Eva Infeld (find me on better networks already)

@BGrucela Czy według tych szacunków będzie 10 frakcji? ;)

Liczba dnia - 10 000

@angela_walch Greed kills most values, but crypocurrency bros stealing the word "cypherpunk" was always cringe. Public ledgers and pyramid schemes are not punk, regardless of any vague historical connection.

Nonsensical that people are talking up how cypherpunk they are while supporting the current Administration.

WTF are cypherpunk values if the people espousing them support authoritarianism?

@littmath Of course, the Pythagorean view dominates some circles because it's easier and fits our cultural context, but it's very flawed.

@littmath That'd not actually true. In mathematics, everything is defined by conditions - even what we think of as "objects. " A circle is a condition on points etc. A set is empty if the defining condition is never satisfied. And there are many such conditions.

went on a 5-plus-minute rant about some mathematical text that used the phrase “an empty set”. There’s only one empty set! All empty sets are equal! Call it *the* empty set!!!

@tracewoodgrains "Rotational numbers" is terrible. I learned imaginary numbers when I was 6 - you really think a 6 year old would respond to a word like that? 🙄 This kind of thinking limits who will ever resonate with mathematics to the same people who can somehow read long, dry manuals.

"It wasn't a seig heil" Hey man, I'm gonna be honest. I get that it's possible that you're that stupid, but I'm not.

@punk6052 Glad there's some life still. :) I've been really enjoying Mastodon for the tech stuff these days tbh. Not much going on at BlueSky for me, even though their protocol design is dope af.

@evainfeld still a fun place to be!

@rop_g There obviously have to be mechanisms that actively counteract that at all levels. You know me better than to think I'd propose a libertarian approach and expect it to bring freedom. ;)

@evainfeld That just creates implicit power structures. Anyone that's lived in student housing can tell you those are way more vicious and unaccountable than explicit ones.

There are so many good people in the world, but it's the bad ones that pursue power. That's how we ended up with today's world. The only answer is to build a world where no person can have power over another.

@manticlops Yes, I agree.

@evainfeld The public can be reliably turned against anything that might shift the balance of power. See bitcoin. Or the way the green movement was weaponised against nuclear power, to the delight of the hydrocarbon hegemony.

@GhostCoase And he fetishizes primitivism so hard it led him to the whole Pol Pot embarrassment 🙄

Noam Chomsky’s anarchism: • no union of anarchist ends with anarchist means • benevolent social democratic state • no gun rights • casting socialist regimes as revolutionary • some kind of radical aesthetic

This is so incredibly cool. Also, imagine the crackdown if drug dealers started carrying pirate medicine. In related news, lemme pitch a show far superior to Breaking Bad.

@EllaPalmes Always correct to your academic title, but gently. They probably just don't know how it works yet. A first generation student might get particularly embarrassed about it.

@SteveWiesnerSMB Stagnating or falling net profits does NOT imply there's no price gouging. The other scenario is that there is, in fact, price gouging but more of the acquired products are going unsold. Come on @CJHandmer I expect better from you.

$47.61 for paper towels and TP at Target today. Absolutely insane example of corporate greed and price gouging. In fact, it made me so angry, I decided to do some analysis. Many prices have increased by 50% or more since COVID, so I decided to put on my investment banking hat and spread some financials back to 2018 / 2019. And man, was I ever surprised... I started by looking at Target's annual revenue: 2018: $75.4 billion 2019: $78.1 billion 2020: $93.6 billion 2021: $106.0 billion 2022: $109.1 billion 2023: $107.4 billion Last Twelve Months (LTM): $106.6 billion Couple things I noticed. First, revenue has slipped a bit since 2022 and is continuing to do so in 2024 - not a great sign for the broader economy. Second, there's been big growth since 2018. They must be price gouging! Well, I looked a bit deeper. Let's look at their cost of goods sold over the same period (the price they paid to buy the products they sold you). 2018: $53.3 billion (70.7% of sales) 2019: $54.9 billion (70.2%) 2020: $66.2 billion (70.7%) 2021: $75.0 billion (70.7%) 2022: $82.2 billion (75.4%) 2023: $77.7 billion (72.4%) Last Twelve Months (LTM): $76.8 billion (72%) Wow, so let me get this straight... Target is making less money (28 cents) on every dollar of sales today than they were in 2018 (29.3 cents). Hmmmm. That's weird. Maybe they're not so good at this price gouging thing. So, I decided to dig even deeper. They were prolly being evil and firing all of their employees so they could make up for the money they weren't gouging, right? So, I looked at their operating expenses (the amount they pay to run the stores and the overall business): 2018: $15.7 billion (20.9% of sales) 2019: $16.2 billion (20.8%) 2020: $18.6 billion (19.9%) 2021: $19.8 billion (18.6%) 2022: $20.7 billion (18.9%) 2023: $21.6 billion (20.1%) Last Twelve Months (LTM): $21.7 billion (20.3%) Hmmmm. Very unusual behavior for someone price gouging me. Let's sum this all up by looking at their operating cash flow: 2018: $6.3 billion (8.4% of sales) 2019: $7.0 billion (9.0%) 2020: $8.8 billion (9.4%) 2021: $11.3 billion (10.7%) 2022: $6.2 billion (5.7%) 2023: $8.1 billion (7.6%) Last Twelve Months (LTM): $8.1 billion (7.6%) So, what this all means is that Target's making less overall profit on every dollar of revenue today (7.6 cents) than they were in 2018 (8.4 cents). And revenue has grown at an average (CAGR) of 7.3% per year since 2018 and operating cash flow has grown at 5.1% per year - both of which are pretty much in line w/ the overall rate of inflation during that period. I guess I expected price gouging to be more profitable. ❌ NO PRICE GOUGING AT TARGET ❌ "Well Steve," you may say, "that's all fine and good, but even if Target isn't price gouging, Kimberly Clark and International Paper (both of whom are involved in the manufacture / marketing of paper towels and TP) sure as H3ll must be!" Well Yes! Surely they are! I'll spare you all the numbers, but here's the summary: Kimberly Clark: 5-year avg revenue growth: 2.0% 2018 Gross Margin: 69.7% LTM Gross Margin: 64.0% 2018 EBITDA Margin: 12.1% LTM EBITDA Margin: 15.6% "A-HA! Look at that EBITDA margin!" you say, "They must be gouging!" Well, the gross margin clearly says otherwise, and the five-year EBITDA CAGR is 6.6% - pretty much in line with inflation. Again, management is clearly bad at gouging. ❌ NO PRICE GOUGING AT KIMBERLY-CLARK ❌ "Well ok," you say, "I'm sure International Paper must be capturing all of that extra profit because they're the ones gouging then." Let's take a look: International Paper: 5-year avg revenue growth: 0.8% 2019 Gross Margin: 30.8% LTM Gross Margin: 27.8% 2018 EBITDA Margin: 16.1% LTM EBITDA Margin: 11.6% Wowza, I guess IP is the worst price gouger of all since, well, they've basically been destroying value since before COVID began. You would think price gougers would be gouging to, I don't know, make more money and all. Well, IP made almost $3 billion of EBITDA in 2019, and a little over $2 billion over the last twelve months. Sigh. ❌ NO PRICE GOUGING AT INT'L PAPER ❌ So, maybe this means the inflation we've been dealing with hasn't been about corporate greed and price gouging after all. Maybe it has had something to do with, oh, I don't know, government spending and stimulus run amok or something. So, rather than going on populist rants about implementing price controls for the greedy corporations (which, you know, have never worked out so well in the past), maybe we should consider some price controls for government spending. That's a novel idea. 🤔 p.s. And for those of you who say "Hey, wait a minute, your receipt says "Bounty" - that's not Kimberly Clark, that's P&G! They must be price gouging!" Procter & Gamble: 5-year avg revenue growth: 4.4% 2019 Gross Margin: 48.6% LTM Gross Margin: 51.4% 2019 EBITDA Margin: 20.4% LTM EBITDA Margin: 23.7% Gross margin up? Yep. EBITDA margin up? Yep. Good management? Yep. Price gouging? Nope. ❌ NO PRICE GOUGING AT P&G ❌

