CW: Doctor Who - Lucky Day
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Amazing. What a show. All the best episodes barely have The Doctor in them at all. 😆
Great to see Millie back. I love Ruby so much, she's brilliant, and to see her so happy and then traumatized and heartbroken is a wrench. What a bastard. Unbelievable levels of idiocy. Throw it away with Ruby just for clicks. 🥴
Great scary lizard dogs and also great fake lizard dogs.
After putting the internet fans into Lux, RTD is putting the internet trolls as villains into Lucky Day.
Don't really get why Conrad wouldn't eat the antidote though. If he knows he's lying, he ought to lie about that too. Only reason to not take the vaccine is if you believe the lies you're spouting.
Best show of the run.
So far.
Read Lyn Alden's book "Broken Money".
The problems and issues with using bank debt as a global monetary system were a surprise to me when I first discovered them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
"Money" is mostly not notes and coins. Banks don't hold your money, they fractionally reserve it and create 95% of all the money that exists out of nothing. All that stuff that isn't notes and coins is interest bearing debt, and there isn't enough money in the system to pay the interest.
It must mathematically, inevitably, lead to collapse.
Alden goes through some of that problem. Describing money as a ledger, either managed by book-keeping or by physical scarcity.
She goes through some history of how money evolves in society. How the limitations of physical money (mostly that it can't be transferred quickly at the speed of communication) lead to using credit and ledgers with balances at trusted traders, and eventually banks. The collapse of Breton Woods with the ending of the Gold Standard and the problems with the current Petro Dollar system.
Some of these problems are in the media spotlight at the moment: The US printing money to trade for foreign products negatively affects their balance of payments, and is bad for the American worker. Deskills their economy and makes America dependent.
Trump says he wants to fix that, but its hard to see how it could be fixed while Dollars remain the world money standard, and America therefore has to get dollars out into that system somehow. And gets to make money for nothing to swap for real world products.
Their free money also pays for the wars that America pursues and funds all over the globe.
Another problem: Constant money printing and resulting inflation causes monetization of real estate, pushing up the price of housing and making people not even *want* there to be cheap housing. They celebrate the cost of housing going up as though it enriches them.
Likewise stocks, and equities and real estate and art and jewelry. All inflated stupidly due to the constantly devaluing worth of money.
Also the problems already mentioned that I learned about in 2008. All the money in the world is owed at interest, and to pay that interest more money must be created, at more interest. The whole system doomed to collapse and enriching the worst of us till it does.
Is the solution to return to a gold standard? Presumably not, gold is too hard to transport, and already collapsed into bank credit once in the 70s.
More controversially she wonders could it be Bitcoin? Not "crypto", which is just scams and more tokens printed out of nothing to enrich those doing the printing. But Bitcoin specifically, separate from Crypto, as a token which only real-world work can create. Nobody gets to print Bitcoin for free. It has no company or country controlling it. It has deliberately limited supply. It is a bearer asset like Gold which can be transported around the world at the speed of communication.
The last 3rd of the book looks at how Bitcoin works, how it's different to Crypto, and examines some of the obvious objections.
I remain unsure that Bitcoin could really be a new global reserve currency, but I also remain convinced that *something* has to, because continuing to use the dollar is certainly doomed and causes innumerable terrible difficulties until it does.
And what else is there?
Can we finally make Keynes' Bancor?
Until we find something, money remains broken. Like in the title. And that breaks many other things too.
It's a right pain. Need a bitcoin node first of course, which takes ages to build and sync. Then you gotta put some capital into the channels, and knowing where to open them is tricky. There exist automated systems to do channel management, but are they any good?
Don't forget to backup your channel state regularly.
You'll need to manage the channels liquidity by doing onchain transactions to "loop out". So open a channel and all the liquidity is on your side. Loop out by sending half to a node that'll do an on-chain transaction to send it back to you. Then you'll have a balanced channel and can use the on-chain funds to open another channel.
Hard drive errors ruin it all, if the drive fails everything needs to be rebuilt.
Only way to really have self sovereign money, but it is definitely still lots of work.
> Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads
Dalliance CEO says he will never use that browser and will continue to use whatever blocks adverts and tracking of all kinds most effectively.
Dalliance CEO says Perplexity CEO can take his browser and fuck off.
