Salvini's Next Move, BlackRock to Fractionalize the World, Armenia vs. Azerbaijan Is Far From Over, The Tyranny of the Algorithm, Another Cosmic Riddle Solved
One can only pity the Armenians. Neither the US nor the EU are reliable allies and it is unlikely that either of these have the military capacity to assist them on any significant scale. Russia is the only country in a position to help but Pashinyan's intrigues with the West have led Moscow to wash its hands of Yerevan.
The smart thing would be to remove Pashinyan and get his replacement to repair relations with Moscow as a matter of urgency. This is most unlikely to happen.
Really? What do you mean by purity? Armenia is a part of Western Asia. It is landlocked and cannot exist in a cocoon separated from its neighbours. Geography and economics demand integration with the wider region. Ideally, Armenia should develop its capacity to engage Iran and Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan. This may be difficult, but they have no alternatives. The antiquity of Armenia is undeniable, but the Armenians should aim for more than being occupants of an ethnographic/cultural museum.
Lukashenko's great achievements were preserving the standard of living of his people during the 1990s and keeping NATO and the NGOs out. But he has had to repair relations with Moscow. An Armenian Lukashenko would be a great improvement on Pashinyan.
Your report of Indians showing up in Yerevan suggests that Armenia is headed down a variant of the standard socio-cultural model of the West. I have read Istanbul also increasingly attracts economic migrants from South Asia and beyond too. The global population churn is set to transform the planet beyond recognition.
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One of my favorite things about Blackrock is how their name even sounds like a front organization for a James Bond villain, and yet western journalists have said right wingers are being too mean to humanity's savior Larry Fink (I think it was WaPo)
In a sane world it would be broken up and sold, proceeds redistributed to the various populations from whom the wealth has essentially been stolen through their ability to access limitless cash at near-zero interest rates over the past 15 years. They are far more powerful than Rockefeller or Bell ever were. But because they support the regimes they are untouchable. Time they were liquidated.
"Gone are the days when populist and right wing parties are anti-EU"
One ancient rumor trying to discredit Orban as a short man with a Napoleon complex fuelling an endless ambition was his supposed dismay when he learned that only people born in the US can become the president over there.
The very same circles still delude themselves that Orban wants Hungary to leave the EU. He doesn't want to leave the next best thing to America, he wants to lead it.
Brexit was a defeatist tantrum, although, seeing British politics, nothing of value, as far as intra-EU support for sovereign power, was lost.
I occasionally listen to corporate MSNBC lib Chris Hayes's podcast. The most recent ep I took in was with a sociologicist who wrote a book about the year 2020. Hayes says things like "we've all forgotten what 2020 was like" throughout. We have? Who are these fricking people?
Internet poisoning and the social-media panopticon/Skinner Boxes all our media types have constructed for themselves means they essentially live in an eternal present, where the dates change but every moment of every day is the same exhausting disorienting (yet also mostly imaginary) battle for civilization, where they stay frozen like Buridan's ass always being tugged by either bliss at their utopian future coming into view or its opposite, all their evil political enemies at last triumphing and installing the Fourth Reich.
It seems like a really miserable and brain- and soul-destroying way to live, but I guess it beats getting a real job or surrendering all the illusions they have about being fearless moral guides, which would also have to be accompanied by the realization that somehow they've become all they claim to hate.
The digital dream world takes escapism to new, previously unimaginable, heights.
Humanity will speciate: the nature and degree of old school reality to which people have access will depend on their bank balances. The rich will reserve real-world experience for themselves while the proles will work and die in virtual reality, subject to the disciplines of social media relieved by the joys of virtual companionship from digital geishas generated by AI pornware. When pressures build up they will be resolved by corporate sponsored protests that blend "Day of the Locusts" with Maoist struggle sessions (edgy t-shirts and merchandise available for purchase).
Way back when, I used to go to this tiny cafe in Tribeca, far east side and way before Tribeca was anything other than warehouses. Only served enormous cafe au lait and small croissants, rickety wooden chairs, maybe six tables total. Loved it there, but it didn't stand a chance against the types of places you're describing there. Never made it to the 21st century.
I'm happy to report that coffee shops in the Maghreb do not follow this "global" trend. No starbucks-like menu, no industrial-size wood tables, no bright interior with walls painted white. In fact if there's any foreign influence in the local coffee shops, it's French influence.
Also: "when someone searches Google for speciality coffee shops in Bucharest, Beans & Dots pops up. Ungureanu developed an Instagram account full of cappuccino snapshots and more than 7,000 followers, but grew frustrated when she felt that the platform was taking away her ability to access her audience through the feed"
The location is bad, I've been there.
