This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

A thing which I unironically and enthusiastically believe which is unpopular among smart people of my acquaintance: financial engineering has in the recent past and present contributed substantially to human welfare. We should hope to see more of it.

Maybe more geeks need to meet someone who says “My job is teleporting value across time and space.”

Financial engineering is sort of a squishy term. I don’t primarily mean payments infrastructure or financial rails, although both of those involve substantial engineering.

I mean more “We took a thing and performed some alchemy, and now have a new thing.”

Except instead of alchemy it is generally quite a bit of math, a huge amount of contract law and due diligence, often an impressive amount of ops work, and a dusting of technology that web devs would recognize as such.

It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I

Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):

Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.

"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."

Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.

First broccoli cheese soup of the new year. I’ve made a pot almost every week since the pandemic started. Maximum comfort food.

I don't follow a recipe, I'll try to recreate what I do here.

3 heads of broccoli
1 onion
1 box container of chicken stock
1 cup of milk
2 tbls flour
block of sharp cheddar
salt/pepper/tsp mustard powder

Chunk up the cheddar and whiz it in the food processor. You want it to be little bits that will melt fast. I've tried using pre-shredded, but I think they put something in it to prevent caking and it makes a grainy cheese sauce.

Chunk up one of the broccoli heads and whiz it up.

Rough chop the remaining broccoli into bite size pieces.

Chop up the onion.

Prep the ingredients for the cheese sauce (two tablespoons flour, salt & pepper, mustard powder) in a little bowl so you can dump them in when needed.

OK, you want everything prepped ahead of time because the timing here is a little tricky (for me).

Sauté the onion in olive oil in a large pot. Once it's softened add your whizzed up broccoli (I like it to get a little toasted, I think it adds a nice flavor).

I’m getting individual permission from everyone sending me pics of their food boxes in my DMs to repost them here but without identifying information because I try to be responsible with this large platform and there are ~children~ involved here.

Disclaimer done, now get angry.

Bexleyheath.

Kent.

No location given for this one, but the contractor is Harrison in this case, not Chartwells.

2 slices of ham, three slices of cheese, one pear, one apple, two bags of crisps. For one child, for a WEEK. Are they meant to only eat on Tuesdays and Thursdays or something?!!! Also pictured, the Govt legislation on Free School Meals for comparison.

#IsolationBaking recipe for #Christmas is a scrumptious

Apple-Cranberry Coffee Cake Wreath

I’m not an expert at shaping dough into wreaths or much of anything else but this is a wonderfully delicious & rather festive wintry coffee cake.

A great weekend baking project.

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1/

INGREDIENTS for dough

¾ cup (200 ml) milk
¼ cup (50 ml) water
2 ¼ teaspoons (8 grams) active dry yeast
¼ cup (50 grams) sugar
¼ cup (60 grams) unsalted butter, softened to room temp
1 egg
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
½ teaspoon salt
3 ¼ - 3 ½ cups (485 – 520 grams) flour

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2/

INGREDIENTS for the filling *
4 pie apples, like Reine de Reinette or Golden, peeled, cored & cubed
1 cup fresh cranberries
2 tablespoons (30 grams) unsalted butter
6 tablespoons brown sugar
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cardamom

MORE

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3/

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp finely grated orange zest

Egg wash: I egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water

You can increase the filling by using 5 apples and 1-½ cups cranberries; just be careful rolling it up to keep the filling inside the dough.

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4/

Make the dough:

Mix the water & milk together in a small saucepan & heat gently until warm, not hot. It should be the temperature of your hand when you test it.

Put the yeast in a large mixing bowl. Pour about ¼ cup (65 ml) of the warm liquid over the yeast and stir

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