BC HISTORY
Saved by @jay_millerjay

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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It's telling that the greatest economics revolution of my lifetime was "behavioral economics," which could also be called "checking to see whether real people act like we've assumed they acted."

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If it seems weird that economists would spend generations operating on the incorrect assumption that people behave in a certain way without ever checking, consider that Aristotle assumed women had fewer teeth than men, - and never bothered to count.

https://t.co/dApCRKT9yj

7/
Accountants check, and what they find is…gnarly. In "An Accounting Model of the UK Exchequer," @spatchcockable, @widespreadhaze and Neil Wilson offer a mindbending account (heh) of where money comes from (hint: not taxes), and where it goes ("poof").

https://t.co/5pJBIfYkUN

8/
The authors did a two-part @MMTpodcast interview describing the paper's findings, and it is the most extraordinary 2.5h audio you're likely to find: not just the realities of money, but the deliberate obfuscation thereof.

https://t.co/IdK92zx2sX

https://t.co/lmCAQfTXQv

9/
One thing the Exchequer paper reveals is that accountants bat for both teams: team clarity and team obscurity. As many finance scandals and finance dramas have reminded us, accounting can be turned to obscuring and dazzling rather than revelation.

10/
After all, somewhere in HM Exchequer is a team of accountants who know EXACTLY how money works - and know that it's nothing like the account produced by economists or politicians. They know it because they are in charge of it. They do money, all day long.

11/
When accountants go rogue, things get bad. And thanks to neoclassical economics - and its emphasis on the "efficiency" of monopolies - we are living through a golden age of ghastly accounting fraud.

12/
Just four companies - @ey, @kpmg, @pwc and @deloitte - audit the books of 97% of the 350 largest UK companies; but they make far more selling these companies consulting services, and have made a habit of lying about those books in order to boost their consulting income.

13/
Accountancy is meant to be a profession that understands that conflicts of interest are a moral hazard. But just as doctors convince themselves they won't get addicted to their own painkillers, accountants talk themselves into believing that conflicts won't corrupt them.

14/
That's how the Big Four accounting companies came to sign off Carillion's fraudulent books. The company hid £7b worth of debts, took on management of vital government services up and down the country, then collapsed, leaving the nation stranded.

https://t.co/4TII4dPMMp

15/
For the Big Four, Carillion's collapse was a feature, not a bug. After all, the only accounting firms large enough to oversee its bankruptcy were...the Big Four, who billed millions for cleaning up the mess left behind by their own fraud.

16/
Accounting fraud is a fascinating potential fracture line in economic reform. After all, fraudulent accountants may help SOME plutes get rich - like, say Bernie Madoff, or Donald Trump - but they often do so at the expense of OTHER plutes.

17/
Like @exxonmobil, which lied to its investors for 11 years about the value of its shale-gas holdings, which it purchased at the peak of the fracking bubble and whose revenues and liabilities it has buried in its financial statements ever since.

https://t.co/hpSWKt1ahr

18/
The company is finally writing down $19.3b worth of those assets, but the true figure is more like $50b. And yes, Exxon's big investors include a lot of passive funds that invest pension savings, meaning this hurts Main Street as well as Wall Street.

19/
But as ever, those pension-savers are the Lucky Duckies here, because - joke's on us - Americans have basically no pension savings, thanks to the wage stagnation and asset inflation that left almost all working Americans facing penury in old age.

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Hey, at least they're not getting ripped off by Exxon! The real victims of this decade-long, multibillion-dollar fraud are the same people who got snookered into buying into shitty Trump casinos and luxury buildings: rich people.

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By definition, rich people deal in quantities that exceed their ability to personally count so they are especially vulnerable to scam accounting. It's only when the frauds tank a company we all suffer, as jobs and businesses disappear, screwing workers and cities.

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The absence of a neutral ref and scorekeeper is a really big deal in online business and policy circles. The ad-tech duopoly isn't merely content to price-gouge advertisers - they also lie about what those sky-high prices are paying for:

https://t.co/pmWMTNsPRp

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But each member of the duopoly has a different scam. Google's frauds are complex, behind-the-scenes market manipulations, an abstruse, mathematical grift that leverages complexity and monopoly to fleece its customers.

https://t.co/gDyvaKtkwZ

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Facebook is much more straightforward. It just lies. Back in 2016, FB lied about how many people were watching videos, and encouraged hundreds of media company to beggar themselves to chase fraudulent video dollars:

https://t.co/GmcR3tDc8B

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Accounting fraud is in Facebook's DNA. After all, this is a company whose primary sales-pitch is, "We will count everything you do and then charge people to help them sell you stuff."

