The #JLPT (Japanese Language Proficient Test) was actually quite hilarious this year, at least in my testing room. Call it the fiasco of new Rule 12. Or perhaps better to call it a circus?

Extremely small print on the admission ticket, which is what happens when they insisted on lots of complicated small print for many rules and warnings, printed in two languages, to boot. It's actually a kind of postcard that unfolds into three double-sided pages, but only four small pages of the six are available for the tiny rules.

The new Rule 12 says something about putting the smartphones in envelopes, which is not new, but there was a clause that actually meant "for the entire text period, NO break". And nothing about red cards for infractions, though Rule 12 was underlined. The disqualification warning was above in one of three bold and underlined sections, though Rule 12 was the only numbered rule that was underlined. (Well, actually there is a Section 7 (about the photo) in a later Rule 4 that was also underlined.) In total there were 19 numbered rules in the main section and a few more numbered rules in another section about the listening test. So...

When we came back to start the listening test they started checking the envelopes to enforce Rule 12, creating a hubbub as they grabbed people and threw them out of the testing room. At some point they realized that they had failed to effectively warn (most of) us (during the long Japanese lecture at the beginning of the test) about what Rule 12 REALLY meant and they were going to wind up red carding a LOT of people, perhaps a third of the test takers... So there was a big conference and they finally brought everyone back into the room and continued the test after the long delay.

Not sure if I should mention my own personal contributions to the circus, but... Before the test began I carefully asked for permission to use a magnifying glass. Actually two of them. The big one is 2X and I have a smaller 3X one. There is no "large print" option for the test, but they sometimes include helpful tiny characters above kanji and my eyes are old and get tired. (Also making my eyes tired is the horizontal writing, but again there is no option for a test printed vertically like most of the Japanese stuff I read. My eyes think horizontal is mostly for English...) The permission was duly granted, just as on previous times when I'd taken the test.

But there were several proctors, and the main one wasn't in that loop. By the way, she was the same person who read the lecture about Rule 12 that so few people had understood properly. After the test had started and before my eyes got too tired, she started invigilating the room, and when she got to my desk she started making a fuss about my magnifying glasses, so I got rid of them. Later on one of the other proctors realized what had happened and there were several attempts to encourage me to find them again and assurances that I could use them, but I wasn't buying it and just keep on struggling. And this was BEFORE the fiasco of Rule 12, but I've been tested at this test site before and I vaguely remember previous problems and wasn't going to start trusting them now... By this time I was already sure that I'd lost too much time to have any chance of passing the test, so it no longer mattered.

Flash forward. Now we're into the listening test after the delay. Might be the stress of the circus, though the energy drink I had during the break didn't help, but I think it's mostly the age thing... Bottom line is that I'm in increasingly desperate need of going to the restroom. I obviously don't want to go into the historical details about hypothetical accidents, but as soon as the listening test was finished I raised my hand and managed to get permission to leave everything and rush to the gents'. I think I dare say (without too much embarrassment) that I was just in time.

I wish I could remember the details from an earlier test at the same NTT Central Training Center. Vague impression that it was also problems created by the proctors. Plus the terrible location. Doesn't look that far away on the map, but almost a two-hour trip each way. There are actually two routes for me, and I used one coming and the other going, and they both took that long.

Given the low activity of Slashdot these years, it seems unlikely, but did anyone reading this also take the test? Anything funny happen in your test room? There were 840 people taking the test at my site, distributed between two buildings (of about 10 buildings in all).

Is your muse under siege by the savage GAIs? I want to limit this 'thought experiment' to Generative AI because AI in general is too large a can with too many worms in it...

Maybe it's just another personal problem, but lately I'm finding it harder and harder to write. Yes, I like the process of writing, especially when it clarifies my thinking on the topic, but it's also hard work for me, and exhausting, and there are a number of dimensions that influence how much I write and how well it comes out, but now... "Use the GAI, Luke!" (I just used an AI to check the quote on which that weak joke was based. I thought it was by Yoda, but the AI says Obi-Wan Kenobi. Then I asked again, and Yoda did say it... So now I should try to unravel which character said it first? Based on when the movies appeared or on the chronology within the Star Wars universe? Yet another Internet bird's nest... (Which now reminds me of Roddenberry's Great Bird of the Galaxy. Oh, wait. It was his nickname?))

