will_pseudonym

They’re not just x. They’re y.

the great bifurcation will continue apace

Pig-human organ transplants make me think of The Onion series, Porkin' Across America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwQns6vGfj4&list=PL4NL9i-Fu1...

I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading.

"There are dozens of us!"

This is my exact experience as well. I wonder if I should switch to using Sonnet so that I can have more time before auto-compact gets forced on me.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/venezuela...

Because money talks!

Could you elaborate in what ways money influenced Turkey to speak out about it, where others didn't? I'm intensely curious about this.

To me, participating in these markets is akin to telling people you have a hot tip on a game of musical chairs where you know when the music is going to stop.

I've played those games successfully, a la GME and BTC. But I don't feel good about the proposition. I feel more and more that Charlie Munger is mostly right on this one.

My money is resoundingly on yes. I'm deeply cynical about NFT's the same way I'm cynical about Beanie Babies and Pokémon & MtG cards. It's not for me, but I get it, and they'll likely do quite well in terms of investment returns.

35.5% in NFT's reads very young.

Are we ready to talk about 9/11 yet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_Septembe...

there's actually an interesting argument that i first heard Diane Fleischman pose -- that chicken is worse than beef on a calorie/animal measure and so would harm more animals because it takes more chickens to feed x people than it does cows, and so more animals suffer for the same amount of food produced.

the ingredients.

it's like a combination between ad-hoc live podcasting and radio call-in shows. your question "what is clubhouse exactly?" is about as straightforward to answer as "what is the internet?". it's a new medium, with all the good and bad that brings.

Thank you for sharing this. It's absolutely hilarious.

FYI, your comments all show up as "dead" to me. I vouched for this one, but not sure why they're dead.

the site is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20101105111623/http://www.erasma...

If I'm not patronizing them, who is? Why would a browser want to get into the censorship business?

...and doesn't care about deplatforming.

"We need more than deplatforming"

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

And who sets the formula, who lobbies for laws to be passed to require it, who runs and owns the clearing houses? Hint: It's in the thread you linked.

RH offered to open up stock market investing more broadly. They succeeded, clearly. But the regulations didn't change - there are still pro-Wall St, pro-incumbent rules and capital requirements. It's one of the most highly regulated industries in our nation. [0]

So @aoc is right to ask how it can be that Robinhood stopped its clients from buying certain securities. And what she'll find is that the reason is that Dodd-Frank requires brokers like RH to post collateral to cover their clients' trading risk pre-settlement. [1]

And it isn't the Fed or SEC who sets the rules. It's the Wall St owned central clearing entity itself, DTCC, that makes its own rules. So when the retail masses decided to squeeze the short-sellers, in the middle of crushing them, it was govt regulations which tripped them up. [2]

This last tweet in the thread was made about 13h ago, about a day after the previous last tweet in the thread. It's quite interesting, if you ask me.

Update: the plot thickens ... @The_DTCC may have exercised its right to add additional margin charges for a set of these stocks. It's a Margin Liquidity Adjustment Charge. [3]

[0] https://twitter.com/KralcTrebor/status/1354952710202814470

[1] https://twitter.com/KralcTrebor/status/1354952711217807364

[2] https://twitter.com/KralcTrebor/status/1354952712400601099

[3] https://twitter.com/KralcTrebor/status/1355175395642003456

Hear, hear!

For the people who see no issues with any of this, shall we shut off their water and electricity too while we're at it?

FYI your comment was dead, and I vouched for it. You might be shadowbanned? Not sure, but regardless you might look into it.

Anyone could join that Discord server. Discord is incredibly difficult to moderate at scale, and they had banned every bad word that they didn't want the chat to be about. People joined and posted bad words in Unicode that the bots didn't catch, and people can screenshot them instantly.

My cousin who I have been IM'ing with from the days of AIM/ICQ/Yahoo Messenger asked me yesterday if there was a better chat app than Facebook Messenger. We're both using Signal now.

https://signal.org/download/

Disclosure: Not affiliated with Signal, but I donated $20 to them to support their mission. And since this is on a post about GME, I am a GameStop customer, but I do not own nor have I ever owned GME stocks. I am a WSB and GME supporter. I purchased $2000 in Bitcoin last night for the first time ever after the GME trading shutdowns on Robinhood and others yesterday.

