journal features

kleptocurrencies, anyone

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2023.01.28

I watch the Youtube videos of a former hedge fund manager who explains who things like financial scams and Elon Musk work. In this one, he's discussing some musicians who decided to get in on the crypto fraud bandwagon and have "rendered their investor's money inaccessible". One of the commenters referred to everything that's been going on as "crypto klepto" and I reckon kleptocurrency is as good a name for these things as anything. Now, after a decade or so, can we stop with this crap?

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton