I learned mostly from YouTube and local carpenters. A home flood that resulted in furniture loss and discovering dirt cheap good woods in tropical regions triggered my amateur woodworking journey. Am also a hw engineer by profession and like to make things, so working with my hands wasn't entirely new - that and all of it was a great excuse for more tools =) If you're new, starting with refurbishing might be easier. Nostr has many professional woodworkers btw - I've seen some great postings - I don't know if there is a hashtag for this. These days, its an occasional weekend hobby thing for me, but a lot of fun.
Have a wonderful day ahead, you are gonna rock this!
Interesting stats. The shift in global GDP does highlight the significant rise of BRICS economies over the years. G7 dominance is transitioning to a more balanced distribution. The other bit is BRICS based on gold rather than a fraction or illusive pairing which would suggest a more tangible foundation. There’s a high rise of countries that are adapting BRICS or having their options open. I hope a fair mediator like Bitcoin would calm the tides.
Loving the wishlist request and making the most of it. Perhaps a wider setting to the story would be great.
1. Historically, the influence of religions on politics is evident, especially from the 1800s Christian missionaries and colonization to the recent 70s and 80s in Northern Africa, with the rise of anti-American Islamic movements - there are traces of resurgence in liberal Muslim countries enforcing nationwide Palestine peace agenda while demonizing Israel. Is this a global political or religious movement, or both ?
2. This period 70’s / 80s saw the emergence of more militarily oriented Islamic movements originating from Turkey to South Asia, middle east, northern Africa which eventually became liberal when referenced to a more conservative Islamic movement establishment in the 90s such as Talibans. How is Palestine divided between the right and the left ? What’s the influence of Sunni-Shia fight on Palestine ? How are the Mossads integrated into Israel?
3. American influence on global politics, particularly in Muslim countries and the oil industry, gained prominence post WW2, conquering nuclear power lead, and especially after the formation of the CIA. What's the oil agenda / nuke agenda here ? The US is not initiating peace. What’s the game plan ?
4. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement (Chomsky cover’s it well), has both pros and cons. Has it been effective in building world pressure and recognition ?
5. Is this a tipping point for the Palestine movement that has been growing globally over the years ?
6. Would it kill the UN, the US, and people of the world to recognise Palestine as a country ? Were the past efforts truly considered efforts? Or ostensible ?
7. Disparities in livelihood between funded and prohibited regions (Israel - Palestine) and the growth / decline seen through generations
8. Religious teachings preventing contraceptive use as a means to grow religious groups over the years, have now become a political agenda and advanced paternalistic traits. What is the impact of this on the rate of growth of population for both Israel and Palestine?
9. People globally have strong reactions with very little input nor wanting to look at both sides (sometimes I imagine them as furious cute robots emitting smoke emitting smoke out of anger) - what is the underlying psychology behind this and can be linked to early beliefs instilled by local education and media - and is this for the purpose of establishing political grounds? Similar to the concept of “communism is evil” and “Democracy is Hail Mary”.
10. The perspective of conservative Jews and liberal Jews, and the historical impact of the Holocaust on their identity
11. Why are the Jews among the richest in America and yet consider themselves the most oppressed ?
12. A less-discussed angle involving Russia's role in saving Jews during the Holocaust, being the strongest opponents to the Nazis, and their open door policies to the Jews even today is worth exploring.
I am for peace too. But people are too triggered, so I avoid having this conversation all together. Thanks nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a. Good luck on the piece
A broader perspective on #1 and #2 above.
Palestine didn't start as a religious issue, still isn't, and has Christians, Muslims, Jews, Druze, and others. Bethlehem in West Bank and Nazareth, are Arab dominated yet remain diverse. While the majority of Palestinians are Sunni Muslims (Iran is Shia Muslim), the conflict with Israel is historically framed from a national and political perspective rather than sectarian ones. The core issue is often related to settler colonialism and the anchoring of American/Western powers in the Middle East. The global reaction however is a fascinating line drawn on religious wars between the Muslims and the Jews. Was speaking to a friends whose wife is from Palestine with family in Giza strip and I realized I got drawn into this common separators. Hope this helps nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a
I just realised the value of an offline digital payment system. Especially as the world shifts to internet banking and relies heavily on fibre cables and satellites that could be vulnerable and experience downtime. This is useful for regions with no/low internet access as well.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Leonardo Da Vinci
Instead of a deductive feature, why not an additive feature? I know algo is a dirty word here, but really, algorithms are just test flows and every programme, every system has it.