So now... Writing feels unusually pointless to me. Because I'm feeling tempted by the superior tools? Similar to the feelings you might get for a nicer computer? Or a better smartphone? But now for the software that helps me write? TANSTAAFL to the max? But if I use the free writing support of the GAI, what did I actually do? The results may be much better and faster, but do I still deserve any credit?

Or look at it from the business side. If you are paying people to write, how can your business compete if the other companies are using GAIs to generate better stuff faster than your company? I'm imagining a writer arguing with an editor whose position is "You send me your best version 10 minutes before the deadline, but Bill uses GAI and he sends me five versions an hour after the assignment and we tweak different version all the way to press time."

I'm remembering how Dijkstra insisted on writing with a pencil... I can barely write by hand now. Did I learn to type in high school or was it junior high? Then there were some computers with files, but I fondly remember WordStar as a huge improvement. WS even introduced spelling checks, though as a separate process. These days I do a lot of first drafts by dictating into my smartphone, especially for Japanese...

But I have tasted the poison of GAI. Mostly that has been for HTML and JavaScript. Yet another language where the computers are better than I am? And the poison tasted so convenient...

The following rant was originally in a feedback webform sent to Rakuten, but it's hard to feel motivated for sharing it on this website. Ye olde Slashdot feels increasingly dead to me.

Anyway, the context of the following rant involves advertising spam from the "applied psychologists" of Rakuten. Mostly there is a LOT of ads, but not much in the form of email lately. Most of the ads come through the most essential RM [That's Rakuten Mobile, which also used to have a linkable presence on LinkedIn. Various questions about why it's gone or hidden...] and the main effect on me is to inhibit the shopping behavior Rakuten wants to encourage. It's related to the "Paradox of Choice" from that old book, though in an enhanced form. Not only do I feel its too hard to find a good choice among too many options, but there are so many coupons and point games surrounding the process of shopping that every choice is blocked by FOMO on the best value. How much money did I lose by not using last week's offer? Or how much money might I save on tomorrow's coupon? Except the frequency of intrusions is more like 10 per day...

So here is the rant [with some explanatory additions]:

Haven't seen this annoying webform [this time linked from an email notice] in a long time, but the email it relates to [was] about Rakuten Points [so it] was the least annoying thing I've heard from RM [Rakuten Mobile] in a LONG time.

I'm going to try to reply to it, too, mostly to make sure it is a no-reply email address. Have you no idea how RUDE that is? Sending email and rejecting replies is a failure of Good Manners 101. [And yes, the reply bounced as expected.]

Other stuff to tell Rakuten if I imagined that Rakuten cared? How about the terrible network problems affecting the new activity measuring band I just bought? [RM] managed to do make the failures almost totally inscrutable.

Actually one of several major purchases this month that were NOT from Rakuten mostly because the point games are too confusing and annoying. Another pending purchase remains in limbo after 7 months because Rakuten is just too hard to deal with. I nearly bought it in May, but Rakuten stopped me again. Congratulations. NOT.

Thinking about reporting the newly discovered network problem to RM "support", but I know Rakuten doesn't care and it will take major effort to let Rakuten prove it again. If I felt more sympathy towards the other company then I'd be more motivated to help them out, but I think my Rakuten experiences are making me hate all shopping. Congratulations again. NOT again.

I'm regarding this as an AI topic because the general problem is crucial for the well-known voice dictation problem, where natural speech is converted into text. My own data is mostly from English and Japanese, but I know there are a number of speakers of other languages around here...

So it started by considering "whole" as in "entire" versus "hole" as in "gap" or "pit". The initial websearch discovered the category of contronyms and also led a longer alphabetical list. (Also spelled "contranym" in some places, to add to the confusion...) In English I think there is some additional confusion with words that have similar spellings with different pronunciations in contrast to words that have the same pronunciation but which should be regarded as distinct words whether or not the spellings are different. That's leading to the broad category of homonyms in English, though homonyms can often be distinguished by the context.