It's Saint George's day!
Not a holiday in England, dunno about all the other countries that share a patron saint with England.
The prime minister says it's a constant battle to try and reclaim the flag of the crusades, that England shares with the country Georgia, to make it a flag which doesn't sow division.
Just recorded for 1hr 20 with nostr:nprofile1qqsqfjg4mth7uwp307nng3z2em3ep2pxnljczzezg8j7dhf58ha7ejgpr9mhxue69uhhxetwv35hgtnwdaekvmrpwfjjucm0d5q3samnwvaz7tmswfjk66t4d5h8qunfd4skctnwv46qu7vtcc and forgot to hit record 🤦♂️
Best show so far.
What's gonna really break your noodle, is so did the generation before them with their global wars. Suspect maybe every generation does it in their own way.
Sure. They pass the Kitemark assessments needed by retailers in the EU. And the chicken isn't chlorinated and the beef isn't full of growth hormones.
As a Brit I hope the UK picks China! They make loads of cool stuff whereas the US just makes software that spies on you and otherwise enshitifies.
I keep hearing Americans saying that China has been manipulating the Yuan for a long time, as though America never adjusts their interest rates or does quantitative easing.
Strange to say that China is doing currency manipulation in such an accusatory tone when literally every currency other than Bitcoin is manipulated by changing the supply or interest rates on a monthly basis.
Walter off of Breaking Bad gets into a hole and keeps digging. He's getting better and better at being bad.
Indeed, so what do we call it? Inside out trading? Public manipulative trading?
"Insider trading" is what they call it when someone has advanced knowledge of economic numbers or a policy change and trades on that knowledge.
So what do you call it when a president posts a note to all his followers saying "Now is a good time to buy" and then two hours later announces an economic policy change that pumps stocks to their highest single-day rise of the decade?
🤔
Wonder if he'll ever tell his followers it's a good day to sell?
Seems like 10% tariffs on everything and a trade war with China is still pretty bad economic news to me, even if it's a bit better than full on global trade war.
It's an AI dystopia where everywhere that isn't locked down gets DDOSED by AI scrapers and the only things left in open access is the spam the AIs write themselves.
Seems like they want to fix the balance of trade with the rest of the world, which may be a laudable aim, but there's a reason it's so skewed: The dollar.
You can't print all the global reserve currency that the world needs and supply the world with money while also having a balanced trade sheet. The world is taking your money, your promises to pay, and giving you consumer products in return.
If you want to give them consumer products in return instead, then they no longer take your money, and the world has to find something new to trade among themselves other than dollars because they no longer have dollars.
Perhaps it really is time to destroy the petrodollar as the world reserve currency. Would likely be good for American workers to do that.
But this seems a somewhat chaotic method to pick.
Can you see on the graph the moment when the liberation came? 😅
Really amazing how they can label the biggest tax rises on America seen since the big wars as "liberation day" and people swallow it.
Look forward to being liberated by having these giant tax increases, expect the big price prices to be very liberating, the reduction in choice at the checkouts to be a liberating experience.
Increases in poverty and shifts in the tax burden towards the poor? How liberating!
Lightning already allows microsats, and the on chain's fees will never really go below one sat per byte, however much a sat is worth, so it'll never need the change. If sats are the equivalent of a hundred dollars each (though the actual dollar is long gone by then) then fees will just be hundreds of dollars per byte. The chain will be that full.
Water bill is up 30%, primarily to pay interest in bad debt borrowed to enrich shareholders. Gotta pay it this month.
Which brings to mind a philosophical question: Who should own UK infrastructure and industry?
A) The UK government
B) Multinational capitalist enterprise
Thatcher decided (B) and the people never got a referendum on it because Labour decided (B) as well, and it's a two party state really.
It's firmly embedded into the politic. When governments of all colors are insisting they need foreign investment from rich capitalists before they can build anything, they are implicitly accepting (B).
They don't need money, they can print that.
The foreign investment doesn't bring labour, they use local labour.
They are just looking for an owner so the government doesn't have to own it.
There's hidden options too:
C) The workers who work in that enterprise should own it communally and inalienably
D) A cooperative of the customers of the enterprise should own it communally and inalienably
But we don't even talk about those.