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arkis22on The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

the problem is that when you get to call it for sure its too late to do something about it

arkis22on Larry Ellison's half-billion-dollar quest to change farming

That is such a weird thing to say. People should just give up?

You've got that famous quote from Edison about failing at make a light bulb.

Or you think everyone who studies cancer and doesn't cure it should think of themselves as failures?

God forbid you have a kid who wants to get better at something and you tell them to not bother because they're already a loser.

arkis22on California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots

your AI girlfriend/boyfriend is totally real, its just that its a south east asian who works at a pig butchering scam farm.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/02/06/the-vast-sophis... https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/02/06/online-scams-m...

arkis22on On being brought up by libertarian economists

Reminds me of my high school physics final. A difficult class, one of the few that curved grades.

Maybe half the multiple choice questions were phrased to trick you into giving a wrong answer that broke newtons 3rd law.

arkis22on GameStop stock influencer Roaring Kitty may lose access to E-Trade, report says

I don't really think he'll lose access, but they are absolutely in contact with the SEC and there is a non zero chance he gets charged with market manipulation.

arkis22on FTX says it has billions more than owed to victims

>FTX added that a jump in crypto prices since the company failed had not given its finances a major boost. It said almost all of the Bitcoin and other digital currencies believed to have been held by the exchange at the time of its collapse were missing.

>The price of the biggest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has risen by around 270% since the firm filed for bankruptcy more than a year and a half ago.

the problem with your logic is that it misunderstands what theft is because you are looking nominal value instead of opportunity cost. he took peoples money, he gambled it, and theyre generally going to get back a little more than the nominal value of their claims.

arkis22on Square Enix to record extraordinary loss of 22.1B yen

It might be helpful to understand that "extraordinary" is an accounting distinction:

>An extraordinary loss is a loss resulting from a business transaction that is highly unusual, should occur only rarely, and which does not result from operating activities. These losses are reported separately on the income statement from operating earnings, in order to keep from confusing readers about the state of a firm’s earnings.

https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/extraordinary-loss

arkis22on World War I dangers in France's red zones

Or the flip side. Russia is trying to take control of land, but what's the point if you level everything and make it uninhabitable.

arkis22on Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

If you are upset at trading shops or the stock market as a retail trader, you dont understand the game you are playing.

arkis22on Airlines make more money from mileage programs than from flying planes

You are wrong that prices falling prior to deregulation proves that deregulation wasn't a factor in declining prices. A graph of numbers showing decreasing costs measures purely quantitative factors. The trend continuing completely excludes qualitative factors, of which you must understand to properly understand what is going on. For example, the article says that what was expected to happen was that costs would fall because there would be an influx of hundreds of competitors. That in itself is a misunderstanding of qualitative factors. Imagine there being 100 different airlines. More than half of them would be incompetent. The correct qualitative understanding of the situation is that deregulation allows the most competent airlines to consolidate/buy underperforming ones. Did service really get worse? Or is the difference really just that these airlines are now able to transport way more people at a cheaper cost because they are no longer catering to smokers who like to leer at PANAM blondes in short skirts?

Also, regulation around marijuana has not decreased prices. This is obvious because in places where marijuana is now decriminalized people still prefer to buy from illegal sellers... because it is cheaper.

arkis22on Second-Guessing the Modern Web (2020)

If you do proper server side rendering you wouldnt even have if statements in the template. your backend code should have divided everything into correct buckets for you to iterate through them. application logic shouldnt be in your view.

arkis22on Full Text of the Federalist Papers

He bought all of the domestic competitors. Which is why they broke up standard oil into different oil companies. Then they all floated on the stock exchange and made him monstrously richer. Or at least he tried to. The idea was once you discover a lot of oil, its harder to control.

but then what happened was international oil companies came around. Venezuela was very rich until they ruined it. RDS was immortalized by Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udZgIsIKU30

arkis22on Full Text of the Federalist Papers

From what I remember he did have an unstoppable monopoly. It helped that he could push around the railroads. But remember this is oil. When he was in charge Pennsylvania at one point was the oil capital of the world. That is obviously a position that is impossible to keep right?

arkis22on Full Text of the Federalist Papers

I do recall taking a constitution test in grade school and high school. I would definitely say that they weren't taught for a whole semester. The test was just something that needed to be checked off.

This is also kind of silly. You can be taught something as a kid, you can show them the legal rules, but if the adults around you don't act with respect for the system, why would you bother believing it?

arkis22on Full Text of the Federalist Papers

If the summation of the popular view is at odds with the facts of the man, is that a flaw, or perhaps the natural contradiction of Rockefeller as a human being? The title is "Titan", but he dies just like all of us. I can't help but think of the ending of Barry Lyndon or The Seventh Seal

arkis22on Full Text of the Federalist Papers

the unfortunate reality of America is that the constitution is taught for less than a semester, and then kids take a test on it, and then everyone forgets everything about it the semester after.

they have 0 understanding of any of the theory. and the resulting society we live in is people that don't understand how the rules work. If you don't understand how the rules work then you'll believe anybody who tells you that the game is rigged.

then you end up with idiots arguing with idiots while they all lie about reality.

arkis22on Full Text of the Federalist Papers

Ron Chernow's biography on him is really excellent. It's so good that I think it's actually a disservice to mention that it inspired the Broadway play.

If you can respect Scalia's legal talent, this video where he mentions the federalist papers is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0

arkis22on SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

everyone enjoy your Stanford or elite school education!

arkis22on FTX’s collapse was a crime, not an accident

This isn't just comingling accounts and bad accounting. They borrowed between firms. They absolutely knew where liquidity was, and where liquidity wasn't - liquidity follows profits. Their solvency was based on their own manufactured tokens.

They took money from clients because they thought they could pay it back because they think they are smart and they are not smart. Their accounting was good enough to keep track of large loans to insiders though.

arkis22on A treasure hunt for microbes in Chile’s Atacama desert

wow, thats an incredible picture. thanks

arkis22on The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment

I think that based on his enthusiasm to invest in Elon's takeover of Twitter he thought he was a big dog. He thinks he's a celebrity billionaire. He's still calling people to invest in his companies, which is like lighting money on fire because it's all going to be withdrawn immediately. He is clueless.

arkis22on FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

The concepts bleed into each other, but Matt Levine explains it well. The Ponzi scheme is unsustainable. it gives you a solvency problem, your assets are bad and no amount of time will help. With fractional reserve banking run on banks usually come down to a liquidity problem, everyone wants their money now and you don't have all of it. So you call up someone with cash, like the FED, and theyll lend to you because you are a chartered, regulated bank.

basically the difference is asset quality and proper accounting. Banks are similar to ponzis, but they are HIGHLY regulated to ensure their continued operation.

arkis22on Ftx.com Has Probably Collapsed

I've been waiting for this for years.

arkis22on It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database

just my years of experience, sorry

arkis22on It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database

https://github.com/hotwired/hotwire-rails

deprecated. they use stimulus and its worse obfuscated JS than htmx IMO

arkis22on It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database

plain old ruby object. basically you take your truth from the database and you plug it into an object that takes the data and functionally produces a data output that you feed to your view.

arkis22on It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database

you're looking for what? my personal million dollar website or my billion dollar startup?

arkis22on It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database

rails, postgres, PORO, and htmx is a monstrously productive stack

arkis22on Most Americans think money comes before mission at U.S. news organizations

I find apnews.com an excellent and mostly emotionless free news source

arkis22on Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz has died aged 78

He flugtagged too close to the sun I assume