Bethany Black

it would have been more but they banned some people for posting too well

Well, it was inedible. But the rest are good

Terrible moment to realise I forgot to put a splash of oil in the bottom. This might all now be welded in place forever

The crumpet in a ring on a pan

A close up showing the bubbles rising

Had a lot of starter left over this morning so I’m making crumpets

4 panel comic Panel 1: A Purple person is standing holding a clipboard. A Blue Person sits at a laptop. Blue Person: Woohoo. I’m the CEO of a social media platform. Panel 2: Purple person: We should hire a PR person to interact with the public Blue Person begins to type on laptop and says: Nope. Gonna do all that myself Panel 3: Purple person looks concerned and says: Really…but… Panel 4: Purple person: You’re such a whiny little fucking baby

Every time I see Kemi Badenoch in the news or mentioned anywhere it makes me uncomfortable, because every single interview she gives reminds me of being an autistic teenager who was friends with someone who hated me and kept me around to make fun of me in front of everyone else when I said dumb shit

I sometimes forget that not everyone has had to learn what other people find interesting like their life depends on it

Greta Thunberg: "I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment. Trust me. But that is not the story. What happened here was Israel… continuing to worsen and escalate their genocide and mass destruction with genocidal intent, attempting to erase an...

The myth gets round the world twice before the truth puts its underpants on

It’s Enron again, only this time it’s almost all the most valuable companies in the world instead of one regional power company.

The second that investment money starts to dry up though, the second people start to go “hang on, this can’t be sustainable, I’m going to take my money out and invest it in govt bonds” the entirety of the value that genAI has added to the stock market will go straight to money heaven.

One of the ways to hide losses whilst making it look like the industry is healthy is to say “we’re investing $1Tn over the next 5 years” then giving a subsidiary a contract to build $1Tn of data centres. Now on paper that subsidiary is worth $1Tn before it’s built a data centre.

Microsoft is in partnership with OpenAI and is not only investing heavily, but allowing OpenAI to use a bunch of their storage and data centres at a reduced price, making the losses for both companies on genAI look smaller.

In the end gravity caught up with them and the company collapsed, taking Arthur Andersen down with them.

I mention all this, because this is pretty much what seems to be happening with OpenAI in a roundabout way.

So they started marking loans as income close to the quarterly reporting deadline, taking out bridging loans and claiming they were sales, and getting super creative with what they perceived the “true value” of their assets to be. This led to investors getting inaccurate figures.

Line went up, investors were pleased.

Enron started running out of cash and if the line started to go down then the people who bought and sold stock in Enron would panic and the line would go down. People would expect paying!

Mark-to-market is a system of bookkeeping where you work out the value of the company not only by the liquidity and assets that it has on it’s books, but by the value it expects those things to have in the future as and when it’s selling them.

As a result the business looked WAY healthier

Of course, the value can’t go up forever and when they seemed to reach their limits they did two things:
1. diversify into pipelines, electricity grids, paper factories, water plants, broadband and telecommunications systems world wide etc.

2. Brought in Mark-to-market bookkeeping.

Enron was essentially a stock market within a stock market where they were buying gas and electricity and selling it at a huge mark-up.

As such they promised investors more and more profits, and ingrained in the culture that the value can only go up. This is classic economic bubble thinking.

Thread.

When Enron collapsed, taking Arthur Andersen (then one of The Big Five accounting firms) with them the two big issues were:
1. Enron’s corporate culture which was dependent on the value of their shares always going up.
And
2. Their Mark-to-Market bookkeeping system

Nearly, I taught myself economics because I wanted reassurance there was a good reason for Tory Economic policy, and in trying to prove my instincts wrong discovered my instincts were actually correct only now I knew why, and was still powerless.

normal person: i just want a place to hang out with my friends
tech weirdo: and shitheads
np: no just my friends
tw: but what about hearing alternative views on race and gender?
np: we just want to hang out and goof around
tw: so where do the shitheads fit in then
np: no shitheads
tw: not following

Me either

Realising that we were The last generation To dance to our parents for sleepovers, blast music on iPads, have dvds instead of Disney plus, play with the neighbourhood kids until it got dark, make potions in the bathroom sink, watch Disney in its PRIME, make slime, post on vine & musically and know what life was before "cringe" was a word.

GenZ nostalgia slop on TikTok already

I unironically adore his books in the main part, but about once every 20 minutes I’ll go “Oh fuck off!” When reading them

How he got tenure is beyond me. The man’s a joke. He only learned what he actually does is semiotics rather than symbology in the last book.

Makes me think Dan Brown must be a secret Yaley

And the one in the previous book Angels and Demons where it was all about ambigrams and there’s one he can’t solve until he does what you’re supposed to with an ambigram and turn it upside down.

This beats the bit in the DaVinci code where after several chapters of thinking about how no alphabet uses the characters in the message he’s found, the woman he’s with points out that in the mirror in the room they’re the right way round

a black and white photo of a man in a suit raising his hands in the air . ALT: a black and white photo of a man in a suit raising his hands in the air .

There has been almost a full chapter of him despairing that there’s no poem her, before the woman he’s with comments it’s a clever decoy, AS YOU CANNOT DISPLAY PAGE 163 WITHOUT ALSO DISPLAYING PAGE 162!!! “Robert Langdon moved his eyes left…”

Absolute literature

Again, his books are even dumber when they’re read as audiobooks. He’s trying to find a poem and his search has led him to an original book of William Blake’s work that a Character asked to be left open at page 193 but page 193 is a picture!