Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
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Mar 24 11 tweets 3 min read
Apparently my trivial use of crypto (mostly to quiet my friends saying “You cannot understand it unless you have actually used it”) resulted in me getting an airdrop.

I’m a bit boggled by what I perceive as the incentive design here. PM: An airdrop uses legal-tells-me-I-can’t-call-it-equity to incentivize the behavior we want to see in the world.
Me: I get this concept.
PM: So projects used to just spray and pray with airdrops, but that ends up being wasteful.
Me: Yes giving your equity to entire world does.
Mar 19 7 tweets 2 min read
I concur.

Also the rule book is much more interesting than anyone thinks it is. It’s Dungeons and Dragons with slightly different flavor text.

If you don’t like the flavor text, substitute your own. (Probably only against the rules a tiny portion of the time.) I promise you you can tell interesting stories about Japanese regional bank wire transfer AML compliance, or tax procedure for small businesses, or the manifest failures of American banks to keep up with Regulation E compliance vis Zelle instant value transfers.
Mar 19 4 tweets 1 min read
The amount of (plainly illegal) shenanigans between FTX/Alameda and select banking partners discovered by the lawyers for a civil suit subjects there will be an absolute mountain found by the independent examiner.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… *suggests

As is typical, the main avenue for developing low-hanging-fruit evidence has been numerous violations of Stringer Bell’s dictum on keeping notes on a criminal conspiracy.
Mar 15 15 tweets 3 min read
People don't usually associate the U.S. with being consumer-friendly with respect to regulation.

I express arbitrarily high confidence that this plumber would have gotten full restitution in the U.S., because Regulation E *really does work.* "Bold of you to assume banks follow the law."

I spent years of hobby time writing letters to banks on behalf of people who had difficulty writing letters to banks. It worked much more than most people expect, precisely because they really do* follow the law.

*It's complicated.
Mar 8 4 tweets 1 min read
@kendrictonn I'd make independent betting markets on subclaims like "lawyers on standby" here but directionally agree.

There is a huuuuuuuge component here which is class and a component which is degrees of active complicity. When that waveform collapses, people get very, very upset. @kendrictonn It isn't conspiratorial to observe that e.g. the state can deterministically ruin the lives of criminals, that there is a playbook to do this (it involves corkboard), that participants do not expect this playbook to be brought to bear, that we've seen this movie before, and...
Mar 8 6 tweets 2 min read
Please note that this is extremely, extremely true, and if you follow that to its logical conclusion, certain blogs are on the org chart of e.g. the U.S. in the same haha but absolutely serious way the NYT editorial page is. I will also add that there are literally tens of thousands of people whose job is to read the newspaper then repeat what it said. This is a core intelligence gathering capability. You earn some brownie points in some circles for calling it OSINT. (“Open source intelligence”)
Mar 6 7 tweets 2 min read
I have no particular reason to believe or doubt the IQ ranking here, but if I can highlight something: most people who care deeply about user interactions with software systems have not lived life constantly interacting with people 20 points of IQ above them. There exist many people relevant to many systems who have 80 IQ. Many find those systems very hard to deal with.

It, ahem, matters very much whether systems choose to have those individuals interact with a human or an AI for various tasks, matters how systems present that fact…
Mar 3 15 tweets 3 min read
This is a beautiful example of an engineering decision with a point of view behind it, a UX decision which is historical controversial for no reason, and how both of those decisions are actually also great marketing. I think it is this Obsidian (which does per docs support vim mode):

obsidian.md
Mar 1 10 tweets 2 min read
Pro-tip for cryptocurrency criminals attempting to evade justice: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to excuse your faked passport by asking the arresting government to contact the government which didn't issue the faked passport.

No one will be amused at what happens. "Sounds like that happened to someone."

Yeah seems like Do Kwon got convicted in Montenegro for it.

c.f. Exhibit 3 beginning on page 33 in the PDF.

document.epiq11.com/document/getdo…
Mar 1 14 tweets 3 min read
Sometimes people not steeped in a subject want a list of representative incidents for whatever purpose. This is tough to Google for unless someone has already produced a list. People not steeped in subject often not familiar with literature to navigate it blind.

And so: 1) Ask ChatGPT for incident that would make a hypothetical list.
2) Google the particulars; verify using human judgement.
3) Ask for incidents like the first incident.

