Activity tagged "Donald Trump"

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

No, Trump didn’t make $50 billion from his memecoin

Photo of Trump dancing with his fists in the air, overlaid over the $TRUMP token price edited to appear as though it skyrocketed

Journalists’ flawed math and ignorance of crypto markets turn tokens into fake fortunes.

Posted:

"The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising free speech," said Mark Zuckerberg.

Doublespeak.

As I wrote the other day:

Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot,22 threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly,23 and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters.24

Posted:

Storm preparedness

My whole life, I've lived in New England: the land of blizzards and ice storms. When there's a storm on the forecast, we prepare. Stock up on bottled water and nonperishables, refill prescriptions that are running low, charge the flashlights and electronic devices, have a stack of blankets on hand, make sure there's fuel in the car and (if you're lucky) generator, restack the indoor wood pile.

Sometimes the forecasted storms uneventfully pass by, in which case you're left with a little extra food on hand, some jugs of water for the next storm, and some cozy blankets to snuggle up in.

Anyway, this has been a message to those choosing to mock people who are taking steps to prepare for a Trump presidency.

If the worst does not actually come to pass, I don't think I'm going to be sitting here going "oh noooo I can't believe I strengthened my communities, made sure I'm up to date on my healthcare needs, and volunteered for causes I believe in".

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Issue 69 – Nice

Coinbase threatens me that continuing to report on their activities would be “.... unwise”. Also, election spending hits a fever pitch, with several new crypto PACs coming out of the woodwork.

Posted:

Marc Andreessen has donated another $2 million to Donald Trump. He's contributed $5.35 million this year (across several committees).

FEC report showing a $2 million contribution by Marc Andreessen to the Right For America PAC. Aggregate year-to-date contributions to this PAC are $4.5 million.

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Issue 66 – Pretensions to relevance

A collage of a Stratios ship from Eve Online, the Flappy Bird bird, and Hamster Kombot tokens

FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried says he wants a do-over, and some more ill-received blockchain games suggest “GameFi” has an uncertain future.

Posted:

As headlines about the Trump family’s “World Liberty Financial” crypto project appear in outlets like the New York Times, a scam website spoofing the project remains on the front page of Google search results. Blockchain data show people actively purchasing the token.

A page of Google search results with headlines about the project in The New York Times, CNBC, Wired, and others. The ninth result is a website for a crypto project called “World Liberty”, using the WLF branding and photos of Donald Trump, but it is a scam version. The result is highlighted, and the text “SCAM” is overlaid.

This is the same scam URL and token address promoted by the hackers who compromised Twitter accounts belonging to Lara and Tiffany Trump two weeks ago.

Quote tweet by Eric Trump: This is a scam!! @LaraLeaTrump and @TiffanyATrump’s Twitter profiles have been compromised!!
Quoted tweet by Lara Trump: “These are the only official channels for World Liberty ($WL)
Contract address: 5EXtQy...
Website: worldlibertyfinance.org
Telegram:
Be safe and be aware! 🫶

Posted:

That's the whole purpose of the post-monopausal female in theory. Did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up in some huge way? She lived with us for a year. Right. So I didn't know the answer there. Right. No. So that's this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman. Yeah. It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyperneoliberal approach to work and family. My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California. She took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year. Okay. So it was just one of these things where it's like this is what you do. So biology professor PhD. Yes. Drops what they're doing. Yeah. To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant. Painfully economically inefficient.. Can I just propose a really- Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you to do. The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is to a ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market I think it's the oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. I think that entire sort of, to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

It's always the women who are expected to stop "prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society". I wonder if anyone suggested to Vance that he should stop prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society, and take a sabbatical from his investment job to care for their newborn while his wife did her clerkship. Or his father-in-law?

Also, it's pretty wild that Vance saw the options to be: 1) MIL leaves her professorship to be a live-in nanny; 2) MIL pays for their childcare. Vance was a principal at Mithril Capital and partner at the Revolution investment firm at the time. Meanwhile, Usha Vance would have been making (ballpark) $70-100k as a SCOTUS clerk, and would safely have been able to expect several hundred thousand dollars in signing bonuses alone the following year when she joined a law firm.