Its how the test flows, that makes a difference.
Say for example, if i have a few topics of interest - history, books, fashion, engineering, dogs etc - perhaps an algo feature that detects words can boost the post visibility for me. Artur Brugeman's search band has word detection - this could be integrated. And it would be great if there is a control element on how much I want this algo to kick in - say 0% means timeline posts, 100% means fully algo - so its ultimately up to the users.
And with this, there might be lesser muting, more content interaction. Just a thought!
on days i feel defeated I just shut down and sleep it off, wake up and figure out a new way. Maybe the brain self short circuits during sleep =) It will come around. Count the sheeps backwards!
Interesting list on women from various countries - India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya, Columbia. Since it's Forex, I presume 'crypto' here would cover bitcoin and other coins. I remember a similar study by Haley of nostr:npub1spralxq6jlw5rdy0249vqr5sh43rfrlx2wzv3rhjjqedw559w9psrs8s72 on bitcoin. Would love to see more on the adoption of women in Bitcoin. I could be bias but i think its a winning element onboarding women =)
Happy happy birthday to you and to Nostr!
Loving the wishlist request and making the most of it. Perhaps a wider setting to the story would be great.
1. Historically, the influence of religions on politics is evident, especially from the 1800s Christian missionaries and colonization to the recent 70s and 80s in Northern Africa, with the rise of anti-American Islamic movements - there are traces of resurgence in liberal Muslim countries enforcing nationwide Palestine peace agenda while demonizing Israel. Is this a global political or religious movement, or both ?
2. This period 70’s / 80s saw the emergence of more militarily oriented Islamic movements originating from Turkey to South Asia, middle east, northern Africa which eventually became liberal when referenced to a more conservative Islamic movement establishment in the 90s such as Talibans. How is Palestine divided between the right and the left ? What’s the influence of Sunni-Shia fight on Palestine ? How are the Mossads integrated into Israel?
3. American influence on global politics, particularly in Muslim countries and the oil industry, gained prominence post WW2, conquering nuclear power lead, and especially after the formation of the CIA. What's the oil agenda / nuke agenda here ? The US is not initiating peace. What’s the game plan ?
4. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement (Chomsky cover’s it well), has both pros and cons. Has it been effective in building world pressure and recognition ?
5. Is this a tipping point for the Palestine movement that has been growing globally over the years ?
6. Would it kill the UN, the US, and people of the world to recognise Palestine as a country ? Were the past efforts truly considered efforts? Or ostensible ?
7. Disparities in livelihood between funded and prohibited regions (Israel - Palestine) and the growth / decline seen through generations
8. Religious teachings preventing contraceptive use as a means to grow religious groups over the years, have now become a political agenda and advanced paternalistic traits. What is the impact of this on the rate of growth of population for both Israel and Palestine?
9. People globally have strong reactions with very little input nor wanting to look at both sides (sometimes I imagine them as furious cute robots emitting smoke emitting smoke out of anger) - what is the underlying psychology behind this and can be linked to early beliefs instilled by local education and media - and is this for the purpose of establishing political grounds? Similar to the concept of “communism is evil” and “Democracy is Hail Mary”.
10. The perspective of conservative Jews and liberal Jews, and the historical impact of the Holocaust on their identity
11. Why are the Jews among the richest in America and yet consider themselves the most oppressed ?
12. A less-discussed angle involving Russia's role in saving Jews during the Holocaust, being the strongest opponents to the Nazis, and their open door policies to the Jews even today is worth exploring.
I am for peace too. But people are too triggered, so I avoid having this conversation all together. Thanks nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a. Good luck on the piece
Some materials take centuries to decompose. The US annually exports 60,000 tons of clothing to countries like Ghana and Chile - where people have no choice but to build homes around it, and live along this enormous junkyard with chemicals polluting their lands that they harvest on, greenhouse gasses are released, flies, and all kinds of unhygienic stuff.
Hazardous liquid chemicals are also sent to poorer nations to be “stored” and these countries’ gov’t are not going to be bothered about their people’s welfare, in pursuit of easy profits.
Countries exporting waste should address their waste issues domestically. - I’d reckon New Zealand has ample empty land that can be used to bury waste - but no - ship it to China. This concept of “let some other country suffer from my rubbish, as long as it's not in my neighborhood” is not right.
