Astral Codex Ten

Blackrock

4 min read

Blackrock

Article

Blackrock is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 03, 2021 and January 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “investing company called Blackrock owns so much of the economy”; “Wanna tell Blackrock to suck my cock”; “Blackrock keeps buying up all the homes as investment properties”. It most often appears alongside AI Circle, Bay Area, Bible.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 03, 2021
  • Last seen: January 04, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For March
March 03, 2021 · Original source
13: CTRL+F “Blackrock” in this Matt Levine column for a discussion of how we accidentally stumbled into true communism for the good of all. The short version: an investing company called Blackrock owns so much of the economy that it’s in their self-interest to have all companies cooperate for the good of the economy as a whole. While they don’t usually push this too hard, the coronavirus pandemic was a big enough threat that “BlackRock is actually calling drug companies and telling them to cooperate to find a cure without worrying about credit or patents or profits”.
Inline links: in this Matt Levine column
14: Related: anticompetitive effects of common ownership in pharmaceutical companies (paywalled). If a big pharma company shares lots of stockholders (eg Blackrock) with a generic company, it will put up less of a fuss when the generic company tries to copy their drug. This particular example is good because people get cheap medication more easily; for reasons why the overall trend might be worrying, see The Problem Of Twelve.
Inline links: anticompetitive effects of common ownership in pharmaceutical companies, The Problem Of Twelve
Another Bay Area House Party
October 19, 2022 · Original source
Yo! TTE is down to 43 Sounds good to me! But it ain’t ESG. Wanna tell Blackrock to suck my cock But if they fuck us over we can't sell the stock So here's what we do - fudge the CO2 You think that that pinko Fink will have a fucking clue? We'll feed them lies, keep our eyes on the prize And our ESG will stand for Eat Shit, Guys.
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“It’s not just about shorting Tesla. This is the beginning of a whole new antifinance revolution. Lots of people want to invest in SpaceX, but they can’t, because Elon Musk selfishly refuses to go public. No one else can get around that. But we can! We print a million shares of synthetic SpaceX stock and a million shares of antistock, each antistock share requires you to pay one one-millionth of SpaceX’s yearly profits to the holder of one stock share. Or, you know how millions of ordinary people can’t afford homeownership anymore because Blackrock keeps buying up all the homes as investment properties? We just print a million synthetic houses and a million antihouses, where the antihouse owners have to pay the average rent in a certain area to the synthetic house owners each month. Blackrock gets to invest in real estate without having to worry about all those boring contingent things like mold or termites, and we can leave the real physical houses for ordinary families.”