However this sort of problem is much worse in Japanese. There is a common term åOEéYç義 to describe words with the same pronunciation but different meanings, and I was thinking this should naturally extend to åOEéYå義 where the meanings are opposed? However websearch came up empty? However the problem is actually much worse in Japanese because there are so many Japanese words that were borrowed from Chinese, and the pronunciations of many of those words were forcibly "collapsed" into one Japanese word because of the loss of the Chinese tones. That was sometimes made worse when the same Chinese word was borrowed at different times with different Chinese pronunciations. And to top it off, I think the Japanese confusion should be extended to cases involving short and long vowels...

(As general background, I'll note that many of the Chinese characters used in Japanese have Chinese (éYèã) and Japanese (è"èã) readings. The semantics are often similar for the same character read differently--but not always, and especially not for some of the most common characters.)

So right now this is mostly just a bit of food for thought, though I am theoretically interested in other languages and practically interested in relation to my own study of Japanese. My main language study activity these days is actually reading Japanese books out loud into my smartphone and trying to get my version to match the original book at the semantic level... It does encourage or even force me to speak carefully, but I wish there was a proper literacy development app (like the imaginary shiritori game I've described so many times over the last few years.) Too many complexities, though I can describe some of them if anyone is interested.

Next major step in the death of the republic will be a SCOTUS ruling that [what DOGE is doing] is legal. It's funny because key decision they will overturn is "Clinton v The City of New York" that threw out the "Line Item Veto Act of 1996". It's also funny because there is no pretense of legislative legitimacy here. The orange buffoon simply doesn't want to be bothered and isn't capable of any hard work, so he's happy to delegate the actual work of destroying America to Elong [sic] Musk and "his" SCOTUS will create the fake law the same way they created "presidential immunity" from nothing. [And if the SCOTUS "fails" by actually following the Constitution and state decisis, then that decision will be ignored--so I predict Roberts will stay his destructive course.]

The real question is which puppeteer has the best GAIvatar (Generative AI avatar) for pulling the orange puppet's strings. If there is a future and there are any future historians interested in human history in the 21st century, they might be able to answer that question if enough data survives cleansing.

[Brackets are for slight editing from a different website. Slashdot not worth much creative energy these years. I might have posted it from the clipboard (perhaps even with a bit more editing) if I had found a relevant story on the current front page--but I didn't spot any.]

Musk thinks he's smarter than the fools in his YUGE cesspool formerly known as Twitter. But he also thinks he's smarter than you and I even if we voted sanely.

However the big puppeteer Peter T is certain he's smarter than all of us put together--and he's betting big on the horses Anarchy and Chaos to win, place, and show in all the races. His only concern is how will he collect his "winnings" after all the shite hits all the fans?

Wasn't my intention to spend any time on this, but since I can't communicate with Apple I am reduced to this rant. Looks like another once-good company in the process of sinking to irrelevance...

Context: I have a "vintage" MacBook Pro. That label actually means Apple wants it to die, though it would be hard for me to say it ever had much of a life. So some of my questions relate to how to "terminate" it gracefully, mostly in terms of making sure I've extracted any data I put there and forgot about. (I know about at least one important file and have copied it elsewhere.) If I could talk with Apple I was willing to consider a possible upgrade path--but no talk possible so far.

As a secondary issue I want to escape from Google Maps. The main problem there is what I regard as abuse of my "contributions". Seriously annoying to the point where I am considering systematic deletion of everything. So maybe Apple offers an alternative I should consider? Again, unable to get any information from Apple. Especially interested in comparisons with the Yelp and Tabelog options. Maybe someone around here can say something?

Calling it a tertiary issue, even though there are others, but iCloud is a concern because of the authentication topic. Right now it frequently (and often intrusively) wants to authenticate through that vintage box I already mentioned--but what happens if I terminate it? Perhaps a minor issue since I've never used it much--but I think that's largely because of the communication-with-Apple problems I started with.

So going for the joke? My latest (perhaps last?) communication attempt was via the Apple website and at one stage it triggered a post-visit survey. I might have mentioned one or more of these concerns as I was leaving but it turned out to be another "We aren't listening" bit of fluff.

Meta-conclusion: It's not only Apple that wants only the most profitable customers. I actually think Amazon may be the top company that is destroying the invisible hand and I wonder what Adam Smith (or his GAIvator) would say about post-capitalism.

Is it plausible to regard the debt ceiling as a kind of artificial scarcity created to protect the increasingly imaginary value of the American dollar?

And yes, I am also thinking about the artificial scarcity claims for Bitcoin. But there is no there there, as in "There is no real value in any cryptocurrency. Just human fools who imagine they see a gold mine."

Already forgot which book triggered this line of speculation, but it got me to thinking about how to design a "better" cryptocurrency, assuming any positive adjective can be used with any cryptocurrency. Largely based on books I've read about Bitcoin and blockchain and a few higher level books on the related topics. The one that keeps coming to mind as the best is Going Infinite by the great Michael Lewis.

My design fantasy is called ULcoin for "Use it or Lose it coin". No fancy math or energy-intensive proofs of work, but just a simple lottery with clear limitations. It does depend on PKE for the identities and signatures of the participants, but each transaction only requires small resources.

The ULcoins are just allocated from the first integers. To spend a ULcoin (or fraction) you create a transaction that transfers your ULcoin to a different identity. The transactions start as pending, but they are collected into blocks favoring the oldest pending transactions. When the blocks get long enough, there will be a kind of election among the eligible participants to pick the next signer of the block. To become eligible, your computer would only have to collect enough pending transactions to make a block, including some number of the oldest pending transactions. The judges of the election would be picked from the previous signers, as recorded in the last signed block. Not sure how many judges you want, but you would go backwards from the latest signer until you find a large enough number of active computers to form the panel, stopping with an odd number to prevent ties. The number of candidates would be limited, too. The candidates would be a power of 2, perhaps around 1024 candidates for each possible new block of transaction data. Each member of the voting panel would then help with a binary search to determine the winner. If the number of candidates is 2^10, then ten bits needed and each member of the voting panel will make a random pick for each of those bits. If most of the voting panel picks 0, then that bit is a zero, and ditto for ones. Trivial enough computation and the resulting winner from the list of 2^n candidates gets to add itself to the new block and calculate the signature of the latest block. And the winner gets the next available ULcoin added to its own account.

What about the "use it or lose it" thing? The ULcoins will expire if they are not used within some limit determined by how many transaction blocks are retained. In other words, the blockchain will also create scarcity and you won't need infinite storage for an infinite amount of transaction data. If an ULcoin has a transaction within the active transaction blocks, then the ULcoin is still valid and the owner is the recipient of the ULcoin in that transaction. If no such transaction exists, the ULcoin has died and can be returned to the pool of ULcoins that can be given to new signers.

Any questions? But the answer to the first obvious question is "Yeah, ULcoin is obviously another crazy castle in the sky, but at least it isn't an infinite castle."

End of year funk? Where should it be filed? Some sort of journal thing?

Breaks the jokes, but I'll lead with the punchlines: "You don't care what I understand" and "We can't get there from here." Both of them probably involve projection, but I already have to clarify a couple of terms. The "understand" is supposed to be about deeper knowledge based on lots of data and careful reasoning, even though it started with the famous Richard Feynman joke (and book) about not caring about what other people think. The "there" in the second punchline is referring to any better place. That might be any better place involving human survival, most recently as triggered by The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar.

You know a joke is dead when you have to explain it, so let me kill those jokes right proper. Have to start with the projection, however?

For the first joke, the more I learn, the more things I am supposed to understand, right? Wrong. The more I learn the more I feel uncertain about things I thought I knew. And yet the evidence shows that I should have learned more than most people, at least by the metrics of schooling and books and perhaps a couple of others. Yeah, I'm sure you can't tell from my poor writing, but that's a different joke. So it's hard for me to care too much about what other people claim to understand because most of the time when I probe their understanding I find out the foundations are weaker than my own--and I rarely think I understand whatever we're talking about. So now we get to the projection part and conclude that they probably don't care much about what I (might claim to) understand.

The second broken joke started with the actually funny joke about asking for directions. After several attempts to describe a route, the wannabe guide finally says "You can't get there from here." In my twisted version, the problem is actually time. The process of life is about making decisions, and each of those decisions can be compared to choosing a road in life's travels. So the problem is that you may sometimes need to go backwards to correct mistakes, but after you've made too many mistakes you're going to run out of time to fix them. The "good place" has become unreachable...

