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Trend?
First signs of a trend? If so it’s a stupid and intentionally destructive trend. The establishment in “both” parties was boosting the Bush/Cheney family for the last few years. Now they seem to be going back to Reagan for the 900th time. I guess the openly bipartisan aspect is somewhat new. 538, a pure DNC…
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Aqua regia
Tablet mag has an interview with Edward Luttwak, a classic galaxy-brain bully. He’s a HARDASS realist about everything from politics to fighting to smoking. And he firmly believes in bitcoin. Yes, my son has made me a believer in the almighty blockchain. It creates an irrevocable past. A tweet is a blockchain of statements. Before…
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More idiotic fake surprise
FBI is pretending to be “concerned” about Chinese secret police offices in NYC and elsewhere. These offices keep track of Chinese nationals living here, and use blackmail to keep them under control. Jesus. This has been going on since 1949. Mao’s revolution mobilized Chinese ‘social centers’ in NYC and SF to blackmail Chinese nationals. If…
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Sam’s system
In one episode of Calling All Detectives, Browning is wasting an afternoon at the racetrack and notices an apparent swindle. A young man is trying to persuade a rich elderly man to adopt his Betting System. As Browning watches, the youngster does indeed win several bets in a row, and the old guy is starting…
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Boss vs boss
Wandering through ‘Elon Twitter’ for chuckles, ran across a surprisingly non-partisan take from an unexpected source, a wonderful reversion to how entertainment used to function under the Fairness Doctrine. Bon Appetit is for gourmet cooks. They focused on Twitter’s wildly expensive free lunches: Musk’s incessant tweeting, mass layoffs, radical changes to the platform, and public…
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Stop the goddamn fake surprise.
The latest official line about Bankman-Fried is the old “Nobody expected!” “Missed warning signs!” Raw ratshit. The regulators and political operators knew full well what Sam was doing. Many of them were in constant contact with him, and he certainly wasn’t shy about stating openly and clearly what he was doing. He said “I AM…
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Somebody finally gets it!
Finally some belated SENSE from the establishment stock-scammers at Financial Times. Actively intervening would convey undeserved legitimacy upon a system that does little to support real economic activity. It also would provide an official seal of approval to a system that currently poses no threat to financial stability and would lead to calls for public…
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Both sides should read
This is a 2009 article by Paul Graham. It’s a rare example of real two-way empathy. Most articles about the conflict between creators and managers are strictly from one side. Managers say creators are lazy slobs, designers say managers are cruel villains. I’m purely on the designer side, and this article helped me to understand…
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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.
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 