"This homogenisation is not just a phenomenon of our own moment; it is a consequence of changes that happened long before algorithmic social media feeds"
Sure, like communism destroying social life and interaction in Eastern Europe, so that now most coffee shops there look like the "global" cafés the writer describes because they don't have a tradition that they can build on.
Actually the coffee shops that sprung up in that region late 90s and early 2000s were very unique and followed different themes that the owners were interested in. Their menus were also adapted to those themes. You had theatre cafes with posters of the different plays and short menus with cheap items like tees and uncomplicated coffees, atelier style cafes which kept a more industrial feel, photography and arts cafes with dark red and violet walls and extensive hot chocolate menus (really you could order 20 different types of hot chocolate) not to mention all the shisha bars, sports cafes, gigolo style cafes (with large white couches where guys would just menspread and chainsmoke for hours)...honestly there was a lot of variety and I could easily keep going. I spent my youth in those places.
Just because we had communism doesn't mean we didn't have different traditions and interests which outlasted that frankly short period in our history and which people quickly picked back up once it was over. If anything has homogenised interests and tastes and for that matter destroyed social life and actual interaction it's social media and the adoption of all things western cause it's "better".
"Actually the coffee shops that sprung up in that region late 90s and early 2000s were very unique and followed different themes that the owners were interested in. Their menus were also adapted to those themes."
Interesting! Thank you.
My experience was mostly with Romania and might not be applicable to all of Eastern Europe.
Fink is right that Bitcoin has largely failed as a currency. It’s been 15 years and the only time I see “pay with Bitcoin!” is shopping grey market online vendors. As a digital bar of gold however it’s been fantastic and that is where its utility lays. I know true believers are probably angry about a company co-opting Bitcoin but that ship sailed when the feds figured out how to track transactions on the Bitcoin ledger in order to shut down Silk Road in 2012. If you want to stay true to the more libertarian ethos that spawned Bitcoin, use Monero instead. The fact Monero transactions are truly private means the feds hate it and Wall Street will never touch it.
As far as tokenization of everything goes, yuck. Fink should pull up some old articles from 2017 on Ethereum blockchain and see how tokenizing cloud computing, homes, or dental care(Dentacoin!) turned out. Big speculative bubble that burst when people realized the garbage they bought. Fink might believe he can time the top.
Bitcoin was never about privacy, but about a non-government, absolutely digitally finite/scarce bearer asset. Please catch up and do more studying.
Bitcoin the network is a settlement layer, similar to Fedwire. Layer 2 solutions, focusing on transaction efficiency (i.e. Lightning Network, Fedimints, etc) are more in line with "Bitcoin as money" (if focusing solely on day-to-day transactions like with Visa/Mastercard payment processors). USD is world reserve currency and most of us Westerners have financial privilege of not having to worry about 20% inflation on a weekly/monthly basis. Majority of day-to-day Bitcoin usage is in developing countries that suffer from high currency debasement, being unbanked, or sanctioned.
Ask yourself what is money and what are the properties of money. Highly recommend "Broken Money" by Lyn Alden, "Layered Money" by Nik Bhatia, "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous
I am fairly well versed in blockchain/Bitcoin, and thanks to the seeming ubiquitousness of a college age libertarian “phase” I’m familiar with the Austrian school of economics.
Currency has been historically default private. Transactions being traceable is mostly a postwar, digital, development. As I said in my comment Bitcoin is NOT about privacy, thus it fails as currency but still is an excellent investment.
People have been talking about lightning and layer 2s for Bitcoin for half a decade now. Yet I have never seen even a grey market vendor use either. Now that the feds have officially arrived any further developments towards private transactions will be heavily discouraged. You can already see this with a few “privacy” Bitcoin wallets redlining transactions to “problematic” addresses. Although it’s not Bitcoin you can also see a possible vector of attack with the arrest and prosecution of the developer of the Ethereum mixer “tornado cash” for money laundering.
Can the hardcore libertarian “Bitcoin as digital currency revolution” win out over the normies that just like “numba go up”? Maybe, but with Wall Street backing them up I wouldn’t bet on it. Default privacy needed to be part of Bitcoin from the start or at least before Wall Street arrived.
Agree to disagree on privacy being necessary for currency. It's nice and preferable, but not required to be functional. Blockchain analytics is probabilistic anyway, not an exact science. Chainanlysis won't even reveal their methods in the various court cases where they were challenged to do so.
