Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

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The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

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As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

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In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

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Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

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First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

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All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

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A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

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The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

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Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

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Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

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It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

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For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

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#Thread - 1/21

A story of a brave woman who let her "breast" cut to protect the life of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose!

Neera Arya was born on March 5 1902 in Khekra Nagar, Uttar Pradesh in a distinguished & eminent businessman Seth Chhajumal's family. Since her childhood,

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She was a true nationalist & always had a vision of becoming a part of the freedom fighter movement. She was also reportedly accused as an undercover by the British Govt.

That was the time when her father's business was flourishing in Calcutta, though his business was..

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spread across the country but Calcutta was the center of his business and that was one of the reasons why her education was done in Calcutta. During that period of time, she had learned quite a few languages along with Bengali, Hindi, English.

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Her father got her married to a CID Inspector "Shrikant Jairanjan Das" in British India but they were two different individuals, Neera Arya was a true nationalist but her husband was a true British servant. She was highly motivated & she had an urge of getting us freedom..

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so she ended up joining the Jhansi Regiment in Azad Hind Fauz after the marriage. It was the regiment that the British always accused them of spying on British Govt.

It was the time when Neera's husband Jairanjan Das was given the responsibility to spy on Netaji Subhash..

I am reading through reams of late-1920s communist poetry and easily my favourite title so far is: "To a Lady who Rejected a Poem about Spring as a Petit-Bourgeois Deviation"

The last lines:
"So here's my hat into the air,
Three cheers for your amazing hair,
For coal mines, and for turbines, too,
For steel, the Comintern and you!"

A not exactly graceful (though possibly satirical) title: "Lines Disassociating Myself from Yessenin and Supporting the Otherwise Unfounded Legend that I am a Foremost Proletarian Writer"

An excerpt:
"Goodbye verses of Yessenin
Goodbye literary slop-
You are not the line of Lenin
You are not the line of WAPP

Never shall I moan a
simple lyric from the heart
I'll devote my new corona
to the proletarian art"

The poet was Joseph Freeman, who published much of his revolutionary verse in the New Masses, a stylish journal of the interwar American literary Left.

What do you think folks, shall we do some bad book covers today?

I think we should...

"I have made some bad decisions in my life..."

Dressed Up For Murder, by Gary Brander. Fastback, 1986.

"It's not you Mr Darcy, it's me..."

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Bestseller Library, 1966.

Move along Twitter, nothing to see here...

The Star Fox, by Poul Anderson. Panther Books 1968. Cover by Bob Haberfield.

Fangs For The Mammaries, edited by Esther Friesner. Baen Books 2010. Art by Clyde Caldwell.

I see what you did there Clyde...

So last week I wrote about the disinheritance of daughters in parts of Igbo land & to my disbelief, there were Ndi Igbo claiming that this customary law of inheritance that privileges sons doesn't exist, that I had somehow fabricated this out of thin air

(even as I and others on my TL gave concrete, real life examples and some Igbo daughters have successfully brought cases contesting the law before civil court).

One ill-informed young man stated that I had to “malign Igbo culture” so that “white people” would give me money. LOL. I understand that we don’t like to see the worst of ourselves reflected back to us but how do we progress if we refuse to confront it?

We can’t pretend that we are perfect, our traditions are perfect, our lives are perfect; we can’t create false narratives in the face of overwhelming evidence disputing those narratives;

we can’t go through life with our head perpetually buried in the sand because that isn’t a sustainable posture to hold. Sand go enter your nose and choke you, abi?