Notices by Andy Polaine (apolaine@pkm.social)

@montecook well, you know, half my students have never seen Star Wars.

@JorgeStolfi @rvkennedy @immibis @pluralistic @funcrunch @kcoyle it does not show this. Archeology requires interpretation. Graeber goes deep into the evidence. But, listen, I don’t need to argue this because someone with far greater credentials already did.

@JorgeStolfi @rvkennedy @immibis @pluralistic @funcrunch @kcoyle if you’re genuinely interested in a very short explanation, read the answer to the “You examined 5000 years of economic and cultural behavior. Would you ever suggest that capitalism as we know it needs to change?” question here: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/david-graeber-studied-5000-years-of-debt/

Virtual money is not new. Hence the applicability of history to crypto.

@JorgeStolfi @rvkennedy @immibis @pluralistic @funcrunch @kcoyle this is a common misconception and exactly what Graeber spent 560 pages debunking. You won’t get it from the cover blurb.

Debt came first. Money is a marker of debt (whether shells or dollars). Markets as we understand them came later.

@JorgeStolfi @rvkennedy @immibis @pluralistic @funcrunch @kcoyle It’s nothing to do with trust of the Fed. That’s why people head to gold in times of financial crisis.

Money is based upon debt, without which it has no value, and sovereign currencies are valuable entirely because of the state’s monopoly on violence (police, army, laws) to call in that debt.

The best primer on this is David Greaber’s *Debt: The first 5,000 years* https://bookshop.org/p/books/debt-the-first-5-000-years-updated-and-expanded-david-graeber/8072806

@jarango @austingovella oh, it’s not all of them. Just some (like the Life Strategy one). You’ll have to click through each to find out, like a game.

@jarango Have an affiliate link to Buttondown! https://buttondown.email/refer/andypolaine

@jarango well you could say the same about Obsidian. I actually had the opposite reaction. I really like the fact that it’s basically one person+help who are entirely focused on doing one thing well rather than a VC-fuelled startup obsessed with scale and adding “features.”

It’s nice to be able to email Justin @buttondown and watch him implement a request straight away rather than searching for a way to co tact customer service ans getting through to an AI chatbot or a bored employee.

So I think the migration of my Doctor's Note newsletter #substack to #Buttondown is complete. Thanks to Justin from @buttondown for adding in redirects from the Substack URL slugs so that old links and searches go to the right place (and fixing up the image CSS). Here it is at its new home: https://newsletter.polaine.com

(Sidenote: the best thing I did was to use a custom domain on Substack just in case I ever had to do this. All the content now lives at the same URLs from before)

@buttondown @ellane thanks! Is it a redirect or just both work?

@buttondown @ellane Amazing, thank you.

@buttondown reckon you could put in redirect option for a newsletter archive so that the /p/ from the former Substrack URL redirects to the /archive/ Buttondown URLs? That way I can safely delete my Substack account and content.

@ellane @buttondown the slugs are the same, but the directory name is different. I have mine running on a subdomain newsletter.polaine.com, but I think the redirects of the archives would need to happen on Buttondown’s side.

Every time I think MS Teams has improved, I encounter some log-in shenanigans and remember that the entirety of Microsoft’s authentication is janky AF.

How can a company of this size make such a poor job of it? I’ve encountered procurement systems better than this. And that’s saying something.