domain:slatestarcodex.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
That is a very non-standard meaning of "buying trinkets", Mr. Dumpty.
FtttG
4hr ago
he doesn't remember when he bought some of the records he owns
girlslaughing.png
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
sometimes you have to think about more important things than winning the next election
Competent politicians recognize this as a strategem by which they may be tricked into removing themselves, and then most likely the "more important thing" they were convinced into sacrificing their political career for is then abandoned or betrayed.
DradisPing
5hr ago
The chronological or purchase order make a lot more sense to me. The only issue I can see is that I might not remember buying some of them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
Current US debt is not for "buying trinkets". It's mostly funding people's lives of questionable leisure, and providing life extension for the aged and self-destructive.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
One could tax every property by default. A mailbox company in the Bahamas hold that tenement? Either they cough up the taxes, or they lose their property. A publicly traded company increased its market cap by 20% in a year? Great, just print shares for Uncle Sam worth 0.2% or the market cap.
This might deter foreign investment, but especially in housing, foreign investment is just driving up prices, which is a boon only to a minority.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
This. Trump has a giant yet fragile ego. I think that the 2020 election denial can be understood not as a carefully designed lie to stay relevant, but as a knee-jerk emotional response. A world in which he fairly lost 2020 was a world where he was less popular than two-term president Obama and president-elect Joe Biden. This was not a world he could imagine inhabiting. Likewise, his 2024 statement to the effect that he would accept the election result if he wins.
In a way, when losing he is like an obsessive ex turned stalker, who can not accept that they got dumped, but tries to construct a world where they were forced by external factors to deny their love.
"How Czech Republic managed to get its Ministry of Justice investigated for money laundering of cca 4000+ bitcoin from a darknet drug marketplace"
“It was so ultra-legal that it couldn’t be more legal,” the justifiably former Minister of Justice Pavel 'Don Pablo' Blažek. [1]
Finally, some a bit 21st century news. I put this into CW and not 'fun' because 'populists might benefit'.
In march of '25 , the Ministry of Justice in Czech Republic accepted about $40 million gift in the form of 864 bitcoin. I briefly remembered the news item: MoJ is selling bitcoin in auction.
Now, the justice minister has resigned, the ministry is being investigated for money laundering, the minister is being investigated for abusing his position and Tomáš Jiříkovský, who gave the gift is missing.
The timeline, so far, seems to be something like:
2013/3: Tomáš opens Sheep Marketplace (SM) opens. Initially scarcely used and amateurish, it gets a lot of users after Silk Road collapses.
2013/10: Silk Road closes. People flood to SM
2013/12: SM hacked, 5400 client bitcoin stolen according to its admins. Real amount is unknown, possibly up to 96,000.. Tomáš closes the market and pockets the rest of the bitcoin clients had there.
2014-2016: Tomáš runs 'Nucleus', another darknet marketplace. He tries to launder the stolen money and attracts NCOZ (Czech FBI without counterintelligence duties).
2016/4/12 Tomáš is arrested by the Czech police. 2016/4/13 Nucleus marketplace stops responding and again, client bitcoin (5400) go missing. It's obvious Tomáš was running Nucleus. Police never investigate him for this.
2018: Tomáš is sentenced to 9 years for drug trading, embezzlement and illegal weapons to 9 years. His electronic devices areconfiscated. State intends to wipe it to prevent the perp from benefitting from the proceeds of a crime. The perp's lawyers contest this. 2021: Tomáš is out due to good behavior. He starts to petition the courts, first to prevent data destruction, then to return his seized devices.
2025/1 The courts finally rule that he can get them all back.
2025/3 For no ostensible reason, Tomáš proposes to gift the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) about $40 million in bitcoin that's supposedly not stolen. There's going to be an expert witness present to attest to that it's not stolen darknet bitcoin, the transaction will be overseen by a notary too. This happens and is covered in crypto news, who are of course unaware of who is involved.
2025/5/30: this hits the news, perhaps due to Tomáš, who seems to be an ADHD guy with a vocational school degree only, making the list of richest people in Czech Republic. Revelations soon follow: the expert witness was paid by Tomáš. The wallet was opened 10 hours before the notary got there - they did not want to waste his time while dealing with the encrypted wallet. It's determined up to 4000 bitcoin were sent from the wallet to various addresses before the notary got there to witness the gift to MoJ.
2025/6 Tomáš departs for parts unknown - probably because people missing their bitcoins are are offering bounties for his whereabouts. Minister of Justice resigns. FBI gets involved.
Some important notes: most everyone involved in this case is connected to Masaryk univerzity in Brno (~750k), the second largest city in Czech lands, much hated by people from the capital.(1500K). Tomáš's grandfather was a professor there. The prime minister and the justice minister both studied there. Tomáš lived in Břeclav, a town close to it.
