Gouthum “Karate” Karadi | The philosophy of money

Web3, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and Architecture. Former @awscloud @Microsoft @Walmart @USArmy #DOE #DOD

Guy rolls up on a scooter to defend a bike thief from getting caught. "Stop! You don't need to do this!" Thief gets up. Tries to steal his scooter. Reality is the fastest teacher alive.

@joecanti @MichaelAArouet This part is true.

@MichaelAArouet The problem with this argument is that CEO wages used to be 10x their base worker wages and now they're 300x or 400x in some cases. And no, they haven't become 30-40 times more productive or innovative.

Percentage of people who naively believe that taxing the most successful more would increase tax revenue in their countries, instead of prompting entrepreneurs to emigrate to countries that value innovation and job creation rather than punishing them. How can one be so naive?

@JayinKyiv @MichaelAArouet It’s not like it sits in a bank account, son. It’s pretty much all in productive assets.

So, there'll be a test as to whether any individual with a networth the size approaching combined GDP of several small European nations sufficiently served humanity in its accumulation? You're suggesting the communist idealogy, not me. I'm saying that a few dozen people, each pulling $500B out of global collective wealth becomes a magnet for the rest, unsustainable. Inevitable path toward vast impoverishment, regardless of the quality of the cages designed for the 95%.

@KirkegaardEmil Change in gender distribution, once again.

American occupations that moved the most politically since 2000. (Dime database remapped.) 19 of 20 moved towards the left.

I just had the craziest experience at the airport. We are about to board a flight to Atlanta when the pilot from the incoming plane walks out of the jetway. Guy is probably late 50s, salt and pepper hair, military look. The kind of pilot you instantly feel good about seeing on your flight. Pilot walks over to the counter, gets on the PA system, and starts addressing everyone. “Folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. Flying one of these jets is easy. The hard part is looking at 130 people and telling them their flight is going to be delayed.” Audible groans throughout the boarding gate. Most people here are flying to Atlanta as a layover before another flight. 130 people just had their day become a complete mess. The pilot goes on. “I get it, trust me. But here’s the deal: During our landing, we had a small mechanical issue. I’m not your pilot for the next leg, but I don’t feel confident the jet’s safe to fly until we have a mechanical team look it over, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the next pilots to fly you guys until we get confirmation.” He points at the agents next to him behind the counter: “Now, none of this is the agents’ fault. Please be kind to them. I’m the one who made this decision, not them, so any inconvenience you experience is my fault. Just please know that I don’t do this lightly, and I’m only doing it because I believe it’s in the best interests of everyone’s safety.” Now this is where the story gets crazy. The pilot puts the microphone down, grabs his suitcase, and all the people in the gate… Start clapping. I’m not joking, everyone starts clapping for the guy. 130 people who just had their travel plans ruined give an ovation to the guy who made the decision and delivered the message. All because he addressed them with decency and transparency, took ownership of the decision, made it clear that it was necessary, and explained why it was in everyone’s best interest. It’s honestly one of the best examples of strong communication—of strong leadership, for that matter—that I’ve seen in a long time. @Delta, whoever your Atlanta to Wichita pilot was this morning, he’s one of the good ones. Please tell him the delayed passengers of flight 1637 appreciate what he did.

@lex_node You mean crypto was invaded by TradFi scum, not the other way around. *Glares at Barry Silbert*

every lawyer, founder, VC will now have 'start as nonprofit and pivot to for-profit while giving donors no equity' as a standard part of their playbooks 'normal tech' becoming more like crypto by the day

They can fight all they want; but believe it or not, once the $BTC ETF was approved, they inadvertently open the door to everything. Watch LATAM $DASH and $ZEC closely. Revolutionary payment systems are on the way. As you know personally, programmable money is so much more than NFTs, tokenized securities and memecoins.

my guess is that a lot of Wall St. intermediary incumbents are secretly very interested in funding politicians who will support enforcement-heavy regulators next term...with tokens in the gutter compared to equity, the risk is that crypto has already blown its load in terms of political influence and a lot of progress could be walked back...Citadel and SIFMA are already making unhappiness noises at the idea of tokenized securities trading rather freely in DeFi without the same broker/dealer intermediation as in TradFi...probably a lot of "tokenization" projects would also be happy with this result as they have invested a lot in licensure and working with the existing system rather than disrupting it...

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@ihtesham2005 I’ve known this for years. In layman’s terms signal is registered in your fingertips and travels all the way up to your brain. Pencil and more friction based media improve memory and recall.

@KirkegaardEmil Again, sort by gender distribution and you have your answer.

Political leanings of American doctors by specialty. Unsurprisingly, psychiatrists the most left-leaning.

@JDHaltigan @nfergus Even worse they push Marxist and Postmodern scholarship on the rest of the world through Colonialism they claim is anticolonialism.

“By my count, the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression and indigenous ways of knowing ... There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom — none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.” @imarinovic demolishes the disastrous new @Stanford freshman program.

@KirkegaardEmil Now overlay with the gender balance change in each of these occupations. @grok

Many people were asking about movements of occupations with regards to US politics. Using the DIME database, here are some initial results. Physicians moved from being right leaning before 2010 to being left leaning. Many other high end occupations similarly moved left in line with the general SES realignment, even CEOs are now centrist. Populism is repulsive to elites. There are some that moved toward the right, retirees, police officers (post Floyd), truck drivers.

