Josh Davis @GuerillaOntologist@social.coop

Another one: I tried to tell my professors that it didn't really make much sense to talk about "a business deciding" to do something, as a business is just a legal structure, and a bunch of relationships between different individuals and groups of individuals. It's those individuals who make the decisions *on behalf* of the business, and that's a detail that matters a whole lot...obviously, right? You should have seen the looks I got for that one...

But wait, it gets worse! Even the economists trying to push back on GDP as a useful measure, repeat the same mistake of thinking that you can capture anything of value about "The Economy" with a single metric. So while they see the obvious problem, they are still living in denial of the fact that the entire idea of this kind of metric is flawed...which should be obvious, right? But not to economists, no...

And I spent 10s of 1000s of dollars on an econ degree, so I have a right to bitch.

Like this: GDP is simply a measure of transactions involving the exchange of money that happened during a certain period of time. This is a measure that tells us nothing of any real interest, and it's obvious that it doesn't, but everyone acts like GDP⬆️ is good and GDP⬇️ is bad, even "expert" economists.

If you get cancer and spend all your money treating it, GDP goes up. If you're 2 days late on your credit card payment and they charge you a fee, GDP goes up. Do we see why GDP⬆️ =/= good?

I think most of a mainstream economics education is really just about training you not to think about obvious things.

Over half of all bitcoin trades are fake, according to Forbes analysis...which, granted, is better than the 95% reported previously.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/2022/08/26/more-than-half-of-all-bitcoin-trades-are-fake/?sh=668e7a876681

The amount of trading volume in bitcoin is unknown, with estimates varying by up to an order of magnitude. In short, no one knows what's true in regards to bitcoin, or any other crypto-token, except that it's clear that a lot of fakery is going on.

If you're into crypto and you don't know who the sucker is, you're it.

Just won my first game of Atomic Chess ⚛️ ♟️ . Check out this final position 🤔

ISO Panelists for "The Future of Cannabis Cooperatives" panel 10/30

https://www.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/xswj2z/iso_panelists_for_the_future_of_cannabis/

How the heck did "thinkfluencer" become a word? Can we do a take-back on that one?

After futzing around a good bit, I finally got Minsky installed and working! Stock-flow consistent economic modeling, here we come! 🥳

Actually, I may be misremembering the '95 date...it could have been earlier. Anyway, look it up and see for yourself. I only found out about it from the Radio War Nerd podcast. Amazing the kind of little details like that never get mentioned on the mainstream news, innit?

Let's do a quiz: 1 of the following quotes is from Julius Nyerere, the first Pres. of Tanzania; the other is from Mr. Putin. Can you tell them apart?

"No nation has a right to make decisions for another nation; no people for another people."

"The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world."

No googling!

Point being that Vlad's speech sounds like it could have been written by my Nepali Marxist friend 🤷‍♂️

Imagine we're heading into WWIII and you're just some average person living in South America, or Africa, or SE Asia and you hear this speech 👇 , what are you going to think? Are you going to want to take this guy's side in the coming conflict, or their opponents?

https://twitter.com/FiorellaIsabelM/status/1575987665085702146

And don't get it twisted, I'm no fan of this guy, even a little -- but seriously, where's the lie?

Does anyone remember the coup in Ukraine in 2014? Does anyone recall one of the coup gov't's ministers going on TV and enthusing about "cleansing the country of Russian-speakers"? Does anyone remember the 14,000+ civilian deaths in the break-away oblasts from 2014-2022, the result of Ukrainian shelling of residential areas? Does anyone remember anything from more than 6 months ago, or is it just me?

Truly, we live in the dumbest timeline.

I wonder how many people r aware of the fact that Crimea was its own country for about 4 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. I wonder how many people remember that they had their own constitution & elected gov't. And I wonder how many people know that Ukraine's military invaded in '95, tore up their constitution, and straight up took them over. Anybody? Does anybody know any of this history? Not in the US, that's for sure, & it feels like not in Europe, either.

In case things go sideways faster than I'm expecting, I just wanted to make sure I got a chance to say it's been nice knowing you all. Had a great time, learned a few things, etc. I look forward to meeting again in our next incarnation as cockroaches, or whatever other hardy life forms survive the massive irradiation that is no doubt in all of our futures.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/tallinn-postcard-feels-like-a-big

Almost got suckered into some NFT 💩 over on Reddit 😒