So I hope I can figure out a way to feel happier about the new year--but running out of time for that turn... There's another joke about the paving on the road to heck, but I think (dare I say "understand"?) that the road paved with bad intentions is not leading to heaven. Right now we seem to be on roads paved with the worst possible intentions by people who really do not care at all what other people think (or understand). They only care about what they can make other people do for their selfish advantage--and they are not worried at all about the future because their vision of the future is only about dying with the most toys. (Actually, there's a new worse case there. I think some of them have probably secretly cloned themselves and they plan to give all their toys to "themselves" when they die. Just one of my conspiracy theories...)

No, I've never officially studied "political science", but I have a new angle on this week's #election...

Focusing on the margins of the results is simply distracting. Yes, in 2016 it was probably true that Putin and Facebook influenced enough voters to cover the margin of the EC victory. But this time the popular vote margin is about 3 million. Needs a bigger distraction to explain this one? So how about the women who were unwilling (or even afraid) to vote against their spouse? I bet there are at least 1.5 to 3 million such women. The smaller number is if they flipped from Harris and actually voted the other way. Flipped votes count double, one vote minus and one vote plus.

But the much more important question is how these elections got so close in the first place. Many ways to put it. A positive version might be "A radically American claim that losers are just as good as winners" while a negative version might be "Revenge of all the unlucky and ignorant and foolish losers". In that negative version it doesn't matter why or how they got to the bottom, or even if they deserved to be there, but they were only more provoked to seek revenge the more the "prettier" or "smarter" or "richer" heads told them they were wrong to vote that way.

The "winning" trick was finding the right "loser" salesman to claim he was leading the mob of losers. Someone who could make the losers angry while actually being a puppet who can be manipulated by the REAL winners who are smart enough to play the game that way (while hiding in the shadows).

So the reality is amusingly different from appearances. But the entire life of the orange bull-artist is proof of how a lucky loser can fail upwards based on cheating and lying. From childhood we all heard "Cheaters never prosper" and "The truth shall prevail", but in the end it's just "He who dies with the most toys wins." The White House as the ultimate toy? But if the real toys are money and power, then the orange clown was never close to "the most".

Not much of a closing joke, but regarding "political science", I'm skeptical such a thing exists. There are lots of books that claim to be in that category, but looks like marketing BS to me. (For grins and the record, my official fields of specialization are sociology, history, philosophy, and computer science, but I've also studied and failed at math and engineering and the Japanese language and various other stuff. I'm a special loser?)

"I want to get to a better place!"

"Sorry, you can't get there from here."

Just saw another long rant blaming the Democrats for fielding bad candidates. I can thank people for sharing their reactions, but most of the reactions I'm seen can be filed under "Thanks for sharing, but I mostly think you are just trying to justify believing what you continue to want to believe."

But the folks who voted for or against the Xit-storms of lies are also believing what they want to believe. I think the historians who will make sense of last few years of Benjamin Franklin's now-lost republic haven't been born yet. That's just how the study of history works. Great detachment is needed to see clearly. As "occupants" of our times, we can only witness, sometimes participate, but never fully understand. (One of my majors was history, so I can even claim to wear a historian's hat sometimes... But if we do exterminate ourselves, then no more historians will be born to explain what happened.)

Don't get me wrong. I do think the Democratic Party deserves some blame. However it's fundamentally hard to fight infinite slanders with a limited amount of truth. Whoever they nominated, it wouldn't stop the lying.

So my "leading theory of the day" is that the main problem is that most smart people can't understand how stupid people think. Especially when they (both the smart and stupid people) aren't thinking at all. "The lies are too obvious and absurd! The promises are logically impossible! No one can possibly be persuaded to vote in favor of that!"

And yet vote they did. They were persuaded Perhaps the deepest question is how reason died? Some people have been trying to correlate voting tendencies with information sources and personal educational histories... Me? Mostly I blame the Reaganauts. They helped gut the amusing fantasy of journalism as a "public service" and really ramped up the divide-and-conquer assaults on public education that led here.

Democracy died in stupidity. Because there are a few smart people who do know how to manipulate and use stupid people.

