Thimbron

Billions is a Showtime TV series about a federal district attorney (Chuck Rhoades) (aka a Preet) attempting to imprison a hedge fund manager (Bobby Axelrod). This is yet another excellent propaganda piece by the pantsuits. The characterizations are so very careful - Chuck is into S&M - but we know it’s OK because his “dom” is his wife. We are reminded often of his nobility in “serving” the public (i.e. living off of the public’s stolen taxes) as opposed to the many opportunities he has to reap massive rewards from working in the “private” sector by of course using his connections in the state apparatus.

The writers of the show (well, really, the sophists) ensure that every unethical action - such as opening a fake investigation to take the heat off of a mole - is backed up by a lengthy dialog of middle school fallacies. The reason it’s excellent is the mindfuck they’re trying to pull by setting up the conflict to be between the government and the free market when in fact the conflict is between the government and the government. See this situation here we’ve created by banning sound money and enabling regulatory capture? Well we’re going to solve it by infringing on your property rights, privacy, right to trial by jury, etc. And it’s all ok because, while we ourselves lack morality, we are certain that in this case this inidividual should rot in a cage.

Somehow the series managed to hold off the serious SJWism until the final three episodes, in which we discover one heroic character is in a gay marriage, the white judge who stands up for property rights is racist, and the assistant (possibly native american) DA dumps the white chick for the super smart, wealthy black chick who thinks that, you know, our democracy isn’t perfect, but it’s the better than the alternatives. This is in addition to the low level background radiation of Chuck and his wife’s conflict over their careers, Axelrod and his wife’s conflict over their careers, a female psychiatrist really being just as important as all the traders who have skin and the game, and on and on.

1. Philz is a private chain of coffee shops owned by Phil Jaber, a Palestinian (possibly Christian) immigrant to San Francisco in the 70’s. Before opening Philz, he ran a grocery/liquor store for decades. Philz is unique in the way they make their drinks - the barista mixes all the ingredients, including cream and sugar, before serving it. First you order your drink directly from a barista, then you go to a different place to pay. There is this inherent trust built into the flow - you order your drink without paying, then they just make it and trust that you will go ahead and pay. In the old days, mistakes would often be made in my favor - with me receiving a large instead of a small. Or I would get a free cup if it took too long. Incidentally the employees are inevitably hipsterish, as is the clientel. They used to hire hot hipstresses, but recently they’ve tended to hire more towards the dyke end of the scale, and at the one I frequent now there is an offensively ugly she-troll - fat - ugly face, nearly shaved hair, nose ring [↩]
2. For reasons that are not clear to me I can’t actually drink much coffee without experiencing almost immediate acid reflux - or at least I think that’s what it is. Coffee, while delicious, also seems to leave a taste in my mouth that lasts the entire day, and the caffeine buzz is harsh compared to that of tea.  [↩]
3. Oddly I can’t even find the line I remember from mircea_popescu that inspired me to begin learning Greek. On the other hand this is what I love about participating in public logged discussions - it forces thought to proceed from what was actually said. There was anothe line that went something like “He couldn’t read for not having glasses,” that I also can’t find, but which I thought was in reference to myself. [↩]
4. On these days I would question whether I was really interested in learning Greek or whether just because of the caffeine high I was interested in whatever happened to be in front of me. [↩]

1. Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, the man who went from this essay entitled “What You Can’t Say” with “Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs.” to this self crit (is it a self crit, actually? He does a good job in here of recontextualizing the excerpts used in the hatchet piece ) entitled “What I Didn’t Say” (well obviously the stuff you can’t say!) with “I also care about increasing the number of female founders, and a few weeks ago proposed that YC organize an event to encourage them.” Perhaps he should write another essay entitled “What You Must Say In Order To Continue To Receive Fiatola From The Great Inca.” [↩]
2. Poverty Indeed. The idea of HN is to take a shortcut - to replace a tree (the root of which being roughly Θαλῆς) with weighted set of unconnected nodes. The weights of course are an illusion. [↩]

This is a Netflix series ostensibly about a man brought back from limbo by a wealthy man to solve his own murder. In reality it is an SJW masterpiece about equality.

In this universe, humans discovered the remnants of an “Elder” civilization and their technology that allows the mind to exist independently of the body in something called a “cortical stack.” Bodies are referred to as “sleeves” and may be exchanged at will, though also at a price. The only way someone can “die” in this universe is if their stack is destroyed, and no backups exist.

It is assumed in this series that someone restored from a backup, and that a stack copied into a cloned body is the same person that was backed up or cloned, and not an entirely new being. It must be assumed since no one with a backup fears the current instance of their stack being destroyed, as when Rei sacrifices several of her sleeves and stacks to subdue Ortega.

I see different layers of pantsuitedness in this work. There is the superficial skin color layer - Kovacs and Rei are half Japanese, half Hungarian. The rainbow cast also includes a swearing-in-Spanish Hispanic female cop, a wise Hispanic grandma, an Arab, an Asian police chief, an evil, wealthy, white married couple (with an inexplicably jewish son), a black female martial arts expert/rebel cult leader running a commune in some secret hole, a living AI with feelings and rights, and a black female lawyer. Women routinely defeat much larger men in frequent hand to hand combat. The Russians are evil. Kovac’s father was an evil wife killer. The brilliant hacker is a blond woman (though in this case a woman in a man’s body) married to a black man. They have a phenotypically black daughter who is, you know, impregnated by the elite white dude whose wife then beats her sleeve to death.

