istewart

How interesting, a volcel who only thinks he’s an incel. Many such cases

LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”

Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall

Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).

Yeah, this is the “emperor has no clothes” reality that I keep bringing up with my friends who are still invested in the bubble (emotionally if not financially). The genAI/LLM tech stack defies the entire decades-long cost curve and investment thesis for computer technology. Up through the smartphone era, you bought in because you could get more utility for lower cost. What’s being pushed now is higher-cost for dubious utility gains; it’s just that some vendors are eating losses to hide the costs. (And of course the externalities get swept under the rug.)

Maybe not super amazing, he probably avoids/firewalls out most of these people because they’d constantly be hitting him up for money

It’s slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it’s going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.

what do we pay this dang guy for, anyway

It’s somewhat orthogonal to most subjects discussed here, but the eventual WBD bankruptcy auction is going to be a prime source of lols

I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy

The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, don’t you think?

Also don’t underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you don’t currently have any other job for