Especially foolish to make predictions, but I find them amusing. I think if 10% of the winner's promises are implemented, then China will be the "greatest" nation on earth by 2028. Scare quote because the dimensions aren't clear, though such a dominant China might be scary, too. Economic dominance? Scientific progress? Green energy? Number of engineers? Military power? Sane information sources? Or "safe" and controlled citizens? Many possible dimensions and different criteria for each of them... But it could be worse. I think if the entirety of Project 2025 is implemented, then America may not even be in the top ten afterwards.

My closing joke is about a cat. I think the most disgusting part is the gloating. He doesn't look like the cat who just swallowed the canary. He looks like the cat who "had his way" with the canary before swallowing her--and he's just spotted a fresh canary.

Any fans of Bond movies in the house? I did read most of Fleming's books, but haven't seen many of the movies. As far as I can recall there isn't one based on taking over America via election interference, but I think that may be what we are about to see in real life...

Now if I was exposing an actual gang of secretive plotters, then that could be dangerous for my health, but if I'm right, then most of this is going to be completely obvious to everyone in a couple of days and if I'm wrong, then it's just another crazy conspiracy idea to laugh at. But if I'm right the XitStorm has already started and the whole thing will be finished before Tuesday, though there will be a few months of autopsy to follow...

I'm calling it the XitStorm because funny tweets have become Xits or something like that and there's a way to read it that sounds rude. Do you need any hints? Try to orient your thinking?

In this fantasy of a Bond villain plot, I think there might be four main plotters: Musk, Bezos, Vance, and Thiel. You'll notice that most of them own major corporate cancers, so maybe Vance is just a patsy, but I'll briefly speculate on each of their roles.

Musk has the personal information from his little petition drive and lottery. The news coverage is mostly focusing on the lottery winners, but Forbes reported a total of 87,000 as of October 30th. That could be enough swing-state votes to decide the election, though it would largely depend on how many of them are Harris voters who can be flipped. Musk also controls the cesspool formerly known as Twitter, which is a great delivery platform for manipulative lies. (However Zuckerberg has an even better one and his involvement might remain unclear even if a lot of the manipulations are channeled via that route.)

It isn't clear how much of AWS is owned by Bezos, but AWS is the obvious delivery platform for manipulations. If large computational resources are required, AWS may also be crucial to execution of the plot. The pushes may be simple email, and AWS is great for spam, but if things are really personalized, it won't be just email. Actually, email would probably be the last resort for people who can't be pushed and pulled by other channels like short phone texts or voicebot calls. However I think Bezos actually controls enough computing power to generate a fake voice phone call for each voter, where that fake voice sounds just like the voice of the person who gave the name to Musk...

Vance should be in on the plot because the orange albatross is too senile and flaky. The plotters can't rely on that fool, even as a puppet. It's actually possible Vance would just be a replacement puppet, but I'm including him as a plotter. His role would become crucial after a suitable "hanging cabinet" is put in place to invoke the 25th. (So the key question there is "How quickly can the Turtle move?")

Thiel might be the real mastermind, and he has a company that is essentially focused on figuring out what kinds of manipulations will have the desired effects. Sort of like the glue holding the whole thing together? But it's also key that he hates freedom so much (and even though I didn't mention him by name in a recent rant about freedom).

What kinds of election interference am I imagining? Most obvious target is women in "mixed" marriages. I'm going to give examples in the form of questions, but the real key is asking the right question to the right person at the right time... "Is your marriage worth more than voting for Harris?" "Do you want to lie to him about your vote?" "Will he hurt you if Harris wins?" "What will happen to your children if you get divorced?" I tried to order them by the implicit nastiness, but here's a possible topper: "Why is he cleaning his guns?"

Time matters more than everything else. If my crazy speculations are right, then we'll know all about it by next Tuesday--and it will also be too late to do anything about it. If I'm wrong, then I'll get to reread this post and LMAO.

Latest ekronomic speculations, though I haven't been writing much on the topic lately. Doesn't seem to fit reasonably within any story, so just scribbling it in my personal journal, which probably means it will only be visible to a few people who are "following" me. Not even sure what "following" means, even at a functional level...

The thought involves the "big" Fed meeting to set interest rates. Only "big" for some absurd sense of the economy. MANY factors and metrics of the economy. Unemployment levels, market demand, foreign exchange rates, stock market activity from market segments down to individual companies, corporate investments in new technologies or other companies. LOTS of things there.

