Unbanking the banked

Not even – it’s a simplified Civilization clone for mobile. (It actually sounds like a pretty neat little game, but, uh, chess it is not!)

My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”

Oh my god, I can’t stop laughing out loud at “women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks,” based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What’s his explanation for why men didn’t do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much

posts you can hear

First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you’re “the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference.” How is that fair? :-(

Except it’s not really being automated out of our lives, is it? I find it hard to imagine how increasing the rate at which bullshit can be produced leads to a world with less bullshit in it.

Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

Wait, run that second one by me again

In contrast, Web4 identifies products consumers are willing to purchase and comprehends market requirements.

The crazy and hitherto-unheard-of concept of “selling things people actually want to buy to people who want to buy them”… It’ll never catch on!

(I mean, it will never catch on for crypto, because applying this philosophy to crypto quickly reveals that no one actually wants the thing they’re supposed to be selling)

Yeah, it’s such a braindead libertarian position to blame tech platforms blocking slurs on The Government. It’s literally not illegal to say slurs! It’s just not something most normal people want to be associated with

I appreciate that he specifies that the dumpster fire is, in fact, metaphorical.

“how would women use our protocol?”
“oh, right, women, shit. uh, I guess they could use it for dating men?”
“yeah, that’s a pretty good one, any other ideas?”
“do women even do anything else?”
“hmmm… I guess not that I’m aware of, no”
“all right then let’s go with that one”

I like how the assumption seems to be that the thing users object to about “websites track your browsing history around the web in order to show you targeted ads” is… the “websites” part