cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses | https://t.co/9R961uPVTV
Mar 21 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
one thing ezra and derek are dancing around in their abundance press tour is that a significant reason the left doesn’t care about the effectiveness of government is because the beneficiaries of dysfunctional government are an interest group represented by the democrats
and i mean this in the sense of direct financial beneficiaries — government workers and public unions are big dem contingents and, as covid demonstrated, self interested against the public good just like any other interest group
Jan 4 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
still don't really know what's making me sick
presenting complaint:
- pharyngitis with white exudate
- no cough
- muted fever
- no obvious swelling in lymph or spleen
assosciated symptoms:
- 2 weeks of generalised fatigue preceding onset
- 1 week of regular headaches and mild idiopathic urticaria preceding onset
- sensitivity to alcohol preceding onset. would wake up after drinking 1 beer with a mild hangover?
Jul 8, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
i know i’m always saying this, but parenthood really is deeply fulfilling and full of joy
this week has probably been one of the “hardest” since my son was born — he’s 18 months old and the whole family has come down with a pretty nasty flu.
he’s really sick, which is horrible on its own, but he’s also very congested which makes it hard for him to sleep well
Dec 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
serving in the guyana foreign legion because it’s my last and only opportunity to write a hemingway-esque fictionalised war memoir fighting an opponent that’s too incompetent to present a serious risk to my personal corporal safety
dawg the guyanese heavy drone division is going to capture insane footage. venezuelan troops hauling soggy cardboard tanks through the wet jungle; unopened cuban meal packs growing strange fungi; stranded units cut off from supply lines ambushed by the wai wai people
Nov 8, 2022 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
aight so — what’s going on with inflation
for this to make sense you’ll need an intuitive understanding of inflation, and how it’s connected to the real economy
sidebar thread on inflation for me to reference elsewhere:
inflation is just generalised price rises — deflation is just generalised price declines
Aug 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
supermarket self scanners are an interesting cultural phenomenon where everyone seems to have just universally decided that it’s polite to steal about 20% of your groceries but no more.
just watched a woman scan 3/5 things… pause for a second and then scan the 4th thing politely, pocket the 5th. staff member was just like, fair play. they all know the rules
Jul 29, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
you’re at the jason calacanis vs founders fund cage match on a barge in international waters. a guy in the stands is selling raw beef liver hotdogs and modafinil. darkweb prediction markets keep getting shut down for running mortality odds. trae appears to be wearing a jet pack.
jason has cupping marks on his back and three dagestani sambo champions conferring in his corner. no one can find peter thiel but chamath is shirtless and trying to pick fights. people keep asking but none of the concessions will take doge coin.
Apr 27, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
the dominant ideology of the worst people on here (left & right) is authoritarian state populism. their view is that the role of government is to directly ban bad things & require good things, and also that all bad & good things should be banned/required.
examples from this week — elon is Bad and the state should Ban him from buying twitter
censorship is Good (“plentiful & equitable speech”) and the state should Require censorship
therapy is Good and the state should Require therapy
masks are Good and the state should etc etc
Mar 25, 2022 • 27 tweets • 4 min read
short thread on inflation frameworks for the austrio-inclined. may g-d forgive me etc
there’s a set of beliefs common in the crypto/libertarian world that characterise inflation as a purely monetary phenomenon (i.e. driven by the fed) & suspect that money printing/QE is the source of many other distortions in the broader economy
Feb 15, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
biggest macro theme over the next decade is going to be capital flowing to the parts of the economy least connected to the real world (tech broadly; crypto, metaverse specifically) while it becomes increasingly obvious that the real world is undercapitalised (stuff sucks)
critics of capital (vcs, finance, but also tech, founders) will say this is bc capital only cares about wealth accumulation — but this was always the case! even during periods of enormous capital investment in real world (railway boom, construction of nyc, reconstruction of eur)
Oct 22, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
deflationary token-based payments systems have the unusual property that if you are punished for using the tokens for their intended purpose (transacting) and rewarded for free riding on the transactions of others (if you hold them they go up)
there are two possible long term outcomes for token-based networks with fixed supply economics:
Oct 4, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
lotta people, even those w/ serious interest, approach politics as if the goal is to pick the side whose stated views are closest to the outcomes ur interested in and then help them win elections.
this appears to be obviously wrong
david shor has a great piece on the child tax credit -- support for a straight ctc is actually pretty low, and the only way to get it past 50 per cent is to means test the hell out of it
Sep 18, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
the world bank situation is amazing and predictable — politically compromised; worse, too incompetent to cover it up. to top it off, it was all done in the defence of “multilateralism”, a cope so unexamined & reflexively defended that it should be the byword of elite IR failure
multilateralism is fine & noble as an *output* of foreign policy — i.e. you could take broad engagement, buy-in and support by global polity of ur agenda as a good sign that it will be successful in accomplishing *whatever ur actual goals are* lmao
Aug 27, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
job opportunity for someone young and interesting - friend is hiring an independent researcher:
- cover contemporary issues in politics, economics & current affairs
- go deep on detail, ready to get ur hands dirty
- lots of agency - outputs could be newsletters, interviews etc
ideal candidate has broad set of interests & skills, might be into a few of the following
- OSINT
- economic history & strong intuition for economic concepts like global imbalances, debt, finance
- quantitative grounding/interest
- might have 2nd+ language
- comfort w/ law
Aug 24, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
idk about u guys but the biggest lie I repeatedly told myself between the ages of 10-24 was that “intellectual challenge” was going to make me happy & satisfied in life. happiest I’ve ever been at work was at a cafe pulling coffs, flirting with hot mums & listening to tame impala
the reason I am currently not at a cafe talking about deleuze with 19 year olds is that it dawned on me p quickly that, while work was not a source of happiness per se in my life, it was one way to shift things in the direction I wanted them to go & build things bigger than me
Aug 23, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
this is the best explanation I’ve seen on twitter for why australia is in relatively strict lockdown & there is little push-back
