Dang that's cool, you made the thread that got DarthCoin's origin story

Yea that surprised me too. Bru seems like he's been here for years.

The rest I'll give you, but not the ☕️

Understandable for fiat bros, but if you're a Bitcoiner... I mean damn, at least send 10 sats right?

Writing about the impact of microprocessing on Karl Marx's economic models. Just a normal day 🥳

Also, the last president, Ceren, is up on corruption charges.

Just like the president before him, who fled the country years ago.

And just like the president before that one https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/el-salvador-police-arrest-former-president-tony-saca-n675656

And just like the president before that one https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-29288915.

Yes that's correct @Undisciplined, @elvismercury—every Salvadoran present over the last 20 years has been charged with corruption, arrested, or fled the country to avoid the same. Salvadoran people think Funes faked his death to avoid arrest and is living large somewhere 🤷

He's only credited in El Salvador with shutting down the Maras during his presidency, i.e., in the last few years. Salvadorans don't actually give a shit about the "declining murder rate" in 2016/2017/2018 because they were still being killed (it was only declining relative to 2015) and because they hated the government for negotiating treaties with the gangs instead of actually dealing with them.

Since Bukele actually dealt with them, he's credited for that.

The decline in murders that happened while he was mayor of San Sal (the capitol city) was a very relative thing. It was relative to the absolute murder storm in 2015, when the city and really whole nation was paralyzed for a while under waves of attacks, but murders didn't decline to anything near what a functional nation could consider acceptable. El Salvador at the time was simply not a functional nation, though.

Ever see The Wire?

Politicians in Baltimore, just like politicians in El Salvador, gamed the murder rate to maintain their credibility. The murder rate would drop when the governments made agreements with the gang leaders, and that's why it "dropped" under Sanchez Ceren. However, the gangs still held power over Salvadoran neighborhoods during those truces, and still murdered each other and people who wouldn't pay them "rent" (extortion).

The guy I work with in El Salvador was paying almost half his $700/month salary to MS-13, for the entire period I've worked with him (since 2007) and would've been killed if he'd refused to pay, truce or no truce—he just wouldn't been added to the "acceptable murder rate" statistics.

When I first bought BTC I thought it was anonymous once I moved it off the exchange. 😀

(Shut up, it was okay to be an idiot in 2017) (😔)

No, Bukele wasn't really elected on an anti-gang platform, but on anti-corruption. The presidents before him made treaties with the gangs to keep the homicide rates at politically acceptable levels, while keeping crime out of the “good neighborhoods.”

The gangs always used murder and large-scale attacks as a political tactic to influence the government (in the USA we would call this "domestic terrorism"). When they tried this under Bukele's administration, and killed 80+ Salvadorans in multiple attacks over a single day, he issued a state of emergency and deployed the military to (finally) end them.

A series of corrupt administrations who made "treaties" with the gangs to keep them out of aristocratic neighborhoods, help them win elections, while having a free hand over the other parts of ES.

You might have read that here, because I wrote about it (lol).

Great articles like this deserve impressive titles, and you delivered.

Found the man of culture 🍺

Somewhere out there, right now, there's a guy who'll have an insane holiday named after him in 1500 years, where our descendents will get drunk and act like retards in his honor.

St. Patrick, St. Nicholas, and St. Valentine would probably think our entire civilization is mentally deranged if they knew how we celebrate the holidays ostensibly named after them.

The first layer of communication is mere grammar. We're all able to do this with a minimum education.

The second layer of communication is *logic... not all of us can do this. It requires formulating a cohesive argument and following it through, from A to B. But I think most of us working in this space can do this.

But the third layer of communication is where almost everyone drops the ball, and that's rhetoric. This is where you package 🎁 the message for delivery; it's a grammatical, logical, poetic, and visual. 👁️ Design enters at this layer, in the form of wording, formatting, and even imagery. If this were about music, the third layer sets the tone of the instrument 🎺 we want to play.

And quite honestly, this 👆 is hard work. No matter how good your message is, it can be lost in translation without the right packaging.

The TLDR is: Yes I agree, formatting matters. 🫡

Stuff like this 👇 will become more prevalent in the future, and in contexts outside warfare

Awesome. I bookmarked to dive into this tomorrow, thanks for letting us know Darth! ☕️ 🫡

The novelty of AI makes right now the most dangerous time for it. Criminals and malicious actors of all kinds (various states included) are actively looking to weaponize AI and exploit the rest of us. While everyone dicks around using ChatGPT to write horrid blog posts, or having AI write a "Happy Birthday" 🥳 email to grandma, black hats are finding out how to use those tools to wreck them, and very little is being done as a countermeasure.