I read your other comments. I don’t understand why recycling or climate change becomes a trigger factor for people. Yes, people abuse it, WEF monetises on it , gov’t are idiots, the term vegan is 90% bullshit - vegan fabric causes more harm than real leather. In fact, even natural disasters like the Laki eruption in Iceland had significant environmental and societal impacts. But it doesn’t change the fact that climate change is a real, and ongoing issue that won't disappear on its own.
Paper waste recycling, egg trays may not seem big, but to a bunch of people there, it gets a tiny bit of the economy going, gets the place cleaned up, get’s the machines running (big deal for small manufacturers), they put food on their table for their kids and they find purpose. And its a stepping stone. recycling techs can expand - people are making bricks out of it these days. And maybe that could help Gaza rebuild. I remember talking to a Cuban friend a long time ago in turning wok into satellite dishes to tap into receptions he was keen on. It may not be a big deal to you and me, but it was a big deal to him.
I think that’s why MacGyver is super cool. He understood how things worked and made the most out of it =)
This is pretty cool - simple and if can be made accessible globally I'm sure a lot of people who don't have access to opticians and eye doctors can benefit from it. Very nice nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z, congratulations! A common question - how do you plan to generate revenue in an open source environment? I think if this can be tackled, it will open more doors for people to establish this route
Btw nostr:npub1r0rs5q2gk0e3dk3nlc7gnu378ec6cnlenqp8a3cjhyzu6f8k5sgs4sq9ac, are there tests to determine if sites are friendly to people with various eye conditions ie astigmatism, long sighted etc ? based on colours and fonts and other visuals i presume
This video was posted 2 months ago, prior to the ongoing war. And it goes to show how the people of Gaza could not even build back basic infrastructure due to heavy sanctions of basic necessities and relentless airstrikes.
Gaza Strip is also known as the "world's largest open-air prison"
nostr:note1krmaqyztneasqq9hrrlylu3k7v7rqzyrdaaf0l2rqp6sdc5awrzqy7u3ln
Survival entrepreneurship
so I’m gathering my thoughts for Only The Strong Survive v2 - which may or may not ever actually happen, fyi - and I have a theory about crypto I wanna run past the good people of nostr.
in my mind the following explains a few things handily: i) why so many smart and seemingly well-intentioned people work in crypto; ii) the nature of the legitimate innovation to have come out of that ecosystem that the people in i) are attracted to; iii) why cryptobros are either mad or confused that bitcoiners don’t take i) and ii) more seriously, and; iv) why despite all the above, bitcoiners are basically *still right* to not take it seriously.
I really like this theory but tbh what worries me is that it’s basically *too elegant*. I’m sure the reality is much messier so I’d appreciate picking holes in it. here goes:
***
there are 3 use cases for crypto: scams, stablecoins, and R&D.
- scams are scams, I’ve written literally hundreds of pages on this so I don’t feel like elaborating much here.
- everybody knows what stablecoins are but here’s where it gets interesting: I think they have no technical merit but they have massive commercial merit (I’ll elaborate on both shortly)
- by R&D I mostly mean the (truly!) cutting edge cryptography and distributed systems research going into zero-knowledge systems for “scaling.” These have massive technical merit but no commercial merit.
***
now here’s what I mean by all that:
by “no technical merit” I mean that stablecoins have central issuers. you *can* issue them as blockchain tokens but you really don’t need to. the issuer could quite literally run a database with some straightforward public key signature schemes for transfers and it would make minimal operational difference. the fact Tron is the most heavily used for this is testament to this point: it is barely even pretending not to be a database. for whatever stupid reason, this works as regulatory arbitrage because regulators are retards and this is iNnOvAtIon that is spared their violence, but, again, it has no technical merit.
by “commercial merit” I mean that this is *extremely widely used and valued* as a means of providing dollarized shadow banking to countries with absolute joke fiat currencies. while cryptobros love pointing to this and many bitcoiners tie themselves in knots explaining it away, I see it as essentially unrelated to bitcoin. clearly there is a superficial connection, but you could create any superficial connection you like by shoving a blockchain into somewhere it doesn’t belong, and regulatory-arbitrage-induced massive commercial success doesn’t change that more fundamental analysis one bit (fyi, highly recommend nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp’s take on this on recent(ish) TFTC - he goes into more detail than I have space to here)
“technical merit” is self-explanatory, but the circumstances are worth appreciating: currently it’s only really in Ethereum that you can permissionlessly experiment with pretty much unboundedly computationally complex cryptographic schemes that operate on real value, which is attractive to (basically) academics if you want to try things out in the wild rather than just in papers on ArXiv.
buuuuuuut … by “no commercial merit” I, of course, mean that the “value” being played with is nonsense. there is tens/hundreds of billions of dollars (cycle-stage-dependent) of value at stake to play around with, but there shouldn’t be because the *underlying systems* make no technical or economic sense and the value is only sustained until there are no greater fools and/or the pump and dump funds at the root of it all reach the end of their lives.