I find it less useful to ask for a list of incidents because ChatGPT sometimes explicitly gives wrong answers.
Feb 26 13 tweets 3 min read
People have said “This didn’t happen” and given it is in the Atlantic I will bet you there is at least one other person who very definitely worked at the NYT and who knows how the game is played who confirmed to the Atlantic this happened. Of all the companies in the world the one company that high status media organizations will absolutely not invent a meeting for is the NYT, and they have very easy access to confirmatory evidence backed by “Burn me and your career; over have a nice day.”
Feb 25 13 tweets 3 min read
Scaled crime is a result of a business process and it’s a very useful lens to understand how that business functions for the purpose of interdicting it. This often causes problems for Seeing like a State reasons. The state does not perceive crime to be an output of a business. It can, with immense effort, describe it in that fashion, but it will default to understanding it in concepts it understands like perpetrators/cases/etc.
Feb 24 12 tweets 3 min read
At Ruriko’s urging, I got one of the kids a probiotic because they threw up yesterday. I had mild culture shock that pharmacies sell pills which are described on the box as repairing damage to the immune system caused by antibiotics. But *shrug.* You are allowed to sell magic to people who believe in magic, maybe?

Anyhow, my other child said “Daddy brought home medicine” and since I did not I said “I brought home something for the stomachache.” (This conversation was in Japanese.)

My other child, who is sharp, said:
Feb 20 13 tweets 3 min read
The answers to all of these questions, happily provided by people old enough to remember them, are a good demonstration that the fairly recent past was actually radically worse than the present. People sometimes lament the decline of e.g. travel agents, likely because they have a distinct memory of the pleasant young lady and forgot about the fee charged or hour spent on logistics for something which now takes a non-specialist less than five minutes from home.
Feb 1 13 tweets 3 min read
Ruriko orders Japanese-manufactured mirin (cooking wine) from Amazon. A different bottle arrives from a Chinese manufacturer, labeled as the originally searched manufacturer.

Ruriko: Amazon is a fraud!
Me: Oh that’s probably a third party seller.
Ruriko: Fraud!
Me: Well honey… Me: … You will certainly get your money back when you apprise them of this
Ruriko: I can’t figure out how.
Me: Hand me the app.

*tries the usual way*

Amazon: This item is ineligible for refunds.
Ruriko: Fraud!
Me: Oh that isn’t their final answer.
Ruriko: Clearly it must be!
Jan 16 6 tweets 1 min read
The most surprising thing about this statement to me is that the CEO of a financial services company would say that *any* client is solvent in this fashion. It’s a bit head scratching. If you ask Chase whether Bank of America has all the money, Chase says “BoA is a very well-regarded institution, regulated extensively, and we have underwritten them with respect to the portion of their business they do with us.”
Jan 11 19 tweets 4 min read
“We invested in you because we believed in you. We still do. A sense of honor compels me to say that we no longer believe this opportunity is the best use of your time over the next few years. What you do with this is your decision because it always has been; we will back it.” Capitalists, and people who have capitalist in the job title especially, must must must actually believe what we say regarding it being a good thing that some companies fail. We have to believe this like scientists believe it is a good thing that sometimes hypotheses are wrong.
Jan 10 22 tweets 4 min read
A random Dad story which I enjoyed from commercial real estate, which I will share for not particular reason:

There once existed a corner in Chicago (and of course that corner still exists). On that corner sat a specialty retail store for baked goods. Their business model was going to commercial bakeries on Friday, buying everything that would expire on Monday for pennies, then attempting to sell it over the weekend for nickels.

Dad: “This did not strike me as a business where one could make a lot of money.”
Dec 27, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
You’d be surprised of how much of management, consulting, teaching, senior ICing, etc is:

“I want to X.”
“Have you written down a plausible plan to get to X with steps listed in order?”
“No.”
“Alright let’s sketch it. OK step one: are you going to do it?”
“Why would I do that?” Generally the person doesn’t sound that silly or pathologically helpless in the meeting. Sometimes they are a committee of extremely intelligent people, because only a large and well-resourced organization acting in concert can reach the heights of no-agency-exists-anywhere.
Dec 26, 2023 14 tweets 3 min read
Apropos of nothing: when money appears to be “lost” between Bank A and Bank B, it is usually in one of a very few places where an informed person would expect it to be, but has not yet reached front of the queue for it to be moved from there to somewhere more useful. For example, a wire transfer can enter into a few states where it is pending human intervention, and the money will be not in the account of the sender or of the recipient but rather an account owned by a bank’s operations team which has a (formal or informal) list of tickets.
Dec 5, 2023 7 tweets 1 min read
Chase seems to be testing a Buy Now Pay Later alternative, where you can retroactively tag a debit card transaction between $20 and $400 and split into four payments. They credit amount back ~instantly then debit 1/4 in 2 weeks, 4 weeks, etc.

No interest. I assume this is entirely a blocking play because on the face of it a) Chase debit card transactions earn ~nothing due to their debit interchange being regulated and b) that’s a more generous timeline than the typical BNPL pay-in-four offering, by 2 weeks.