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This proposition is intrinsically hard to evaluate. How can a customer know if their FB ad generated a sale, or whether it was an ad elsewhere, or random chance, or even that elusive beast, customer loyalty?

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The main source for the belief in Facebook's efficacy is...Facebook. It's not a neutral party, and the accountants who sign off on its books have repeatedly shown themselves to be untrustworthy.

28/
Here's the latest scandal: since 2018, FB's been defending a class-action suit brought by its customers who claim that FB lied about "potential reach" - that is, how many users would see their ads.

https://t.co/alNpNJ8PZw

29/
And while FB strenuously denies that the inaccuracies in "potential reach" metrics were just normal, unpredictable variations in user behaviors, a whistleblowing FB product manager has produced emails in which they warn execs that they're committing fraud.

30/
The execs who got these memos rejected them, telling the product manager that acting on them would have "significant revenue impact" - that is, "Our customers wouldn't buy our products if we were truthful about them."

31/
The fraudulent reach figures begat fraudulent revenues, and those revenues were fraudulently reported to investors. Those investors will now take a haircut if FB loses in court.

32/
Accounting fraud's pathology is bimodal: it abets the wage-theft and austerity that harms the poorest and most vulnerable - but also the reporting scams that harpoon finance's biggest whales.

33/
It's a curious alliance of interests. For now, it seems like Big Tech is going to be antitrust and anti-corruption's harbinger, but I wouldn't count accountancy out - it's got exactly the right kinds of enemies to fire sustained political will.

34/
If you'd prefer to read or share this thread as a blog post, here it is on https://t.co/iSBh8s9m7q, a site that is entirely free of ads, trackers, or surveillance:

https://t.co/niVePUyzgf

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
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.

1/


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.

2/

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."

3/

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.

4/

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.

5/
TRADING , STOCK MKT
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

2/

These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

3/

The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

4/

PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

5/
SOCIETY
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

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* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
INTERNET
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the "paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

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After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US politics have always been conspiratorial.

2/

I found @zacharykarabell's @politico history of the Know Nothing party especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging, paranoid, fractious political movements

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

4/
HISTORY

More from History

Dr. Peggy Blair
Dr. Peggy Blair
@peggy_blair
So I have a funny story about Governor General Jules Leger. I was working in the gardens on the grounds as a summer student in 1972 (might have been 1973, I can't quite remember, but it was the first year that women were hired as labourers by the NCC).1/

One of the things that we had to do was rake The pebble gravel on the paths and that was my task this particular day. I was out raking when I saw a Columbo type man dressed in a fedora and a crumpled raincoat approach me.2/

At that time the grounds were open to the public so it wasn't particularly surprising to have someone wander up and we chatted. I realized that he had recently had a stroke and that his English, while fluent, was a little slow. 3/

Anyway, we had a very nice chat and the next time I saw him in the garden, I showed him some baby rabbits that had a nest in the front rotundra. He thought they were pretty adorable.4/

I was able to pick one up for him to hold, but it was difficult for him because one of his hands was quite paralyzed. Anyway, he thought this was very lovely and our regular chats continued.4/
HISTORY
History Under Your Feet
History Under Your Fee...
@HUFToday
Today is Jayanti of Udham Singh, the man who assasinated General O Dwyer, responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the atrocities that followed, a true hero.


His real name was Sher Singh, born on Dec 26, 1899, to a poor peasant family in Punjab’s Sangrur district. His father, Tehl Singh, worked as a railway gate keeper at a level crossing in the Uppali village of Punjab.

Having lost both his parents when he was small, he along with his brother Mukta Singh, grew up in the Central Khalsa Orphanage in Amritsar. Following the Sikh initiation rites, he got the name of Udham Singh.

In 1919, he left the orphanage after passing the matriculation exam. In that year Punjab was in turmoil, with massive protests breaking out against the British rule.

