Billionaires aren’t real

They are especially unreal if their fortune was built on cryptocurrency and NFTs. One of the big players was this curly-haired guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, whose wealth has experienced a catastrophic roller coaster ride.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s fortune has been erased as his assets become essentially worthless, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

And that came before FTX and its affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Friday.

At its peak, his net worth was $26 billion and still stood at $16 billion on Monday. But by Wednesday it had shriveled to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

By late Thursday, it was gone. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put the value of FTX’s US business at just $1 — down from $8 billion after a January fundraising round — due to a potential trading halt. Bankman-Fried owns roughly 70% of FTX US.

In addition, his $500 million in Robinhood stock was stripped from his net worth figure after Reuters reported it was held by Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm he founded, and may have been used as collateral for loans.

Earlier in the week, Bloomberg had assigned a $1 valuation to Alameda. On Thursday, Bankman-Fried said he is shutting down Alameda.

That’s amazing. $26 billion just evaporated into thin air. He’d spent millions putting his company name on sports arenas and teams before everything went poof, and he had to have known the company was worthless. So much jiggery-pokery was going on to prop up an empty shell, and now it has all collapsed. It does my heart good.

Next billionaire on the chopping block: Elon Musk. He’s desperately flailing about, selling off Tesla stock to keep his latest acquisition afloat, and it should be obvious to everyone by now that he’s an incompetent businessmen, a bad clown juggling his inherited wealth clumsily to acquire an unwarranted reputation and an inflated net worth. The ongoing Twitter debacle is illustrating that in a spectacular fashion.

The bad news is that I can’t quit Twitter now. I have to stick with it to watch the final explosion, all while waving my cowboy hat and going “Yeeee-haaaww!”. It’s going to be glorious.

Then, after I get my next game life, I wanna watch Mark Zuckerberg fold with a piteous whimper.

You can see with a glance where people are dying

I just discovered Liveuamap, a service that compiles ongoing reports from the war in Ukraine and plots them on a map. It seems to have a Ukrainian bias, which is OK, I guess, if you look at it as a representation of where the fighting is going on, but it’s also depressing when you’re looking at it and suddenly an icon of a bomb pops up with a label like “6 people killed as result of Russian missile strike at residential house in Mykolaiv”. What a godawful waste.

Ukraine does seem to be winning in the south, for now…where “winning” means lots of people on both sides dying in ferocious combat.

Believe them when they tell you what they want to do

Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, it’s pretty clear what the theocratic Right wants to do: they want to kill you or force you to be as mad as they are.

I remember when everyone thought atheism was radical.

Just a thought: are these far-right loons finally insane enough to repel the majority of Americans? Or are they actually winning converts to their bloody causes?

Oh, wait. I just realized that Twitter is in the process of melting down, and that it’s entirely possible that every time over the last 10 or 15 years that I’ve linked to Twitter, that’s going to become a dead link, and I better make sure to include a link to a more stable, reliable source from now on. That excerpt of one of Nutty Nick’s rants is also enshrined on Right Wing Watch.

The death of Twitter is going to punch holes in blogs everywhere.

Google Maps for the Roman Empire

The last time I was in London, I was so tempted by all the ads for $30 flights to Rome — I could flit off for a weekend in Italy! I could also make a day trip by train to Edinburgh, which was a bit more expensive but a pleasant way to travel anyway. Let’s do a fantasy vacation and see what I could do. Here’s the Edinburgh trip:

What? The closest you can get me is to York, which the British manage to spell funny, and it’s going to take nine days? By donkey? British rail sure has gone downhill.

What about that weekend trip to Italy, instead? Cheapest route, please.

No direct flights available? I have to take a couple of sea cruises, another butt-busting ride on a donkey, and it’s going to take 37 days? I haven’t the slightest idea what the conversion rate for denarii is, so I’m not going to guess what it costs. Probably more than $30.

You’ve probably figured out that I wasn’t using Google Maps, but this cool webpage called Orbis, which uses a historical database to calculate routes and travel times to and from various destinations in 200CE. Apparently, there was no such thing as taking a three day vacation in a different country back then, when you either had to walk, ride a donkey, or pay a lot of money for a carriage.

I could see how fantasy novelists and fantasy gamers, as well as historians, could use this to get some perspective on how much work was required to move around in the ancient world.

Your religiously-motivated murders must be tidy and conservative!

The day of the election, Michael Voris of the Vortex/Church Militant posted a strange video. The grey/blonde junkyard rat he uses for a toupee is noticeably tousled, and his voice is mildly agitated. He starts off by thanking god that the GOP was going to stop the evil ones, so he seems to be confident that there is going to be a Republican sweep (with reservations: the forces of darkness…have complete control of one political party and partial control over the other, and we lost the war over morality, so evident today in even the GOP, which just warmly embraces sodomy as marriage — it’s a bit of a mixed message), but his real message is simple: if conservative Catholics don’t get their way, then violence is justified.

You may notice his message here is also confused. He keeps insisting that political action is the first resort and that violence is the very last resort, but hey, if you can’t ban abortion and gay marriage, then yeah, go for it, start busting heads.

Now we are in a pitched battle in the political arena—the last remaining line before all-out civil war. If you love peace and you don’t want to see violence, then you better get involved on the political front.

