Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
if you are a feminist the trade is long $MELANIA / short $TRUMP.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i'd really like some $DONJR in my wallet.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
it is such an own goal! $TRUMP was becoming a focus point. there are lots of bitcoin clones, but none matters very much, because bitcoin established itself as "the real thing". $TRUMP could have done the same, be the one true vehicle for expressing love of / currying favor with Trump. harder now!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i'm not sure the datapoint we get tomorrow will support this hypothesis.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
you remember how the goose that lays the golden eggs dies when they get greedy and, um, try to clone it?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
This is amazing. I'm so glad that somebody is finally bringing dignity back to the White House.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
ht @stephenjudkins.bsky.social! sorry to have skipped that in my mania!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
@dylanmatt.bsky.social it's, um, not so great you used a 2022 analysis near US peak inflation to claim "economists…attributed abt 3 percentage points of inflation to excessive stimulus", when from 2021-01 to 2024-11 the US experience was about the same as the EU and Eurozone on OECD numbers. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
"overall price increases could have been reduced, perhaps even halved." is also misleading, since the peak you claim might have halved was quite narrow. again, given global experience since 2022, this analysis on which your diagnosis of Biden's failure largely hangs, strikes me as tendentious. 2/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Re www.vox.com/politics/394... ht @akkartik.name My OECD numbers from data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&pg... accessed 2025-01-19 (Overall OECD inflation, and OECD Europe, were much higher than the US, but that's largely Turkey, less comparable.) /fin
The president who could not choose
Link Preview: The president who could not choose: Biden’s indecision led to four years of weakness.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
SpaceX legit has capabilities one might want. Europe has all of Facebook's capabilities, it just hasn't deployed them as rentierism-as-a-service. Nothing to regret there, except letting Facebook in!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
thank you copilot. all i want is excel on my frigging desktop.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
again, support for a very particular set of his actions is not support for him.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
yes. i think Apple and Alphabet are the clearest canaries. who is providing hosting, CDN, whatever is less visible. i've read skeets claiming that Oracle is, on the basis of assurances, but that's just hearsay for now, who knows? i wonder if app performance is at all degraded?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
it would be funny if what happens is Trump baits firms like Oracle into violating the law and then fines them hundreds of billions and they're like we had assurances and the courts are like don't you have lawyers? the money would be enough to put a dent in a year's deficit!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i'm not endorsing Tom Cotton in general, God help us. i'm not vouching for his consistency on this or any other issue. but at this moment, it strikes me as essential someone stand up and say acts of Congress are the law that the President must take care are properly executed, not cute suggestions.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
they usually are!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i think we deserve a t-shirt of we make it through the inauguration without a heart attack.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
you don't. and now there are lots of stablecoins (back when there was only tether, very sketchy), so people can send pretty safe dollars. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
there's no reason why a band can't put an ETH address as a payment destination. depending what network is used, transfers can be nearly free. (base ETH is most expensive. for the first time in a couple of years, i recently transacted there, a token transfer cost ~70¢.) 2/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
if you are starting up some kind of group informally, you can avoid incorporation and bank accounts and have a crypto wallet that requires authorizations from three-out-of-five or whatever, off the shelf. people can donate with some assurance the guy with the envelope of cash doesn't walk away. 3/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
maybe these ideas were just early? still, so far i've seen very little of this kind of thing. (maybe it's selection bias in what i see, what's small is not so visible!) /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i really don't know. for a while, at least on Ethereum, transactions got so expensive that small experiments were priced out. but recently that seems to have subsided. maybe it could still emerge, if people can still glimpse the stars behind a garish sunlight of overwhelming greed.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i always thought usurping currency was not a great idea. it was creating rails for financial flows more open to smaller and more creative actors that interested me. www.interfluidity.com/v2/7153.html
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
in the wake of 2008 and the bailouts, a lot of us were thirsting for alternatives. the idea of building something from scratch, making financial pipes that would be universally accessible without having to schmooze with lawyers and bankers, did seem like it might be a good thing.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
we didn't actually object to the oppression. we just objected to who got to be the oppressor.