ChatGPT and the Cotton Gin

by Wholesome Rage | 22 April 2023

Controversial statement: Slavery’s bad.

Here’s the thing though; It’s not just morally and ethically bad, in a lot of cases it’s also just bad economics.

I want to be careful saying that because a lot of orthodox economists finish there. There is a particular kind of brain that hears that sentence and thinks; This means market forces will cause slavery to self-abolish! Keep the course of automation and development and slavers will be out-competed!

This is why we’ve got to talk about the cotton gin.

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Ponzi Schemes

by Wholesome Rage | 9 November 2021

God. Okay. This is going to be a fun one. My favourite articles come from assuming something is common knowledge and being told it isn’t.

Okay so almost everyone has heard of Ponzi schemes. The label gets thrown around a lot, but I realized I don’t actually see it get explained when it’s used. It’s what George Orwell would call a dead phrase - in the same way that ‘swan song’ doesn’t actually make you think of a swan, ‘Ponzi scheme’ has just come to mean ‘scam’ in the same way.

The problem with not explaining it, though, is most people think scams are obvious. They immediately think multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes and Nigerian prince emails, something that happens to other people. Stupider people.

Ponzi schemes are the stuff of nightmares, though. Men as brilliant as Sir Isaac Newton have been bankrupted by them. Bernie Madoff conned Wall Street investors out of between $17 and $60 billion dollars - depending on how you count it - in a scam that ran from 1992 to 2009. Even when he was the subject of a federal investigation in 2000, he wasn’t caught.

If these schemes are robust enough to pass federal investigators, why should we expect better from journalists? If Enron could get on the front page of Forbes and Fortune, why should we be surprised when the Rolling Stone not only endorses, but partners with the Bored Apes NFT, what I would call a clear example of an ongoing Ponzi scheme.

More than just how they actually work, I want to explain how these scams are so effective at recruiting people and the effect it has on people inside one. The technical explanation is enough to explain why very clever people will still be tricked, but scams that rely on ongoing trust from their victims are especially vicious and destructive.

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Aragon on; Attack on Titan

by Aragon | 18 September 2021

Attack on Titan, or Shingeki no Kyojin if we’re being Like That, and we’re not, is a manga written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama, which ran from September 2009 to April 2021, and it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.

But it’s bad in a fascinating way.

Narratively speaking, Attack on Titan makes some incredibly stupid mistakes. But that’s the thing, right? It also does some things incredibly well. Only, those things it does incredibly well actually make the story worse as a whole. It’s incredible. It’s super entertaining. Don’t read it. It blows.

So that’s what we’re talking about today. This review will be split in sections for ease of reading, and it will contain full spoilers of everything Attack on Titan. You don’t need to know anything about the series to understand this review, and I don’t recommend you read it if you haven’t already.

This is going to be a long one.

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