The second, deeper layer of pantsuitedness comes in with the sleeving. Since the soul (or “stack” as it is called here) exists independently of the body, it may be sleeved in either a male or a female body. This seems to feed the trans narrative that insists that the body is incidental and one can actually be anything on the inside.

Despite the fact that this series is an evil work of propaganda, it was beautifully produced and extremely faithful to the tradition established by Bladerunner.

Rockband 4 is a multiplayer Rock Band simulator that lets players play guitar, base, and drums, and also allows players to sing into a microphone. Right now I only have two guitar controllers (and no other instruments).
I was initially skeptical of this game since I’m a trained classical violinist and … well it seems like cheating. It turns out that playing the game is a lot of fun somehow. The way it works is each player hovers over an infinite flowing fretted guitar neck. “Notes” that correspond to buttons on the controller fret stream towards the player from the horizon and the player must hit the correct fret button and flip the strum control just as the “note” passes under a line near the base of the screen. The “notes” are color coded, usually, although sometimes they are all a single color for certain sequences though at this point I’m not clear on why that is.

The songs that come with the game are all rock songs from various eras. It is very easy to get into the flow and thoroughly enjoyable to hit the notes at the right time to keep the melody/base going. I find myself kind of dancing or “rocking out” where I sit while playing the game.

One downside I’ve found so far is that in 2 player, with two guitar controllers, one person has to play the base, and it’s very difficult (for me at least) to hear the baseline - if I miss notes for example I can’t seem to usually notice any effect on what I hear.

My daughter hates the competitive mode - it’s way too hard for her and for some reason ever since she started playing video games she takes losing them very seriously^[1], but she loves the endless solo mode, which is pretty much all she plays.

1. I do not recall ever taking losing video games either by myself or against someone else as seriously as she does - to the point of tears. ↩

The past year has been a year of failures for me. I failed to persuade any of my old friends about any of my strongly held beliefs concerning morality, politics, and economics.
Not only did I fail to persuade them, I failed to maintain them as friends. I can count 3 friends from high school and college and early startup days who actually cut me off (i.e. won’t reply to emails, left a chatroom, skipped birthday text).

On top of that there are some who I may still exchange pleasantries with, but will no longer discuss Bitcoin with, since, seeing how it went with the others and where they’re starting from, there’s no point.

I am bemused to say the least at how little influence I have over others concerning areas I’ve taken the time to learn a lot about and in which I have significant SITG and, although I do not often make new friends I will have to consider very carefully who I will associate with going forward, as it is clear I have been hanging out with people that have zero respect for me. And although it may actually be that I don’t deserve any respect from anyone, I would rather be alone and aware of that than delude myself that I have actual friends.

The (poorly named) Sacramento Bitcoin meetup is run by an Argentinian. That alone should be enough to deter anyone from attending - but not knowing this, I attended two meetups there, the last of which (and the one in which I discovered it was run by an Argentine) turned into a shitcoin boiler room recruitment session. When the direction things were going became clear, I explained to the room their idiocy and left.

The item of interest that compelled me to return to the meetup the second time was that the Argentinian claimed to have something of a Bitcoin ATM side business going, about which he provided some interesting demos - namely that his primary customer base is whores who need Bitcoin to pay for ads on Backpage. Any legitimate¹ economic activity involving Bitcoin interests me so I decided to investigate the business further by going to one of his ATMs and testing it out by selling a small sum of dollars.

At the middle of the day in the middle of the week I made the trip to Sacramento. The ATM turned out to be located in a liquor store in a run down neighborhood. As I approached, I saw that the Argentinian just happened to be dropping by to check on his ATM. As I walked in he kind of recognized me - one would think one would remember being shown to be an idiot - but just barely. In any case we struck up a conversation that very shortly went off the rails. This is a paraphrased reconstruction of the important part (and keep in mind he spoke exactly like a very short Ricardo Montelban):

Argentine: “You didn’t know that segwit was already enabled?² I know this because all my recent transactions only took a few seconds. You should come to my meetup and learn some things.”

Me: “Mabye you could actually learn a thing or two from me.”

Argentine: “Vanity! That is your problem!”

Here I attempted fruitlessly to explain to him how the blockchain concept works. Giving up I took out my phone to use to accept Bitcoin from the ATM. I commented offhand that the phone wasn’t online so I’d have to verify that I received the btc later. He took this as a sign of undue mistrust I think and got a little miffed. I mostly only use the thing as a podcast player or Uber caller.

Argentine: “Why don’t you use use a smartphone? Why do you use that ancient flip phone? Don’t you know people would laugh at you if they saw you using that?”

Me: “Is your phone secure?”

Argentine: “Ah I see your problem. You have OCD. You should seek help. You are not in touch with reality. Everyone uses smart phones.”

Me: “…”

Things devolved from there. In his mind I was out of touch with reality for understanding how Bitcoin, smartphones, etc. actually work. And he was in touch with reality because he had meditated for several years at some buddhist retreat.

It is more clear to me now that those who read cross an ever widening gulf over which no words may pass to be understood by those on the other side.

1. Activity in which fiat is sold for Bitcoin, or where fiat is completely excluded from the transaction. I’m specifically not interested in redditard apriori masturbation about the unbanked and all that. [↩]
2. In fact at the time of that encounter it hadn’t and as of this writing it still hasn’t been. Not only that, its use is completely optional even after being activated. As the leader of a Bitcoin meetup, he was completely unaware that in fact segwit has no affect on average time for inclusion in a block, and yet I was the one who needed to come to his meetup to learn a few things. [↩]