WOAH 🚨 Gavin Newsom launched a program that spend $23 million dollars on hearing aids for kids 5 years later only 300 hearing aids have been given out That’s a cost of $76,666 per hearing aid Retail costs for these same hearing aids is roughly $1,400 Gavin Newsom pushed lawmakers toward a state-run program instead of requiring private insurers to cover the pediatric hearing aids If the retail cost is $1,400 and the state only provided 300, then that’s a cost of $420,000 Yet Gavin Newsom spent $23,000,000 I actually looked into where this money allegedly went, and officially it went to “administrative and overhead costs” instead of providing hearing aids In other words, money laundering

@tex4freedom @TFTC21 @MartyBent I used to say as a kid: “ Intelligence is shown by the questions you ask not the answers you give. Anyone can memorize.”

@cryptodiaries @TFTC21 @MartyBent Query is the key.

Ken Griffin went home on a Friday "fairly depressed" after watching AI agents at Citadel do work that used to take teams of PhDs in finance months to complete. Done in days. His words: "These are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI." This is the head of one of the most successful hedge funds in history saying the people he pays seven figures to analyze markets and structure deals are being replaced by software that works in hours instead of months. Not theoretically. In his own office. Right now. The Coatue deck we covered earlier this week called agents "the biggest unlock" in AI. Griffin just confirmed it from the buy side. The shift from copilots to agents is not a future event. It is already happening at the highest levels of finance.

I was wondering why the Mormons decided to settle in Utah rather than going all the way west to California, which was still largely uninhabited before the gold rush of 1848. Turns out they actually did consider this, and Mormon pioneer Sam Brannan led 238 Mormons to Yerba Buena (now San Francisco) in 1846, actually making SF a Mormon-majority city for a year or two. Brannan arrived in California a year before the first Mormons arrived in Utah. In 1847, Brannan met with Mormon leader Brigham Young to urge him to bring the Mormons to California, but Young refused because California was too desirable and they wouldn't be able to maintain a stable Mormon demographic majority. Young was right. Utah remained majority Mormon until around 2007, while California was swamped by Gold Rush settlers starting in 1848 and is only ~2% Mormon today. As an early settler, landowner, and proprietor in California, Brannan ended up becoming enormously wealthy. He was the first to popularize the Gold Rush through his newspaper, and became the backstory behind “in a gold rush, sell shovels” when he bought up the state’s entire supply of picks, pans, and shovels to sell them to gold speculators. He also created SF’s first private vigilante group to stamp out crime and made Napa Valley a popular tourist destination when he founded the town of Calistoga. Brannan Street in Soma is named after him.

Pizza Hut corporate spent seven years killing the exact thing this guy is bringing back. And his stores are now some of the busiest in the entire chain. Tim Sparks, President of Daland Corporation, is converting 80 Pizza Hut locations to the original 1980s format. Red cups. Salad bars. Stained glass lamps. Pac-Man machines. Vinyl booths. His first job was as a Pizza Hut dishwasher. The Classics are massively outperforming standard Pizza Huts. Customers drive two to three hours to eat there. A single Facebook post about one Classic location in Pennsylvania got 7,500 shares and broke onto TikTok overnight. Meanwhile, corporate is doing the exact opposite. 250 store closures planned for first half of 2026. "Red Roof" dine-in franchises no longer offered to new operators. Yum Brands is considering selling the entire chain. No obvious buyer. The decline numbers are brutal. Pizza Hut held 25% of U.S. pizza market share in 1995. Today: under 14%. In 2019, half of traditional stores were still dine-in, but 90% of revenue came from off-premises orders. Corporate saw the mismatch and decided to eliminate the dine-in format entirely. Convert everything to delivery boxes. Compete with Domino's on logistics. The problem with that strategy: Domino's is a technology company that happens to sell pizza. Their competitive advantage is order tracking, delivery optimization, and franchise efficiency. When Pizza Hut stripped out the booths, the salad bar, the lamps, and the experience, they became a worse Domino's. A typical Pizza Hut location now generates 20% less revenue than the average across the other four major pizza chains. Their biggest franchisee went bankrupt in 2020 and closed 300 stores. Total sales haven't grown since 2004. Twenty-two years of stagnation. And a former dishwasher is adding salad bars and Pac-Man machines, and people are driving across state lines. The Friday night with your family in a vinyl booth under a stained glass lamp while the kids played arcade games and loaded up plates at the salad bar. That was always what Pizza Hut was selling. Corporate optimized it off the balance sheet. One franchisee who grew up inside the original version understood what the spreadsheet couldn't measure.

Eisenhower Matrix : Busy-ness doesn't equal productivity. Credits : Ben Meer

@comfort_eagle56 @tmsilverman @Riley_Gaines_ Alienated somewhere.

@tmsilverman @Riley_Gaines_ Wonder where his dad is

If you have to create a shared podium for the boy competing in the girls’ event, you’ve already admitted you know he isn’t a girl and that his participation is unfair. At that point, you're just seeking a public humiliation ritual for the girls.