YOU BECOME WHAT YOU GIVE YOUR ATTENTION TO.

GOOD MORNING. 🫡

GM from Waiheke Island!

Always assume “if”.

Assuming “when” often leads to complacency.

Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

Q: Why are so many people clueless about Bitcoin?

A: The media

Here’s BBC coverage of Bitcoin since 2013

What a disaster

🎧🎧 WHAT IS THE BEST UNDERRATED PODCAST ? 🎧🎧

zapping 420 on each answer 👇

I feel like Nostr doesn’t have enough cat pictures yet. That’s how the internet won after all; it reached a critical mass of cat pictures and thus people couldn’t resist. Or something like that.

My friend took in three rescue kittens off the street several months ago, who are now around seven months old, so we went over and played with them yesterday.

My profile picture on here commemorates Ba Jin, the leading anarchist Chinese writer. His short stories and novels animated a revolutionary generation that saw China break from thousands of years of dynastic rule - but he was personally punished by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. His wife was denied treatment for her cancer and she would die. Ba Jin took to writing about remembering the Cultural Revolution and reading Dante's Inferno to gain some small measure of comfort.

Some people talk about the "Chinese model" as if it is a matter of destiny, but the recent ideological fascination with Marx and a stronger Leninist state doesn't have as strong of a root as most assume, and even less so the idea of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" forged right after Ba Jin's torment. Ba Jin's story tells us that there was always a China that looked to temper the state's excesses and one rooted in a desire to engage the world (at the time in Esperanto, perhaps now with Bitcoin). Though the Chinese Communist Party has tried to seize his legacy, I believe it is Chinese cypherpunks looking to hedge and move away from one of the most unequal fiat kingdoms on Earth (China's income inequality by some measures surpasses that of the United States) that truly follow Ba Jin's legacy.

)

In every century there are people telling you…

Say nothing, do nothing, be nothing, head down, know your place, stay small and don’t upset the established order.

It is only the rare people who reject that doctrine whose names we remember.

For good and bad.

Sometimes people ask me what my favorite food is in Egypt. It’s the common thing people generally ask about regarding travel and such.

I often say grilled fish and vine leaves. That’s my favorite main course.

But the *real* answer is dumber. It’s the ubiquitous pita bread and tahini sauce. I eat way too much of it when I’m here, considering I normally eat low carb.

And there are these little walnut-sized specific type of lemons that are served with many meals to squeeze on your food. My father in law instead squeezes them into his water to make unsweetened lemonade with his meals, and I started doing it and find myself drinking it whenever there are lemons around with the meals. So good.

So for me the dumb but true answer is the pita bread, tahini sauce, and mini lemons. The cheapest, most basic appetizers/garnishes around. 🤷‍♀️

Sometimes people ask me what my favorite food is in Egypt. It’s the common thing people generally ask about regarding travel and such.

I often say grilled fish and vine leaves. That’s my favorite main course.

But the *real* answer is dumber. It’s the ubiquitous pita bread and tahini sauce. I eat way too much of it when I’m here, considering I normally eat low carb.

And there are these little walnut-sized specific type of lemons that are served with many meals to squeeze on your food. My father in law instead squeezes them into his water to make unsweetened lemonade with his meals, and I started doing it and find myself drinking it whenever there are lemons around with the meals. So good.

So for me the dumb but true answer is the pita bread, tahini sauce, and mini lemons. The cheapest, most basic appetizers/garnishes around. 🤷‍♀️

I agree to an extent. The world is where it is, and if you let down your defenses someone WILL take advantage. Those are the current rules, and even in a more peaceful world there will always be someone waiting to prey on weakness.

BUT, we as people have zero say in WHEN to fight. They use our money and productivity to fund wars that benefit only a tiny number of powerful peoples, and now they need our sons and daughters to man the guns and get blown to pieces too.

Fuck that! If you want me or my family to fight, if you want my money (productivity and time) I want to know and agree on what exactly we're fighting for.

Is it just a “coincidence” that the day after the US house passes an act automatically registering men aged 18 - 26 in “selective service” ie - draft, that my 16 year son comes to me saying that signing up for the military looks “fun”.

As the propaganda and war machine ramps up, and social media channels/AI is used to manipulate minds and control the agenda, talk to your kids - openly and often about their thoughts.

Ps - It was a good reinforcement lesson for my son that his own thoughts are being manipulated. (He thought he was immune because we often talk about it as a family)

file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/99/09/968C4460-DD17-4B6D-8778-BEDAC4728133/IMG_1749.jpeg

Call me old fashioned, but I think it’s illegal to fund foreign wars without a congressional declaration of war (because that’s literally in the Constitution and hasn’t happened since 1942), and yet we’ve been embroiled in illegal forever wars since before you were born.

Anyway, have a great evening.