John D.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

“Wellness” quackery can be fatal

[John D. @john_the_fool]

@DefiDiogenesYFI When I'm talking to a group of people about my favourite greek philosophers and start rattling off diogenes anecdotes, and then get to this one...

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

Translation: American consumers will pay higher prices for Canadian goods to atone for the wildfires. You really showed them.

[“paula” @paularambles]

You see, what fascinates me about “remember to not smile” is that he needs his pain to be witnessed. He suffers at 4am, okay, fine, many people suffer. But then, immediately, he makes a slide! He gathers the entire company! He writes an article! Is it not clear what is happening here? Suffering without an audience simply does not count. This is ideology at its purest.

We see here the old Protestant trick in its Silicon Valley form: success alone is vulgar, almost pornographic. My god, you cannot simply succeed. It must first be purified through unnecessary suffering. So you get this obscene reversal where pain stops being a cost of the product, and instead becomes the product itself. The developer documentation is, how do you say, merely the byproduct, the excrement of the true production, which is the suffering. As Hegel already knew, and here I think even Lacan would agree, although perhaps not, the true obsession is always with deserving success.

Here I must tell you this old joke from Soviet Union. A worker says: "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Now here it is inverted, which I claim is much worse. They are paid perfectly well, wonderfully well, and so they must pretend to suffer. Do you see the perfect madness of this?

And now, the ultimate obscenity. Imagine the company succeeds while everyone leaves at 5pm. Catastrophe! Total ontological catastrophe! In this worldview, I am tempted to say, failure would almost come as a relief. Failure means you simply did not suffer enough, go back, suffer more. But success at 5pm? This cannot be explained.

So when he says "remember to not smile," this is a desperate command of the superego. If you smile, we will all discover the pain was never necessary.

[John D. @john_the_fool]

only 3 billion?

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Stanley Druckenmiller on how he lost $3 billion during the early 2000s tech bubble

He bought $6 billion of tech stocks right around the peak, and got cut down in half within the span of just six weeks

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

The idea that this "celebrates the strength of American values" is laughable. George Washington vehemently (and successfully) opposed a plan to put his face on a coin because he didn't want to be treated like a king. This embarrassing worship is *antithetical* to American values.

[John D. @john_the_fool]

Does this mean I won't have to listen to those stupid IBM AI for business ads anymore???

https://t.co/VRWlLWp8Zx

[David Z. Morris @davidzmorris]

Mitch McConnell remaining technically alive for an extra three weeks because of a manipulative procedural maneuver is exactly how he would have wanted to go out.

[Lee Roach @leevalueroach]

You can track Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades on X. But once you start tracking Donald Trump’s that’s a no no. What’s up with this @nikitabier.

[Tay 💖 @tayvano_]

guys 😭

[Coffeezilla @coffeebreak_YT]

So turns out a bunch of those "Polymarket winner" videos weren't real, per some great reporting by the WSJ.

It was a fake website. Absolutely nuclear levels of fraud.

[John D. @john_the_fool]

@GreenPlusAnE @biggsag infinitely better; thanks

[John D. @john_the_fool]

@inversebrah

[John D. @john_the_fool]

@Birdyword

[John D. @john_the_fool]

@gainzy222 could obviously get a COLA-SPIA, but that would reduce monthly payments of course; none of this negates the original premise that fixed payments limit opportunities and temptation to overspend

[John D. @john_the_fool]

@gainzy222 for $1M you could buy a SPIA guaranteeing >$5k/month, so you can do this right now if you really want! but this or the 1k/week would get destroyed by inflation assuming you live a while longer

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

I think people sometimes get the impression that corruption creeps up on a country over time, but actually it turns out if you turn the tap on everyone is pretty much ready to go at a moment's notice

[peepeepoopoo @DeepDishEnjoyer]

what's the point of being a billionaire if you still have to grovel and sell out