stacks are eating the world

social media use really calls for something closer to a driver's license than terms of service... most apparent bad behavior here is more incompetence than malice, like not knowing how to change lanes or take turns at a 4-way stop..

trump's history on twitter is something closer to a crazy car chase on LA streets than bad driving (with the cops MIA, but media helicopters in pursuit), but almost all unpleasantness around here is just poor driving skills

not that I'm advocating for a licensing regime... that would be a terrible thing. Do not need a social media DMV. But the underlying principles (as tested for eg. in the written and road tests) are pretty good.

Written test would test things like "safe following distance" (reply-guying = tailgating?)

Road test would actually expose you to routine provocations. Like, "make a left turn" = "deal with this concern troll"

As in the driving test, where an awkward, unnatural, and unintuitive bit, the parallel parking test, is the toughest bit, there would be some such awkward maneuver you'd have to learn (hmmm... what's the parallel parking equivalent on twitter?)

Reading my own old writing from 10+ years ago is rarely pleasant. It’s not that the ideas and techniques are worse/embarrassing by current tastes (though they often are), but that they have a brash energy I can’t vibe with anymore even where I can still stand by the content.

Most of that energy is not mine from a younger mindset personally (though there’s some of that) but a function of the era. 2010 generally had more of a brash energy going. An energy born of a widespread sense of the world making more sense and humans being more agenty within it.

2007-13: Brash energy. The GFC bloodied our noses but we still felt in control of the plot collectively.

2014-20: Angry-anxious energy. Everybody lost the plot. Winners and losers alike. Great Weirding.

2021 - : Mellow sadder-and-wiser energy on macro, brrr energy on micro.

Opening mood for 2021 feels like how a figure skater spins faster by pulling in tighter. Narrower horizons, more concentrated energy, easy to mistake conservation of momentum effects for an absolute increase in system energy. Shows up in everything from stocks to writing.

Its tempting to retreat to narrow horizons with primarily happy domestic cozy energy (these are really good times for anything that taps into domestic-scale psyche energy). But even the happiest broader thoughts are alloyed with that mellow sadder-wiser plotlessness.

following a discussion at @yak_collective this morning, I came up with this chart to capture a hypothesis I have that the difficulty of creating communities scales exponentially with the the "depth" of what you're trying to do

thanks @grigorimilov for leading the discussion that sparked this.

The way to read the graph is: each line is a time history of difficulty. It starts dotted, goes through a criticality inflection point, and then crests in difficulty before coming down to a stable plateau.

The inflection points have different names depending on context, but are all topologically similar. They are the make or break moment when a network-effect either kicks in, or fails to. "Product-market fit" in the case of market is the best known such point.

Level 1 is a basic social community, such as a FB group, meetup etc. There are millions of successful ones, and 100s of millions of failures. The "fit point" is what I call a meme-mind fit, when some social object catalyzes a sustainable long-term conversation of growing richness

Almost everything I've helped instigate is Level 1. My contributions to the social-object soup have been things like the vocabulary around sociopaths/clueless/losers, legibility, 2x2s etc.

1 - Over the years I've learnt a lot of new things that I wish I knew when I first started so I want to make this thread for all the new traders out there who wants to turn their trading into a profitable career 🔥

Will be adding to this thread over time.

17 - Because trading is a game of numbers and probabilities, whenever you see a setup that fits your trading rules and aligns with your edge, you NEED to take the opportunity!

Don't pick and choose, just religiously follow your plan and rules!

Think crypto is confusing?

You're right.

Let's make it easier.

Here's Crypto Terminology 101: 🧵

Altcoin:

Any coin that's not #Bitcoin

Ether (#ETH) is the second most popular coin overall and the most well-known Altcoin.

Ether is the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain.

There are thousands of other altcoins, but for now, this is the one to know.

Bitcoin: (#BTC)

The first decentralized digital currency.

Launched in 2009 by an unknown person or organization known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto."

It is the most famous, and most valuable cryptocurrency.

Blockchain:

The core tech behind Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies.

An open, distributed, general ledger where transactions are organized into blocks which are then connected using cryptography.

Coin:

A store of digital value that lives on a blockchain.

Some blockchains, such as Bitcoin, use the same name for both the network and the coin.

Stable coins are another type of cryptocurrency which are backed by fiat currency (e.g the US dollar) or commodities such as Gold.

1. IMP ANNOUNCEMENT

I want to let you know when I made the decision to launch @StrikePac & directly get into electioneering I realized I wasn't going to continue issuing "race ratings" & "forecasts" each cycle- OBV that's a conflict of interest!

The hostility & sexism of

2. that world, I have to be honest, makes it very easy to walk away- the misogyny in the top tier of the election analysis community outside of @Center4Politics folks who are awesome & also more accurate than anyone else is intolerable. I'll still analyze politics, political

3. events, issue commentary, write articles, run the pod, go on TV, and generally succeed in ways that drive those men nuts but no, I won't be putting out ratings or "forecasts" anymore. Now, lots of people are asking me "what's going to happen in 2022?" The Midterm Effect, the

4. the long standing pattern of the president's party losing seats in the Midterm happens virtually every single cycle. I believe there are 2 recent exceptions: post-9/11 in the 2022 midterms and 1998 post-Lewinski gate. What I'm trying to do in building @StrikePac is completely

5. redesign/overhaul/modernize & reshape the way that Dems currently approach electioneering. I want to build a new organization with the funds capable of coming into cycle's like VA's 2021 cycle and the 2022 midterm cycle and start to deploy these new methodologies into the