***
finally, here’s how the contrasting attitudes break down:
cryptobros are mad bitcoiners don’t like stablecoins because they have clear commercial merit, so why would you ignore that? and they are mad bitcoiners don’t like the crypto R&D because it has clear technical merit so why would you ignore that? if you are happy with technical merit but no commercial merit, or vice versa, it’s easy to convince yourselves bitcoiners are recalcitrant, closed-minded, tribal, dogmatic, or whatever else, and just kidding themselves about what has been achieved in ex-bitcoin crypto (and of course, they conveniently ignore the scams as something like “collateral damage” or “using this tool for evil rather than good” or whatever, rather than actually pretty core to the whole thing)
buuuuuuuut … bitcoiners are either ambivalent on or outright reject both because they lack the half that makes it worthwhile. bitcoin has technical *and* commercial merit, therefore is worth working on.
so the bitcoiner’s attitude (also mine, hence the above is obviously going to be biased in this direction) is, roughly: you can work on stablecoin and stablecoin-adjacent tech and finance if you like, but, even if it’s massively commercially successful, it’s kinda LARPy because it doesn’t even really have anything to do with “blockchains” and, once the state catches on to the larpiness of the iNnOvAtIoN, it lacks the technical merit to resist that obvious attack. likewise you can work on crypto R&D if you want, but if you are building it all on a self-referential house of sand (/cards? not sure which metaphor I prefer) you are likely wasting your time in the long-run. you are building ways of manipulating value that we can say with near certainty will no longer exist on a long-enough time horizon. maybe you’re okay with that but probably you just haven’t thought it through carefully enough.
***
there are interesting follow-ups here as to whether either stablecoins or R&D (i.e the stuff with partial but incomplete merit) could or should be brought to bitcoin, but this note is long enough and, besides, I’m aiming at an accurate analysis rather than a normatively motivated prescription, so maybe some other time.
I’ll note before ceding the floor to questions or comments that I arrived at this by pattern recognition from a shockingly large number of the founders I speak to in my day job. I’d guesstimate 1/3 of them came from crypto, and 90% of *them* gave some variation of one of the two explanations above as to what was lacking and why they moved, all of which they independently realized after working on [whatever] for long enough. I’m open to there being some massive sampling bias in that source of info, but I thought it was worth throwing in by way of justifying that I didn’t just make all this up. I mostly just observed and codified …
I like this word 'recalcitrant' lol. Also cyborg has quite the take. Love your write ups as always, but I would like to know what founders who work on user adoption to buy and sell bitcoin globally think, and not just builders =)
I work with a lot of small manufacturers and import/export so here are my thoughts from that angle.
There are a few factors to Bitcoin global adoption for trade purpose (the real commerce trade to buy and sell goods and services, not pump and dump or wall street) :
1. every country has its own way or buying and selling through payment methods suited to them. a lot of countries differ from the other and syncing up Bitcoin as currency would be easier, simpler.
2. it might be easier to convince govt to adopt stable coin - just tell them its a fancy modern version of USD and ride on the USD branding. Governments are not the smartest people, but require a lot of "relationship building". Your stable coin might be a stepping stone to Bitcoin adoption. But. It could also backfire.
3. when you work with traders (real traders - manufacturers, distributors, sellers of goods and services) - they are the ones who will recommend the best payment modes to the buyers. Say if many small companies in the US are buying goods from South America or other countries, If South America has a fairly matured Bitcoin adoption, they would influence US buyers to use Bitcoin to buy and sell.
In most countries, small businesses are 90% of businesses in that country. This is actually a very powerful way to intercept Bitcoin as global adoption and leverage that to "spread the word"
I think if there is a tech builders can work on country conversions between Bitcoin and their currency, then user adopters who are also commercial builders can work with tech builders to expand this possibilities.
As with stable coin - another way to look at it is to establish peaceful intercepts for the US govt to retain USD branding. But Bitcoin will create an intermediary peace effort between USD and BRICS. There might be a BRICS stable coin (or maybe there already is). But Bitcoin will be friends with all.
And hopefully stable coin eventually fades when Bitcoin adoption grows heavily, localised to countries
❤️
Somebody should build a dev translator :)