So everyone's wondering if there's a financial crisis coming from the popping of the dotcom bubble. Here's a little chart of those events, projected as though repeated from last week's stock market top. You'd be looking at 25 to 50 percent drop over a year or three, taking S&P index down to four to five thousand or so over 2026, since that's what they were. I think it's at least 30% likely to play out roughly like that, and am positioned such that I'm happy either way.

Facebook turns out to know internally what we all knew from the outside. Like 10% of their money comes from showing your grandma ads for scams. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

I see Sir Kier Starmer thinks that it's "inappropriate" for a music festival to have a band that campaigns for peace and an end to genocide, but that it's perfectly appropriate and may "alleviate" a "grave threat” for a country to bomb nuclear sites in a another country! He thinks daubing some paint on airplanes as a protest is terrorism, but that using those planes in reconnaissance to support an ongoing genocide by Israel is a good and normal use of them. What a fucking weasel, absolute death worshiping fuck-knuckle. Goddamn Labour party loves them some illegal wars of aggression in the middle east. Can't get enough of it. Please fuck off Sir Starmer.

Seems to be some sort of conference for bankers and CEOs and politicians and suits and squares going on in Vegas this week.

😆 Missile Air Defense As a Service MAD AS you like. In some ways a government paying by a subscription for a missile defense service has been inevitable since Reagan started the mission to Privatize Literally Everything. The government will own nothing, and be happy. States must do only one thing: Pay money to rich people to get them to do the things. The idea of Reagan's Star Wars returning is pretty crazy in itself. That launching all those satellites would massively enrich the government's biggest donor is mostly just pretty typical corruption. But having the government pay to rent it out is just amazing. 🧑‍🍳 💋 Hey, if Russia and China outbid America during the hour they were launching the missiles, that's just the free market! Never really even know if it works without being attacked, but the rich owners get to extract the wealth from it all the same. Rentierism? In this economy? 🤣

Defence Industry Europe

SpaceX proposes subscription model for Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence system, reports Reuters

SpaceX is leading a proposal to contribute to President Donald Trump’s missile defence initiative, now called the “Golden Dome”.

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch. Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain. It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind" And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures. Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections. Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons. All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception. That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality. But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom. Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason. You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow. Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with. People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain. Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom. "Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself. But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe. Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong. #reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request. Confusing. Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time. That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really. Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on. Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then. That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers. The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie. Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved. So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house. This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned. In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill. I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.

CW: Doctor Who - Lucky Day --- Amazing. What a show. All the best episodes barely have The Doctor in them at all. 😆 Great to see Millie back. I love Ruby so much, she's brilliant, and to see her so happy and then traumatized and heartbroken is a wrench. What a bastard. Unbelievable levels of idiocy. Throw it away with Ruby just for clicks. 🥴 Great scary lizard dogs and also great fake lizard dogs. After putting the internet fans into Lux, RTD is putting the internet trolls as villains into Lucky Day. Don't really get why Conrad wouldn't eat the antidote though. If he knows he's lying, he ought to lie about that too. Only reason to not take the vaccine is if you believe the lies you're spouting. Best show of the run. So far.

Read Lyn Alden's book "Broken Money". The problems and issues with using bank debt as a global monetary system were a surprise to me when I first discovered them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. "Money" is mostly not notes and coins. Banks don't hold your money, they fractionally reserve it and create 95% of all the money that exists out of nothing. All that stuff that isn't notes and coins is interest bearing debt, and there isn't enough money in the system to pay the interest. It must mathematically, inevitably, lead to collapse. Alden goes through some of that problem. Describing money as a ledger, either managed by book-keeping or by physical scarcity. She goes through some history of how money evolves in society. How the limitations of physical money (mostly that it can't be transferred quickly at the speed of communication) lead to using credit and ledgers with balances at trusted traders, and eventually banks. The collapse of Breton Woods with the ending of the Gold Standard and the problems with the current Petro Dollar system. Some of these problems are in the media spotlight at the moment: The US printing money to trade for foreign products negatively affects their balance of payments, and is bad for the American worker. Deskills their economy and makes America dependent. Trump says he wants to fix that, but its hard to see how it could be fixed while Dollars remain the world money standard, and America therefore has to get dollars out into that system somehow. And gets to make money for nothing to swap for real world products. Their free money also pays for the wars that America pursues and funds all over the globe. Another problem: Constant money printing and resulting inflation causes monetization of real estate, pushing up the price of housing and making people not even *want* there to be cheap housing. They celebrate the cost of housing going up as though it enriches them. Likewise stocks, and equities and real estate and art and jewelry. All inflated stupidly due to the constantly devaluing worth of money. Also the problems already mentioned that I learned about in 2008. All the money in the world is owed at interest, and to pay that interest more money must be created, at more interest. The whole system doomed to collapse and enriching the worst of us till it does. Is the solution to return to a gold standard? Presumably not, gold is too hard to transport, and already collapsed into bank credit once in the 70s. More controversially she wonders could it be Bitcoin? Not "crypto", which is just scams and more tokens printed out of nothing to enrich those doing the printing. But Bitcoin specifically, separate from Crypto, as a token which only real-world work can create. Nobody gets to print Bitcoin for free. It has no company or country controlling it. It has deliberately limited supply. It is a bearer asset like Gold which can be transported around the world at the speed of communication. The last 3rd of the book looks at how Bitcoin works, how it's different to Crypto, and examines some of the obvious objections. I remain unsure that Bitcoin could really be a new global reserve currency, but I also remain convinced that *something* has to, because continuing to use the dollar is certainly doomed and causes innumerable terrible difficulties until it does. And what else is there? Can we finally make Keynes' Bancor? Until we find something, money remains broken. Like in the title. And that breaks many other things too.

> Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads Dalliance CEO says he will never use that browser and will continue to use whatever blocks adverts and tracking of all kinds most effectively. Dalliance CEO says Perplexity CEO can take his browser and fuck off.

TechCrunch

Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

It's Saint George's day! Not a holiday in England, dunno about all the other countries that share a patron saint with England. The prime minister says it's a constant battle to try and reclaim the flag of the crusades, that England shares with the country Georgia, to make it a flag which doesn't sow division.

I keep hearing Americans saying that China has been manipulating the Yuan for a long time, as though America never adjusts their interest rates or does quantitative easing. Strange to say that China is doing currency manipulation in such an accusatory tone when literally every currency other than Bitcoin is manipulated by changing the supply or interest rates on a monthly basis.

"Insider trading" is what they call it when someone has advanced knowledge of economic numbers or a policy change and trades on that knowledge. So what do you call it when a president posts a note to all his followers saying "Now is a good time to buy" and then two hours later announces an economic policy change that pumps stocks to their highest single-day rise of the decade? 🤔 Wonder if he'll ever tell his followers it's a good day to sell? Seems like 10% tariffs on everything and a trade war with China is still pretty bad economic news to me, even if it's a bit better than full on global trade war.

Seems like they want to fix the balance of trade with the rest of the world, which may be a laudable aim, but there's a reason it's so skewed: The dollar. You can't print all the global reserve currency that the world needs and supply the world with money while also having a balanced trade sheet. The world is taking your money, your promises to pay, and giving you consumer products in return. If you want to give them consumer products in return instead, then they no longer take your money, and the world has to find something new to trade among themselves other than dollars because they no longer have dollars. Perhaps it really is time to destroy the petrodollar as the world reserve currency. Would likely be good for American workers to do that. But this seems a somewhat chaotic method to pick.