The DNC is the only reason you're not currently enjoying a second-term Sanders and a sane Supreme Court.

@_TomHoward Well now I know how it feels to agree with Peter Thiel on something. Kinda dirty. 😂

Higher education is a trap for high IQ people

@ChrisLynnHedges "Justice doesn't just happen, justice is forced by people coming together and exercising strength, unity and intelligence." (2008)

You Saved Julian Assange: Julian Assange was not released because the courts defended the rule of law and exonerated a man who had not committed a crime. He was not released because the Biden White House and the intelligence community have a conscience. He was not released because the news organizations that published his revelations and then threw him under the bus, carrying out a vicious smear campaign, pressured the U.S. government. He was released — granted a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents — in spite of these institutions. He was released because day after day, week after week, year after year, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe mobilized to decry the imprisonment of the most important journalist of our generation. Without this mobilization, Julian would not be free… This sustained pressure — during a London hearing in 2020, to my delight, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Old Bailey court overseeing Julian’s case, complained about the noise protestors were making in the street outside — shines a continuous light on injustice and exposes the amorality of the ruling class... These people are unsung and often unknown.  But they are heroes. They move mountains...They shamed the politicians in Australia to stand up for Julian, an Australian citizen, and finally Britain and the U.S. to give up. I do not say to do the right thing. This was a surrender. We should be proud of it. I met Julian when I accompanied his attorney, Michael Ratner, to meetings in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Michael, one of the great civil rights attorneys of our era, stressed that popular protest was a vital component in every case he brought against the state. Without it, the state could carry out its persecution of dissidents, disregard for the law and crimes in darkness…. The decimation of civil liberties has shackled us, as Julian warned, to an interconnected security and surveillance apparatus that stretches across the globe... The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”…This constant surveillance and personal data waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. The object of all totalitarian systems is to inculcate a climate of fear to paralyze a captive population. Citizens seek security in the structures that oppress them. Imprisonment, torture and murder are saved for unmanageable renegades such as Julian. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. The population is immobilized  by trauma. The courts, along with legislative bodies, legalize state crimes. We saw all this in the persecution of Julian. It is an ominous harbinger of the future. The corporate state must be destroyed if we are to restore our open society and save our planet. Its security apparatus must be dismantled. The mandarins who manage corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt media, must be driven from the temples of power. Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up — which is what the corporate state is counting on — will see us enslaved and the earth’s ecosystem become inhospitable to human habitation. Let us take a lesson from the courageous men and women who took to the streets for 14 years to save Julian. They showed us how it is done.

"Justice doesn't just happen, justice is forced by people coming together and exercising strength, unity and intelligence."

I still can't get over how bad AI has become. And this is coming from a computer scientist who spent over a decade studying and programming AI. I fucking LOVE AI, but here are 10 reasons I absolutely fucking hate it now, a 🧵 ...

@david415 Yeah that's an easy one - there's zero cypherpunk values in most of the cryptocurrency world, with the exception of some of the privacy side. Public ledgers and pyramid schemes are in fact the opposite. Crypto bros calling themselves cypherpunks are so cringe.

Bitcoin is not freedom money and bitcoin maxis don't get a free pass to call themselves cypherpunks; for that you need to advocate for privacy enhancing technology and anonymous communication networks; bitcoin is netiher of these things.