EDIT: had the wrong link for Signal.

Can't remember where I picked this up, but this has been a good mental model for me for understanding the dimensions of this problem of picking what I should pursue in my career & life. It's a riff on "Good, Cheap, or Fast. Pick two."

  * Low Risk
  * Low Stress
  * High Reward.

It seems less down to choice than personality in terms of which two you personally should choose, but understanding the tradeoffs you're making is a good thing regardless.

It actually started due to WWII.

Once America became embroiled in World War II, there was great concern that rampant inflation would threaten America's military effort and undermine its domestic economy. The concern was valid, as Americans had witnessed what inflation had done to war-torn Germany, devastating its economy and giving rise to Hitler's regime.

To combat inflation, the 1942 Stabilization Act was passed. Designed to limit employers' freedom to raise wages and thus to compete on the basis of pay for scarce workers, the actual result of the act was that employers began to offer health benefits as incentives instead.

Suddenly, employers were in the health insurance business. Because health benefits could be considered part of compensation but did not count as income, workers did not have to pay income tax or payroll taxes on those benefits. [0]

You can also read about this in a 2017 NY Times article [1]

[0] https://www.griffinbenefits.com/blog/history-of-employer-spo...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210109190532/https://www.nytim...

"This is the most important slide in the entire talk. So, if you want to leave after this slide, I will not be offended, because it is all downhill from here."

https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0?t=1256 (Timestamped link of the "Time Management" talk by Randy Pausch, which is what the OP PDF is from)

That part in the talk is about the "Eisenhower Matrix", popularized by Steven Covey in "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", on the importance of prioritizing important, non-urgent tasks over urgent, unimportant tasks.

You can read about it here as well, but I haven't seen it put as well as Randy Pausch did in his talk. https://evernote.com/blog/work-effectively-with-the-eisenhow...

PS If you haven't seen his "Last Lecture", it's also fantastic. I watch it about once a year to re-center myself, and remember to focus on the truly important things in life. https://youtu.be/ji5_MqicxSo

The critiques you have of Macbooks of touchbar and keyboard wouldn't apply to the Mac Mini. And they have an M1 Mac Mini.

Personally, I would love an M1 Mac Mini that ran Linux well. Very exciting development.

OT, but "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" reminds me of a funny Mitchell and Webb sketch about evil villains using ambiguous phrases when ordering their henchmen to kill someone.

(NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6cake3bwnY

For competing with Discord, it seems like it would benefit from a more robust free offering to compete with Discord. Being able to create a free Discord server is great, and it is incredibly capable for most communities that don't need the fancy perks of Discord Nitro etc.

The free Discord plan provides virtually all the core functionality of the platform with very few limitations. Free users get unlimited message history, screen sharing, unlimited server storage, up to eight users in a video call, and as many as 5,000 concurrent (i.e., online at the same time) users.

For a lot of small communities that aren't focused around commerce of any kind, Discord's free offering blows Element Matrix Services out the water. It's a non starter. If I could create a server with feature parity to Discord's free server, any new community I'd create I would definitely jump on EMS in a heartbeat, and I'd start trying to recreate communities currently within Discord, to be on EMS.

So like a very normal progression for Discord servers is that some niche sub-community wants to gather, and so they create a free server, and people join and there's all kinds of rich content that gets posted and curated and great discussions and then as it gets bigger, people running the community or people who want to support the community will boost the server with Discord Nitro for additional features like more slots for custom emojis (I can't communicate enough how important of a feature this is to Discord's success, even though it seems like minor window dressing).

That kind of model is what would justify a server starting to shell out money every month for EMS. I would note that Discord's pricing for this kind of level of community is tiered and not a per-user thing. You unlock more features based on how many users are paying for Nitro, going up a tier based on breakpoints of 2/15/30 Nitro Boosts per month. It doesn't cost more to have a tier 3 server if you gain more users. This is a big deal for fostering growth and unseating incumbent social networks (which is what Discord and Slack are).

Just some thoughts. I really want stuff like Element/Matrix to succeed!