Around 1500 Indian civilians, in Amritsar, protesting against the deportation of nationalist leaders, Dr.Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal Dang, were brutally massacred at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. While Gen Dyer led the carnage, he was backed by the Lt. Governor O’Dwyer.
HISTORY
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Stephen Moore
Stephen Moore
@smooreBofB1940
1. This is a thread about the Bristol Beaufighter & how it was the most important (if not the absolute ‘best’) heavy fighter of the SWW. Beaufighter origins go back to the Bristol Type 142 ‘Britain First’ built as a publicity stunt for Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere in 1935.


2. With a top speed of 278mph, this was considerably faster than the Hawker Fury, which could only manage 207mph. A specification for a fast medium bomber was issued for a revised version of the 142M, named the Blenheim.


3. By the time the war started all-metal monoplane fighters had eclipsed the performance of the Blenheim. Serious shortcomings in operational capabilities of all RAF aircraft were revealed during early wartime aerial activity, leading to heavy losses of aircraft & crews.

4. Lack of defensive armament, armour & self-sealing tanks were added to the problems of looming obsolescence. The huge number of aircraft ordered from shadow factories, along with delays to replacement models, kept the Blenheim in the front line much longer than it should have.


5. Fighter Command had 7 Blenheim IF squadrons at the outbreak of war. These were dual purpose day/night units, but by early 1940 were operating primarily as night fighters. The need to provide cover for east coast convoys led to the formation of 4 ‘trade protection’ squadrons.
HISTORY
Erik Loomis
Erik Loomis
@ErikLoomis
This Day in Labor History: February 14, 1940. A group of Navajos write a letter of protest against the livestock reduction program the government forced upon them. Let's talk about how the New Deal transformed Navajo work culture in a shockingly negative way.


The four Navajos were named Scott Preston, Julius Begay, Frank Goldtooth, and Judge Many Children. They wrote, in part, "The Navajo Indians are not opposed to grazing permits as such, in fact we believe they heartily approve them if the manner of issuance is fair...

....and the limits are sufficiently high to permit the family to exist.

For instance, in our own district (No.3) the sheep unit is set at 282. If a person has 5 horses, that would be the equivalent to 25 sheep; 1 head of cattle is the equivalent of 4 sheep....

... A Navajo family will consume 150 head of sheep or more per year depending on the size of the family. In addition to this amount, it is necessary to sell for their staples enough to keep the family from starvation....

.... Then each family must be prepared to meet natural losses. We understand the families with smaller than the maximum are not permitted to raise that limit, but those above must be reduced....
HISTORY
Michael Kinyon
Michael Kinyon
@ProfKinyon
Why are loops called "loops"?

(0/15)

Before addressing the question in the title tweet, let me first back up to the origin of the term "quasigroup". The first use of the term was by Ruth Moufang in 1935 in her study of the multiplicative structure of the octonions.

(1/15)

Moufang defined "quasigroup" in a much narrower sense than we do now. The details are not part of this story, so I'll skip them. What she called quasigroups we now call Moufang loops in her honor.

(2/15)

The current definition of quasigroup - a set with binary op * s.t. for all a,b, the equations a*x=b, y*a=b have unique solutions x,y - is due to Hausmann & Ore (1937), in the same paper where they introduced the "other" meaning of "groupoid": a set with a binary operation

(3/15)

It was A.A. Albert (1943) who introduced the term "loop" for a quasigroup with identity element. In his words, "It will be very convenient to have a special name for such quasigroups..." (p.510)

(4/15)
HISTORY

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(THREAD) Pre-election Russia collusion may take down Trump. It's equally possible the Trumps' pre- and post-election collusion with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel will do it—a course of collusion also connected to the Kremlin. I explain here. I hope you'll read on and retweet.


1/ I must stress how unbelievably complex the "Grand Bargain" theory of the Trump-Russia case is—a different thing from saying it's not substantiated. It's substantiated in *almost every single particular*—it just *also* happens to be very confusing. Not byzantine—just confusing.

2/ The basics: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE all view Iran as their chief regional enemy. Iran is propped up by Russia. Therefore the Saudis, Israelis, and Emiratis all need a US government willing to find a way to get the Kremlin to *stop* supporting Iran in the Middle East.

