambling
Reading bitcoin’s original code has helped me to think about the larger qualities of money and economics. As a former bookkeeper I already had a solid grasp on the vectors of creating and increasing value in an ordinary business, operating inside a functional economy. From this foundation, plus 40 years of real programming, I could…
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Cold revenge
Elon talked about merging Twitter into his dream of one all-consuming web system. He had tried it once before with X.com, and his holding company for Twitter was called X to make the point. When he started this particular headfake, I began to notice that Yahoo Financial is doing the best job of covering the…
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Flbossing
Earlier one of the “wags” said we should hope Elon buys Twitter and shuts it down. Now it’s clear that he’s pulling a classic LBO. Buy a company with debt, transfer the debt to the company, force it into bankruptcy to write off the debt, steal the assets. Old-fashioned LBOs generally slid under the radar…
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Worst of all anechoics
Continuing to debunk the “echo chamber” myth. Social media is the exact opposite. Lately I’ve been trying to read items in Medium, brought there by Avi Loeb’s great crowdfunded UFO project. Medium’s algorithm is the most aggressive anechoic I’ve seen. It offers you a chance to Mute an author you don’t like. Allegedly you will…
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You are playing a game you don’t understand
I’ve been disgusted but not shocked by the Official Two-Sides Game centered on bitcoin. Deepstate started playing the AP game around 2017. R favors bitcoin, D hates it. When bitcoin steals your money, you blame R because that’s where the sponsors are. Today’s crash of FTX/Binance shows a different side. Sam Bankman-Fried, who organized the…
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Flat land, flat caste
The old frontier spirit persists in the plains. Social structures are flatter, and castes matter somewhat less, in a hard land where everyone has to contribute. Today’s EnidBuzz question: What do you collect? The usual literal and cute answers were interrupted by an example of flat caste. Can you imagine Johnnie Rockefeller or Andy Carnegie…
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Checking the source 2
Two weeks ago I explored the original C++ code by ‘Satoshi’. = = = = = START REHASH: I was assuming the chain is a linked list or nodelist. It’s just a simple array, with expandable memory. The ‘chainness’ only means that each item in the array is a vector or struct including its own…
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Appreciation to apprehension
Enid is looking forward to the arrival of a supertall Xmas tree to kick off their annual lighting competition. The lighting has been going on since the 80s. When I visited Enid in those years, I often toured the well-organized neighborhood displays. When I lived there in the 70s, I might have appreciated the ‘tallest…
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Who’s more effectively paranoid?
I’m looking at two strings of comments at Substack. First Justin Hart asking for guesses about WHY the “virus” hoaxocaust needed to happen in 2020, as opposed to any other time. Second, the responses to Taibbi’s funny drinking game on last night’s “election”. I used to wonder about the WHY question, and finally settled on…
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Looks like a win-win
If stories can be believed, two late-autumn migrations have started in the bird world. The “journalists” and other D-brand demons are leaving Twitter and moving to Mastodon. The R-brand demons are moving back into Twitter. Mastodon is an obscure platform with even less general interest than Twitter. The D-brand demons will be talking solely among…
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