My suspicions: based on the lot of Czech language info I've read on this case, it looks like the justice minister ensured the courts ruled to not wipe the devices, and some of the other bitcoin were likely gifted to people backing the staunchly pro-war and pro-American government parties. The courts obliged but in their verdicts strongly protested and said the bitcoin were proceeds of a crime. Of course, this implies the prime minister knew about this too. But the it's believed is the justice minister is more influential than the PM, and claimed to be ' regional godfather',
If you want to know more, some sources in Czech:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoinov%C3%A1_kauza
https://zandl.substack.com/p/97-jak-tomas-jirikovsky-a-ministr
[1]: the two time justice minister is suspected of being a grey eminence / involved in many shady influence deals. https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-blazek-ministr-spravedlnosti-rezignace-profil.A250530_165132_domaci_ikul
functor
6hr ago
Could AI be the next big thing without impacting the economy and labour market?
Computers revolutionized the construction industry. CAD software makes it far easier to draw buildings and share the drawings. Phones makes communications vastly easier. Instead of a worker getting stuck or having to physically find someone they can make a video call. Manuals and documents are freely available online. Online shopping makes order parts cheaper and easier while allowing builders to press prices. Accounting, scheduling, recruiting sales and other supporting activities are easier with computers. Even on the construction site computers control machines. A modern truck is full of software.
Yet the productivity in the construction industry has flat lined and is if anything declining. Land prices can take some blame but renovating a building has not become cheaper.
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean
In 1910, there were 2.7M German speakers and 544 German-language newspapers in the US. As we all know, the result was a Germanization and Nazification of the US as seen in the documentary series "the Man in the High Castle". Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society. As are the immigrants which came from Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, and so on one hundred years ago.
In 2011, the US had 1.1M people who spoke Korean at home. I don't know how many newspapers they have in the US, Wikipedia has a grand total of two Korean-language newspapers with articles. In time, most of their descendants will certainly be fluent in English. (Given the cliches about East Asians, I would not be surprised if it turned out that most of them are fluent and have actually read more Shakespeare than the median White American.)
The US has been integrating (not assimilating in the borg sense) people of various origins for about as long as it has been a thing. What you observed is part of that process.
Also, my gut feeling is that either for cultural or HBD reasons, East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.
nopie
6hr ago
In such situation the US would indeed just print the money to save itself from bankruptcy causing immense inflation. It will cause worldwide financial crisis. It is possible that the GDP for many countries will fall by 50% or even more.
That will not be good neither for the US, nor the world peace. Possible some other countries will arise more arise more powerful, especially China, Russia or Iran. The countries who have learned to become more resilient due to constant sanctions.
TowardsPanna
7hr ago
Is that the trilogy containing Oslo 31. August? Great movie IMO. Felt pretty accurate.
FtttG
7hr ago
Have you ever read High Fidelity? The protagonist is an obsessive collector of vinyl records, and whenever he's going through a major life upheaval, he reorganises his records as a therapeutic exercise. At the very start of the novel his girlfriend breaks up with him, so he immediately begins reorganising his records - but in a break from tradition, he does so not in alphabetical or chronological order, but autobiographical: the chronological order in which he bought them.
Terracotta
7hr ago
(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)
I can fully see how this would be true of mowing down dim figures with ranged weapons at a distance, videogame-style. Can I ask, from curiosity, if in your experience it's also true of killing in hand-to-hand combat, where you can see/ hear/ smell the physical damage being done and watch the life leaving people's bodies?
DradisPing
7hr ago
So I've been getting an ad on Xitter for a tiny bookshelf with a whole lot of fake books you can organize. Then you can dump it out and organize them again.
This blew my mind because it never occurred to me that this was an activity people enjoy.
I just assumed that people who alphabetized their CDs (dating myself here) just never did the math on how often they actually search for a random CD by name.
Does anyone good stories about seeing a product that made them realize their failures at modelling the minds of others?
Corvos
7hr ago
Do people use the chat history / user memory features? I found them kind of intrusive and I prefer having a blank slate for queries, so I turned them off.
No_one
8hr ago
If you AI under close oversight / editing it won't make something unrecognizable.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
Equally thanks to pressure from the Gingrich era Republicans in Congress.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
I don't see why Trump gives a shit. He can't be reelected anyway, so who cares if the voters hate him?
He himself? He's quite obviously someone who is obsessed with whether the people, or at least his own voter base, like him or not.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control.
But that would have been right after the years the US federal budget had been running a surplus under the Clinton admin, no?
TowardsPanna
9hr ago
To me he seems nothing like a visionary leader who accepts temporary pain for the greater, long term good of his people. His first and second priorities are his ego and his embezzlement.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I’m with you, zero confidence that Americans will go along with this, because Americans have been raised up until maybe 15 years ago in a world of abundant wealth where hard choices didn’t have to be made. Or the can could be kicked until basically now. They aren’t used to “suffering for the greater good”, making do or doing without. So they aren’t going to tolerate such a thing. Add in the opposition making a point to blame the GOP for the suffering and promising to go back to the before times when the public could expect high standards of living, cushy office jobs, university education, and cheap consumer goods, and you will see the revolt.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Or more generally, doing anything fun and non-programmer with generative llms?
RP?
You can slam any two settings together or make your own, any moderately known characters replicated with moderate authenticity, go on adventures. I might be eccentric since I'm more of a '2nd person going on an adventure in a world' person while many if not most seem to be 'directly communicating with an invented character 1 to 1' people.
Surely this has to be the most freeform roleplaying game ever made.
i love that book
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