3/ The best way to get Russia to stop supporting Iran—or reduce support—was/is to drop all sanctions on Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea, as that'd be worth *trillions* to the Kremlin over the next decade. Everyone knew that Clinton wouldn't do this—and that Trump would.

4/ Per the NYT, on August 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. met secretly at Trump Tower with a Saudi and Emirati emissary, George Nader, as well as an Israeli intelligence expert, Joel Zamel, with *significant* ties to both Israeli intelligence *and* Russian oligarchs allied with Putin.
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Vibhu Vashisth
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MAHARAANI TARARANI: THE QUEEN OF MARATHAS

Rani Tarabai was the brave daughter-in-law of Chhatrapati Shivaji and one of the greatest medieval Monarchs India ever had.
She was born in 1675 to one of the bravest commander-in-chiefs of Shivaji's Army named Hambir Rao Mohite.


Tarabai was just 8yrs old when she was married to Shivaji's younger son, Rajaram. Mughals and Marathas were constantly at war with each other. Shivaji was crowned the ruler of the Independent Maratha Swarajya in 1674 which was established by him.


However,the great leader died in 1680&the Maratha Samrajya went into a complete&total chaos.Marathas saw some very tough times ahead. In 1689,when Raigad Fort fell to the Mughal Army of over 15000,Shivaji's first wife Saibai and his elder son Sambhaji were captured&put to death.


Sambhaji's wife and son Shahu were taken prisoners to the Mughal court. During the same battle, Shivaji's second son Rajaram(Tarabai's husband) , who was the heir to the throne now, managed to escape using a disguise. He made his way to the Gingee Fort in Tamil Nadu.


Mughal General Zulfikar Khan, however, followed them to Gingee laying siege to the Gingee Fort. From 1690-1698,This was the longest siege by a Mughal Army of any Fort which stands testimony to the military and diplomatic credentials of Rani Tarabai.
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Pieter Levels \u2728
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Joe Rogan's podcast is now is listened to 1.5+ billion times per year at around $50-100M/year revenue.

Independent and 100% owned by Joe, no networks, no middle men and a 100M+ people audience.

👏

https://t.co/RywAiBxA3s

Joe is the #1 / #2 podcast (depends per week) of all podcasts

120 million plays per month source https://t.co/k7L1LfDdcM


https://t.co/aGcYnVDpMu
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John Myles White
John Myles White
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This post is pretty bizarre, but it manages to hit on so many false beliefs that I've seen hurt junior data scientists that it deserves some explicit

(1) The notion that R is well-suited to "building web applications" seems totally out of left field. I don't feel like most R loyalists think this is a good idea, but it's worth calling out that no normal company will be glad you wrote your entire web app in R.

(2) It is true that Python had some issues historically with the 2-to-3 transition, but it's not such a big deal these days. On the flip side, I have found interesting R code that doesn't run in modern R interpreters because of changes in core operations (e.g. assignment syntax).

(3) "Most of the time we only need a latest, working interpreter with the latest packages to run the code" -- this is where things get real and reveal some things that hurt data scientists. If this sentence is true, it's likely because you don't share code with coworkers.

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Anu Satheesh
Anu Satheesh
@AnuSatheesh5
Thrikkangode Sree Randu Moorthy Temple
Ottappalam, Kerala. 🚩
#keralatemples

This is very unique temple as Shiva and Vishnu both are in the “linga” form in the same Garbhagriham. The Srikovil is in a circular pattern. Temple's Prathishta was done by Parasurama.


Mahadeva and Maha Vishnu in the same Srikovil is very rare Prathishta, but poojas are done separately Dhara is done to Maha Vishnu here. People suffering from “KAIVISHAM” and mental illness are fully cured on drinking a medicinal herb supplied by a nearby family here.


The root of the banyan tree around the Ayyappa Sannidhanam is said to have great powers for skin ailments.

Very ancient temple but was covered with forest for many years.
Later two persons Chakki and Chaathan, while cutting trees their axe hit on the nearby
@SriramKannan77


Vigrahams and it suddenly started bleeding. Later Devaprashnam was held and thus found out that these were murthy's of Shiva and Vishnu which was worshipped long back. And thus temple is constructed here.
Om Namah Sivaye
Om Namo Narayanaya
🕉🙏🕉
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