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Unanswered question
An observation that deserves explanation. I don’t have a good explanation yet. Bankman-Fried and his cohorts are dramatically different from the usual pro-coin influencers in two ways, and I think the two are related. (1) SBF is influencing the elite. He donates to D candidates and says all the things the elite say, with added…
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Write but not read
Just noticing an oddity for the hundredth time. ‘Write what you know’ is excellent advice. EXPERIENCE is the only thing that counts. When you know about a job or a skill or a place or a culture, you can IMMEDIATELY spot an outsider’s attempts to describe it. Staying inside your zone of familiarity also breeds…
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Best parody of the decade
The Buttcoin section of Reddit mocks blockchain with (sometimes) less ad-hominem bigotry and bullying than the big anticoin influencers like David Gerard and Molly White. Buttcoin seems to recognize that you don’t persuade people by kicking them in the balls. Punching your adversary in the face makes him defend his position. Here’s an ingenious and…
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How to corner the market
From EnidBuzz, the city ice plant, photo from the 1920s. The photo is remarkably informative. A little snow on the ground** makes traffic patterns nicely visible. Elegant mission-style building with the refrigeration plant behind. Price list by the door. The ice route men would have picked up their load from a loading dock, presumably to…
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The whole world is Parkinson
Among the spam emails this morning. From New “Scientist”: Climate negotiations in disarray at COP27 From the Washington state Repooflicans: The election isn’t over yet! Both of these headlines are repeated year after year. The New “Scientist” headline takes a bit more copy/paste work because COP27 has to be changed to COP28 and COP29 etc. …
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Dance of demons
Kirn pointed to this interview of Bankman-Fried a few years ago when his fraud was still Cool. It’s scary as hell because the INTERVIEWER is a demonic psychopath judging Sam by the standards of psychopaths. He starts with Sam’s founding achievement, which was a stock trade inside the world of bitcoin. Sam figured out how…
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Perfect headline
Perfectly crafted headline in UK Independent: Amazon to lay off 10,000 employees as Bezos vows to give away his $124bn fortune Or in old-fashioned terms, Billions for my buddies but not one penny for my workers.
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Cruel joke
Taibbi and Kirn are talking about the Nevada “election”, where counting seems to be sloppy in favor of the house. Kirn says that no casino would allow sloppy counting, so why should the state’s “elections” allow sloppy counting? He’s implying that casinos and “elections” are opposite. Casinos are meant to be rigged while “elections” are…
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Weirder and weirder
The Ankler substack, devoted to entertainment industry news, says that author Michael Lewis has been “embedded” with the Bankman-Fried bunch for six months, gathering material for his next book. Lewis is famous for The Big Short about the 2008 “crisis”, and he also wrote a disgusting celebration of the 2020 “virus” genocide, hymning the godlike…
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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…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 