The fact that you haven't seen Layer 2 payment solutions on websites doesn't mean they don't exist and are not becoming more common. That says more about your exposure to the technology and the products/services/websites you use (or the bubble your'e confined to) than it does about the adoption of the technology. I use Lightning to stream satoshis directly to podcasters for every minute I listen, using podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain. I used it to buy books, coffee, Bitcoin hardware wallets, online subscriptions, gift cards and a small personal server device.
This feels a lot like Paul Krugman poo-pooing the Internet in 90s. It's understandable if one is not actively keeping up with and using the technology, but it doesn't make it true.
As far as chain analysis goes I would not expect past court cases to predict the outcomes of future ones in this case.
I use layer 2s on Ethereum all the time, just only for cryptocurrency related tasks. I think just about everyone knows about Bitcoin at this point, but if I were to ask any of my millennial aged friends if they have used lightning, or even know what it is, they would look at me like I have two heads. To turn it around on you, I think your experience using lightning says more about the bubble your in than mine does about me.
And saying I sound like Paul Krugman??? Ouch. Krugman would have been correct if he had limited his analysis to the era of the open internet. After 2000 the feds started working with tech companies to slowly manage and direct the internet. With Wall Street moving in I fear the same will happen with Bitcoin going forward.
Excellent SCR as usual, sir! I watch EU politics (as I did Brexit) like a soap opera or sports league…full of rivals and subplots. It would be fascinating to see a solid anti-EU block emerge and watch whether the path would be accommodation or exit. I expect the EU could survive without Italy but not without France or Germany.
As in my comment above, Salvini, Lega, Meloni are doing as dogs with food, whatever somebody else is asking them to do, for power an money sake. They were 30 years ago against EU establishment. Now they are just stupid dogs that are barking for some food, but they'll never betrayed their owner that is EU Commission, those bunch of criminals nazi fascists!
My college student son (big US state school) said he hung out with an Azeri classmate recently and got an earful of college-aged-Azeri perspective on how terrible Armenians are and how righteous Azeris are in their conflict. He said it was quite a trip.
When I went to college I think my most exotic classmate was from Texas.
One can only pity the Armenians. Neither the US nor the EU are reliable allies and it is unlikely that either of these have the military capacity to assist them on any significant scale. Russia is the only country in a position to help but Pashinyan's intrigues with the West have led Moscow to wash its hands of Yerevan.
The smart thing would be to remove Pashinyan and get his replacement to repair relations with Moscow as a matter of urgency. This is most unlikely to happen.
Really? What do you mean by purity? Armenia is a part of Western Asia. It is landlocked and cannot exist in a cocoon separated from its neighbours. Geography and economics demand integration with the wider region. Ideally, Armenia should develop its capacity to engage Iran and Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan. This may be difficult, but they have no alternatives. The antiquity of Armenia is undeniable, but the Armenians should aim for more than being occupants of an ethnographic/cultural museum.
Lukashenko's great achievements were preserving the standard of living of his people during the 1990s and keeping NATO and the NGOs out. But he has had to repair relations with Moscow. An Armenian Lukashenko would be a great improvement on Pashinyan.
Your report of Indians showing up in Yerevan suggests that Armenia is headed down a variant of the standard socio-cultural model of the West. I have read Istanbul also increasingly attracts economic migrants from South Asia and beyond too. The global population churn is set to transform the planet beyond recognition.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
Also: I've written essays on Salvini in the past and might do so again in the near future.
My only problem with Salvini and it’s a pretty big problem, is his unwavering support for Israel.
"Meloni who was ruled as a centrist liberal, and is now feted in western media as a ‘voice of reason’."
The EU likes Meloni the way I like my women: quiet and submissive.
That BlackRock shit is crazy.
Completely insane. I think about it all the time for no reason except to upset myself.
Don't be upset! They can't break us.
One of my favorite things about Blackrock is how their name even sounds like a front organization for a James Bond villain, and yet western journalists have said right wingers are being too mean to humanity's savior Larry Fink (I think it was WaPo)
In a sane world it would be broken up and sold, proceeds redistributed to the various populations from whom the wealth has essentially been stolen through their ability to access limitless cash at near-zero interest rates over the past 15 years. They are far more powerful than Rockefeller or Bell ever were. But because they support the regimes they are untouchable. Time they were liquidated.
"Gone are the days when populist and right wing parties are anti-EU"
One ancient rumor trying to discredit Orban as a short man with a Napoleon complex fuelling an endless ambition was his supposed dismay when he learned that only people born in the US can become the president over there.
The very same circles still delude themselves that Orban wants Hungary to leave the EU. He doesn't want to leave the next best thing to America, he wants to lead it.
Brexit was a defeatist tantrum, although, seeing British politics, nothing of value, as far as intra-EU support for sovereign power, was lost.
