Notices by Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity@zirk.us)

there should be a river in Crimea called Crimea River. (sorry.)

okay. so maybe it wasn’t a landslide victory. but it was for sure a mudslide victory.

@akkartik There's a tension between perceived straightforwardness (which requires keeping it simple, which may mean misportraying some edge cases) and legalistic accuracy, which requires either careful qualification or restraint. 4/

@akkartik You can say a lot about Biden, but Biden 2020 was not cautious or scripted. Biden's whole career has been a fountain of gaffes. Biden would say bizarre shit (not-un-Trump-like) in 2020, from his record player spiel during the primary to telling people who annoyed him at diners not to vote for him, and almost starting physical altercations. You may think Biden's "Scranton Joe" persona authentic or a put-on, but it was always hanging out. 1/

@akkartik (Biden was accused of "hiding in his basement" in 2020, doing podcasts — PODCASTS — but not getting out during the pandemic. But when he interacted, he was scrappy, not scripted.) 2/

@akkartik I think it's true that Hillary was always going to have a hard time of it. As Kevin Drum put it, she was in fact an unusually honest politician, but the way she retained her honesty was by giving guarded rather than unqualified-and-therefore-imperfectly-accurate statements. 3/

@ntnsndr @Hyolobrika on face, that seems like a reasonable hypothesis! maybe in the open source world, we grew too comfortable with “benevolent dictator for life”. and obviously, surveillant commercial platforms.

@Hyolobrika i'm a big fan of @ntnsndr i haven't read the book, but from a glance, it looks like he is advocating ways of strengthening democratic habits via civil society, participation in lots more democratic spaces, ideally personally and socially consequential, which i agree would help a lot, render us better at being part of a constitutional democracy.

[new draft post] What does it mean to have no kings? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/11/13/what-does-it-mean-to-have-no-kings/index.html

@feld @Hyolobrika I made no insinuation that a small group of people control bitcoin. I made an analogy between the trust strategies. Devise a central authority (the whole point of a blockchain is to define a single, unified legder) maintained and controlled by a very dispersed community. Then if you trust the community, you can trust the authority.

@Hyolobrika @feld that is why we invented the institutional state. it’s very much the same story as the blockchain. there’s a central power (central ledger) but no small group of people controls it, only a large decentralized community. we can trust that community, and enjoy the (absolutely extraordinary) benefits that can derive from central authority.

but, in both cases, there is always an attack surface.

@Hyolobrika sometimes people are glad to win bets by helping them come true.

@feld QE does much less than you think. But you are getting to the actually interesting questions. Fiat is extremely effective. It’s a tool of statecraft. The question is whether its effectiveness is a good or bad thing.

@feld you might address the basic point that the dollar has retained and gently increased value over time as long as it’s been held in the form of zero-credit-risk Treasuries. your graph just shows the existence of a mattress tax, not a weakness of the dollar as a store of value. while crypto has been a terrible store of value, because a currency has to accommodate those who expect to store negative values (be indebted) over fixed periods.

@feld here’s maybe a more concise and entertaining version.

https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2019/10/uber-but-for-slavery-2019-10-30-post-edit2.pdf

@feld i’ve maybe devoted years of my life to thinking through this stuff. and, um, no.

here’s a presentation that directly addresses what you misinfer from that graph.

https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2017/10/Fiat-Is-Effective-Minitalk-light-edit-to-share.pdf

management of the US dollar is now in the hands of… the people who’ve been buying a ton of bitcoin in a bet on the imminent death of the US dollar.

“the idea that Donald Trump is a free speech supporter is literally backwards. He’s spent years suing people for their speech, and now he’s even doing it in response to editorial discretion he dislikes. Donald Trump has no conception of free speech. He only supports speech he likes, and he is eager to punish any speech he dislikes.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/04/trumps-latest-lawsuit-against-cbs-proves-hes-no-free-speech-champion/

“Musk has all the money in the world. He has the ability to be one of the best informed people in the world. And he’s built for himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias, making sure that a randomly floating combination of grifters and morons continue to feed him the dumbest shit imaginable, rather than take the slightest effort to actually inform himself of reality.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/

from #EdithOlmsted https://newrepublic.com/post/187537/kamala-harris-donald-trump-stunning-endorsement