But all of this is supposed to be controllable with one little level that adjusts an interest rate? I am not convinced that it is the key or that any one metric can be key. Not even with all the absurd explanations of why raising or lowering it "should" have certain effects. The most appropriate interest rate? In a flying pig's eye.

But the fintech rot goes much deeper than that. Money itself has become a meaningless concept. It's supposed to be valuable because "the government" says it's valuable. But most of the "value" involves speculations based on speculations about relative future speculations--and no one actually knows anything concrete about the future. To the contrary, our persistent delusions seem to be leading to a future of no future. "Game over"?

Annoyed by fake personal messages from "recruiters" on LinkedIn. The website has always been infested with garbage, but it's really ramped up recently and my theory is that they are just teasing suckers to help validate disinformation--though they will quite possibly pay decent money to a human who is sufficiently unethical but skilled at crafting plausible new lies.

It's NOT a real message if you cannot reply to it. It's a one-way broadcast and the response path is always asking for my personal information. That might be good if they are a legitimate recruiter and if it were a real job, but they all stink to high heaven of AI-generated disinformation from companies with no reputations that can be checked beyond a pretty webpage.

#fraud #LinkedIn #fake #recruiter

As a good read, you can't beat Going Infinite by Michael Lewis.

Okay, I confess I'm scrambling for a good opening, but I've read a lot of his books and can't recall a bad one. So it's supposed to be a joke about infinity being too big to beat. And I'm not joking that it's a good read.

It's basically the story of SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) and the implosion of FTX. The infinite part is actually about imaginary money, and I think we are seriously screwed on that side of things. Though the book only addresses that part in passing, I want to start by focusing on it because it has become part of a fundamentally untenable background situation. It's not infinite, but close enough to destroy us?

Maybe the historical perspective is best? Value was originally defined quite narrowly. "Here is a loaf of bread. What's it worth to you? What can you offer in exchange?" Before that level of barter it's hard to argue that "economics" existed at all. Later on "value" grew up to consider pieces of land, then factories and other more complicated things, but there was still something there.

I think "economics" broke down when the future got involved. It wasn't the thing anymore, but the future value of the thing that mattered. As implemented in terms of stock markets, people started "valuing" stocks based on increasingly wild guesses about "future sales" and "future earnings" and "future mergers"... But when they started gambling on future values of everything, then they got too close to infinity. So now we have stock markets with "values" of a relatively small number of trillions of dollars (whatever that's supposed to mean) underlying speculative markets with "values" that are vastly larger based on wild speculations on the future.

And all of that is legal? Well, mostly, but SBF apparently crossed a line somewhere and wound up in jail for it. The book wraps before sentencing... When I checked (and the google returns Sam as the first hit (via Wikipedia) for "SBF") the bottom line was 25 years. No mention of when he might get paroled...

In terms of funny, SBF was trying to be legal, even for the cryptocurrency stuff where the values are completely imaginary and bogus. But he is also rather more crazy than the average bear. At least those are the feelings Michael Lewis left me with.

Anyway, the book is a very friendly treatment. Maybe Michael Lewis is everyone's friend? I actually thought the most interesting part was in Chapter 8, where the psychiatrist creates the organization chart. Not so much the chart itself as the shocking things the shrink seems to be saying about some of his patients. In public? What happened to protecting the privacy of the patients? One theory is that SBF picked an unethical doctor, but I suspect the reality is more complicated. I think Michael Lewis got the personal information from the patients and the psychiatrist didn't disavow it. Presentation issues dogging the author?

The overall quality of the writing and editing was up to the usual high standards. Only had three page-linked reactions. There were mistakes on pages 63 and 64 that made me wonder if there was some kind of production hiccup at that point in the book. Page 63 says "millions" where it must have been "thousands" in reality and page 64 has "2104" as a year that must have been "2014". More interesting is on page 164 where it refers to that org chart. It's printed on the inside of the dust jacket, but I read a library's copy and the dust jacket is taped down, so I had to use websearch to see the chart.

'Nuff said. I predict you'll enjoy it, though the story is fuzzy and I didn't detect any solutions here.