I occasionally listen to corporate MSNBC lib Chris Hayes's podcast. The most recent ep I took in was with a sociologicist who wrote a book about the year 2020. Hayes says things like "we've all forgotten what 2020 was like" throughout. We have? Who are these fricking people?
Internet poisoning and the social-media panopticon/Skinner Boxes all our media types have constructed for themselves means they essentially live in an eternal present, where the dates change but every moment of every day is the same exhausting disorienting (yet also mostly imaginary) battle for civilization, where they stay frozen like Buridan's ass always being tugged by either bliss at their utopian future coming into view or its opposite, all their evil political enemies at last triumphing and installing the Fourth Reich.
It seems like a really miserable and brain- and soul-destroying way to live, but I guess it beats getting a real job or surrendering all the illusions they have about being fearless moral guides, which would also have to be accompanied by the realization that somehow they've become all they claim to hate.
The digital dream world takes escapism to new, previously unimaginable, heights.
Humanity will speciate: the nature and degree of old school reality to which people have access will depend on their bank balances. The rich will reserve real-world experience for themselves while the proles will work and die in virtual reality, subject to the disciplines of social media relieved by the joys of virtual companionship from digital geishas generated by AI pornware. When pressures build up they will be resolved by corporate sponsored protests that blend "Day of the Locusts" with Maoist struggle sessions (edgy t-shirts and merchandise available for purchase).
Or Jesus comes again to reward the righteous and punish the wicked.
"Behold, I am with you always, until the close of age." End of Matthew.
Way back when, I used to go to this tiny cafe in Tribeca, far east side and way before Tribeca was anything other than warehouses. Only served enormous cafe au lait and small croissants, rickety wooden chairs, maybe six tables total. Loved it there, but it didn't stand a chance against the types of places you're describing there. Never made it to the 21st century.
#primagliItaliani
Fun reads today...won't sleep now
Yes, someone has to be left surviving in the rubble -.-
I'm happy to report that coffee shops in the Maghreb do not follow this "global" trend. No starbucks-like menu, no industrial-size wood tables, no bright interior with walls painted white. In fact if there's any foreign influence in the local coffee shops, it's French influence.
Also: "when someone searches Google for speciality coffee shops in Bucharest, Beans & Dots pops up. Ungureanu developed an Instagram account full of cappuccino snapshots and more than 7,000 followers, but grew frustrated when she felt that the platform was taking away her ability to access her audience through the feed"
The location is bad, I've been there.
"This homogenisation is not just a phenomenon of our own moment; it is a consequence of changes that happened long before algorithmic social media feeds"
Sure, like communism destroying social life and interaction in Eastern Europe, so that now most coffee shops there look like the "global" cafés the writer describes because they don't have a tradition that they can build on.
Actually the coffee shops that sprung up in that region late 90s and early 2000s were very unique and followed different themes that the owners were interested in. Their menus were also adapted to those themes. You had theatre cafes with posters of the different plays and short menus with cheap items like tees and uncomplicated coffees, atelier style cafes which kept a more industrial feel, photography and arts cafes with dark red and violet walls and extensive hot chocolate menus (really you could order 20 different types of hot chocolate) not to mention all the shisha bars, sports cafes, gigolo style cafes (with large white couches where guys would just menspread and chainsmoke for hours)...honestly there was a lot of variety and I could easily keep going. I spent my youth in those places.
Just because we had communism doesn't mean we didn't have different traditions and interests which outlasted that frankly short period in our history and which people quickly picked back up once it was over. If anything has homogenised interests and tastes and for that matter destroyed social life and actual interaction it's social media and the adoption of all things western cause it's "better".
"Actually the coffee shops that sprung up in that region late 90s and early 2000s were very unique and followed different themes that the owners were interested in. Their menus were also adapted to those themes."
Interesting! Thank you.
My experience was mostly with Romania and might not be applicable to all of Eastern Europe.
Fink is right that Bitcoin has largely failed as a currency. It’s been 15 years and the only time I see “pay with Bitcoin!” is shopping grey market online vendors. As a digital bar of gold however it’s been fantastic and that is where its utility lays. I know true believers are probably angry about a company co-opting Bitcoin but that ship sailed when the feds figured out how to track transactions on the Bitcoin ledger in order to shut down Silk Road in 2012. If you want to stay true to the more libertarian ethos that spawned Bitcoin, use Monero instead. The fact Monero transactions are truly private means the feds hate it and Wall Street will never touch it.
As far as tokenization of everything goes, yuck. Fink should pull up some old articles from 2017 on Ethereum blockchain and see how tokenizing cloud computing, homes, or dental care(Dentacoin!) turned out. Big speculative bubble that burst when people realized the garbage they bought. Fink might believe he can time the top.