And let’s be clear about this for all the phony or delusional pacifists out there: Violence in and of itself is not immoral. It depends on the circumstances, and sometimes, even, it’s necessary: self defense, the subduing of an aggressor threatening the life of your family, the Son of God in the temple violently whipping the money changers.

Wait. One of his examples is not like the others. I can agree that violence in self-defense against violence is acceptable, but if you’re the Son of God you’re allowed to be violent against capitalists? Bring on the Communist Revolution then. Except that Voris hates Communists, and that’s exactly what the Democrats are. Except also that I suspect what he really means to say is that whipping The Jews is just fine and dandy.

The idea that violence must always, at all times, always be avoided is not Catholic. Remember the Crusades? Sometimes violence must be unleashed to protect the innocent.

Wait again. The Crusades were about protecting the innocent? What I remember is that the Crusades were violent invasions of the Middle East justified by a welter of complex political and religious excuses that mainly ended up killing a lot of people to no good end. I interpret this to mean that violence is bad except when religious rationalizations allow you to unleash it. He’s kind of arbitrary in what he accepts as “protecting the innocent”.

But lethal violence—because of its drastic, you-can-never-come-back-from-it consequences—must never be the first resort. In fact, it must always be the last resort, and then not be allowed to turn into an orgy of dominance over the foe.

Nonetheless, violence does — must — always be an option. Welcome to a fallen world.

Violence is bad, mmm-kay, but it must always be an option. I’ll let you know when the option must be exercised. Stay tuned to the Vortex for the signal!

Remember, no orgies. Orgies are bad. The Church Militant only endorses strait-laced murders.

We have many jumping spiders now

We have a couple of terraria with Bold Jumping spiders — they’re fairly large, they got big cute eyes, they’re usually active — but the biggest of our jumpers retired to a silken refugium last month. We decided to check on her and winkle her out, and discovered the sad truth.

She was dead.

She did, however, leave a legacy — a big egg sac full of squirmy baby bold jumpers. Take a look!

And now for something completely different

The news is mostly politics and Twitter right now, so here’s a dose of perspective.

Apple finished Wednesday’s session with a $2.31 trillion market cap, according to Yahoo! Finance data. Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta were worth a combined $2.3 trillion. Meta’s meltdown, of course this year, backed– or helping to drive that underperformance there. Big Apple, though, indeed the winner.

These absurdly rich companies are happily sliding under the radar while Elon Musk is distracting everyone. Tax them all more.

Boy, I remember when everyone was predicting that Apple was going to decline into irrelevance.

Not as bad as it could have been, not as good as it should have been

This is not normal, and I hate it.

I woke up this morning with a sense of dread, and glanced at the news only briefly. I have been conditioned to expect the worst the day after an election, when I will learn just how stupid and hateful my fellow citizens are, when I will discover that the shrieking losers will march their case to the corrupt Supreme Court to get their election overturned, when the newspapers and fucking 538 will babble excuses about how their efforts to manipulate, that is, “predict” the elections went awry, and we’ll see how much democracy has decayed. There is never any good news but that it is tainted with bad.

So I glanced. Then I closed the news and ran away.

What little I learned: ballots aren’t all counted yet, lots of elections are still up in the air. The “red wave” that esteemed newspapers like the NY Times never materialized — but then, I’ve learned that the media desperately wants a “wave”, and they never happen. We don’t know the final outcome yet, but the newspapers are still yapping about it. I can’t even imagine what the noise on cable news is like, and I’m not going to try to find out.

So my current assessment is short: not as bad as it could have been, not as good as it should have been. Give it a few days.

It’s all part of the brilliant plan to become profitable

The first step in making money with Twitter is to drive away all those scientists. They’re so critical!

Still, with uncertainty about how Twitter will change under Musk, many of the thousands of medical and scientific experts on the platform have started to look for alternatives or are considering giving up on social media altogether. For a while the hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter and #TwitterMigration were trending, and many researchers have been posting their new Mastodon handles, encouraging others to follow them to the site, which has gained more than 100,000 new users within days of Musk completing his purchase.

For the moment, most researchers are waiting to see what happens with Twitter. “I’m hedging my bets with a Mastodon account but not planning to leave in the short term,” says biologist Carl Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom, 163,000 followers) of the University of Washington, Seattle. Many other researchers are doing the same. That means even if little changes for now, the groundwork is being laid for what could quickly become a digital mass migration of scientists.

Once those old crotchety stick-in-the-muds are gone, Twitter will prosper. Just like when chasing away those computer scientists made it possible to sell dancing serfs as robots, and making the neuroscientists roll their eyes at Neuralink opened the door to brain surgery on his fans, and horrifying space science realists makes it possible to sell seats on a rocket to millionaires, Musk has a grand plan. By antagonizing all the rational people, he’s left with a market packed with fools — it’s like those Nigerian prince scams, where the skeptics get turned off by the subject line, but if the mark reads through a whole paragraph, you know you’ve got a potential sucker.

Like Bergstrom, I’m staying on Twitter for now — for the lulz, if nothing else — but I also have a backup plan with an account on mastodon that I set up 5 years ago (I’m on octodon.social/@pzmyers, if you want to track me down). There, I’ve noticed a recent flood of familiar science-related names showing up, which is nice. It’s always been a pleasant crowd over there, but I was sad that I had to go to Twitter to hang out with most of my science-related online pals, and now Twitter is becoming less and less essential.

By the way, if you find Mastodon confusing, DrSkySkull has written a short guide.