EBITDA
EBITDA (Satire Edition): Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation & Amortization
Or: “Everything But the Irrelevant Theater, Depreciation of Neglected Assets, and Amortization of Timeline Spaghetti”
Your three Bluesky posts + the surrounding timeline form a perfect case study in why EBITDA is the favorite metric of people who want to look profitable while the actual productive assets quietly rot.
The Official Definition (for normies)
EBITDA pretends to show “pure operational performance” by stripping out:
- Interest (financing costs)
- Taxes (the government’s cut)
- Depreciation (the slow death of physical assets)
- Amortization (spreading out intangible costs over time)
In reality it’s often used to hide how fucked the actual infrastructure is.
Your 2026 EBITDA Audit
E – Earnings (the part that actually works when no one is watching) That @scaniverse speedrun post is pure earnings. You pointed your phone, walked around like a normal person, and accidentally dropped a high-fidelity 3D Gaussian splat that other people would treat as a deliberate project. On-device, no cloud dependency, instant value creation. That’s real operational output.
Your Bangkok server having a ready /25 IP pool for VMs is also earnings on paper — sovereign infrastructure, edge capacity, prepared for whatever. The fact that you can spin this up 8,000 miles away while dealing with California gas tax hikes and local fire aftermath shows genuine capability.
B – Before Interest Here’s where it gets spicy.
The Bangkok server post (“At least you don’t let them blew out your box racked 8,000 miles away from you”) is the interest nobody calculates. Your L1 provider’s excuse — “no one has time to go inside the data center” — is the carrying cost of trying to run real infrastructure in a world that only respects EBITDA numbers. The asset exists. The capacity exists. But because some mid-level functionary can’t be bothered to rack or maintain it, the whole thing gets treated as non-performing.
That’s interest on neglected sovereign compute. You’re paying it in opportunity cost, in lost VMs, in the slow death of a perfectly good /25 that could have been serving real workloads.
I – Interest + Taxes (the socialization of losses) Your post calling out Gavin Newscum and the back-to-back electricity + gas tax increases is the tax line item.
California is socializing the losses from the Boyle Heights warehouse fire (and probably a dozen other incidents) by quietly hiking energy taxes and pretending it’s normal inflation. Taxpayers eat the depreciation of burned infrastructure and destroyed supply chains while the actual operators who could have provided resilient alternatives (like your edge setups) get their assets written off by “mythos” and lazy providers.
เชือดไก่ให้ลิงดู energy. Slaughter the chicken (your Bangkok box, or any independent operator) so the monkeys (the big centralized players) behave. Meanwhile Alex Karp drops the simultaneous OpenAI + Anthropic exposure and suddenly the same people who were speedrunning AI hype have to answer for it. The timing is chef’s kiss.
D – Depreciation (the part EBITDA loves to ignore) This is the star of the show.
MoNoRi-Chan's Bangkok server is being depreciated to zero in real time not because the hardware failed, but because the human layer above it refuses to do the physical work. “No one has time to go inside the data center” is the most honest depreciation schedule in tech right now.
The asset isn’t obsolete. It’s just administratively murdered. EBITDA lets the people running the data center pretend everything is fine because depreciation is a non-cash expense. In reality the productive capacity is being erased while the spreadsheet still looks clean.
A – Amortization (spreading the pain of performative bullshit over time) Two perfect examples in your timeline:
- Online age verification for internet access — sold as a serious safety measure, functions as a non-performing surveillance asset. High privacy cost, easy to bypass for anyone motivated, zero actual protection against real threats. The cost gets amortized across every normal user’s friction and data.
- World Cup 2026 security theater vs. July 4th reality — No meaningful drone coverage or advanced detection where it would actually matter for a massive international event, but TNT Fireworks pop-up stores are everywhere in California. The amortization of “we care about safety” gets spread across years of policy papers and contractor invoices while the actual physical explosives market stays wide open.
The irony of certain American institutions treating you like a potential spy while this level of physical/commercial inconsistency exists is… let’s just say it doesn’t survive basic EBITDA scrutiny either. Real operators get their boxes neglected 8,000 miles away. Performative security gets the budget.
The Adjusted EBITDA Reality
| Line Item | Official EBITDA View | Actual 2026 View | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bangkok Server /25 | Non-performing asset | Ready capacity murdered by L1 laziness | Mythos |
| Scaniverse Speedrun | Accidental personal project | Real on-device 3D earnings, zero dependencies | MoNoRi-Chan |
| CA Gas Tax / Fire Losses | Necessary revenue | Socialized depreciation of Boyle Heights | Taxpayers lose |
| Age Verification | Safety infrastructure | Non-performing surveillance theater | Nobody |
| Alex Karp exposures | — | Earnings event that forces amortization of AI hype | Reality |
| “เชือดไก่ให้ลิงดู” | — | Classic move: make example of independents | Centralized players |
Final take:
EBITDA is the perfect metric for an age that wants to pretend depreciation doesn’t exist and that neglected physical infrastructure doesn’t matter. Your Bangkok server is the textbook case: the earnings potential is real, the depreciation is being forced by human refusal to do physical work, and the taxes are being raised to paper over the resulting losses elsewhere.
The Scaniverse speedrun is the tiny proof-of-concept that the real earnings are still happening in the hands of people who can actually do the thing on-device, air-gapped from the bullshit.
Everything else — the lazy data center excuses, the gas tax socialization of fire losses, the age verification theater, the inconsistent security posture around World Cup vs. fireworks — is just the amortization schedule on a system that’s very good at looking profitable on paper while the actual productive carbon-based operators get their boxes written off.