Bitcoin was never about privacy, but about a non-government, absolutely digitally finite/scarce bearer asset. Please catch up and do more studying.
Bitcoin the network is a settlement layer, similar to Fedwire. Layer 2 solutions, focusing on transaction efficiency (i.e. Lightning Network, Fedimints, etc) are more in line with "Bitcoin as money" (if focusing solely on day-to-day transactions like with Visa/Mastercard payment processors). USD is world reserve currency and most of us Westerners have financial privilege of not having to worry about 20% inflation on a weekly/monthly basis. Majority of day-to-day Bitcoin usage is in developing countries that suffer from high currency debasement, being unbanked, or sanctioned.
Ask yourself what is money and what are the properties of money. Highly recommend "Broken Money" by Lyn Alden, "Layered Money" by Nik Bhatia, "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous
I am fairly well versed in blockchain/Bitcoin, and thanks to the seeming ubiquitousness of a college age libertarian “phase” I’m familiar with the Austrian school of economics.
Currency has been historically default private. Transactions being traceable is mostly a postwar, digital, development. As I said in my comment Bitcoin is NOT about privacy, thus it fails as currency but still is an excellent investment.
People have been talking about lightning and layer 2s for Bitcoin for half a decade now. Yet I have never seen even a grey market vendor use either. Now that the feds have officially arrived any further developments towards private transactions will be heavily discouraged. You can already see this with a few “privacy” Bitcoin wallets redlining transactions to “problematic” addresses. Although it’s not Bitcoin you can also see a possible vector of attack with the arrest and prosecution of the developer of the Ethereum mixer “tornado cash” for money laundering.
Can the hardcore libertarian “Bitcoin as digital currency revolution” win out over the normies that just like “numba go up”? Maybe, but with Wall Street backing them up I wouldn’t bet on it. Default privacy needed to be part of Bitcoin from the start or at least before Wall Street arrived.
Agree to disagree on privacy being necessary for currency. It's nice and preferable, but not required to be functional. Blockchain analytics is probabilistic anyway, not an exact science. Chainanlysis won't even reveal their methods in the various court cases where they were challenged to do so.
The fact that you haven't seen Layer 2 payment solutions on websites doesn't mean they don't exist and are not becoming more common. That says more about your exposure to the technology and the products/services/websites you use (or the bubble your'e confined to) than it does about the adoption of the technology. I use Lightning to stream satoshis directly to podcasters for every minute I listen, using podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain. I used it to buy books, coffee, Bitcoin hardware wallets, online subscriptions, gift cards and a small personal server device.
This feels a lot like Paul Krugman poo-pooing the Internet in 90s. It's understandable if one is not actively keeping up with and using the technology, but it doesn't make it true.
As far as chain analysis goes I would not expect past court cases to predict the outcomes of future ones in this case.
I use layer 2s on Ethereum all the time, just only for cryptocurrency related tasks. I think just about everyone knows about Bitcoin at this point, but if I were to ask any of my millennial aged friends if they have used lightning, or even know what it is, they would look at me like I have two heads. To turn it around on you, I think your experience using lightning says more about the bubble your in than mine does about me.
And saying I sound like Paul Krugman??? Ouch. Krugman would have been correct if he had limited his analysis to the era of the open internet. After 2000 the feds started working with tech companies to slowly manage and direct the internet. With Wall Street moving in I fear the same will happen with Bitcoin going forward.
https://images.thedirect.com/media/photos/spider-meme.jpg
Excellent SCR as usual, sir! I watch EU politics (as I did Brexit) like a soap opera or sports league…full of rivals and subplots. It would be fascinating to see a solid anti-EU block emerge and watch whether the path would be accommodation or exit. I expect the EU could survive without Italy but not without France or Germany.
As in my comment above, Salvini, Lega, Meloni are doing as dogs with food, whatever somebody else is asking them to do, for power an money sake. They were 30 years ago against EU establishment. Now they are just stupid dogs that are barking for some food, but they'll never betrayed their owner that is EU Commission, those bunch of criminals nazi fascists!
My college student son (big US state school) said he hung out with an Azeri classmate recently and got an earful of college-aged-Azeri perspective on how terrible Armenians are and how righteous Azeris are in their conflict. He said it was quite a trip.
When I went to college I think my most exotic classmate was from Texas.
Thanks Niccolo!
Two minor points -
feted --> fêted
signs show --> signs indicate
[comment: 'signs show' is more like 'signs display' than 'signs allow the inference' which is what you mean]
word up