The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan knocked me out
“Hey [insert A&R person’s name]. I just saw these guys at CBGBs. Really great band—totally your type of thing. ~Steve.”
Fig Dish gambled on the idea that most people—even record company employees—know someone named Steve.
https://chirpradio.org/blog/fig-dish-returns-with-two-singles-and-two-sold-out-shows
That’s an incredible story
👏👏 exciting news on all fronts Trey. Looking forward to Rebooting Money!
Very much agree and looking forward to the world we can construct when that’s the case
Very kind of you to say 🙏🏻
Thank you for sharing that, too. Pairs very nicely and naturally with the Neruda. That poem is called “Keeping Quiet” by the way if you’re searching for it.
“If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.”
-Pablo Neruda nostr:note1tnvky067250hmpt8gncd2auml48mwk5x2egjjd57705y73e9ap2qp5w02t
You just made me think of this Neruda stanza too:
“If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.”
Consumerism is a value of the fiat system. It is both literally a value, since we measure economic health in large part by measuring consumption, and also an ingrained mode of behavior. By disincentivizing mindless, reflexive consumption and incentivizing a lower time preference, #Bitcoin, if it continues to grow in adoption, offers the promise of a cultural foregrounding of deeper things, like fulfilling pursuits, relationships, creativity, contribution to community, presence, etc.
#Bitcoin is money that, through its soundness, will hopefully allow us to actually get past thinking about money all the time so that we can make room for life’s important things - which tend to get lost, neglected, and/or sacrificed in consumption and the systemically coerced pursuit of more and more money.
We spend so much time thinking about money (how to get it, how to get more of it, how to make it grow, how to keep up with inflation, how to invest it, how to spend it, what to spend it on, how to get rich quick, how to pay the bills, etc). And to a certain extent this will always be true.
But when money does not hold its value, when it is continuously debased, when the sovereign debt is so massive it must be inflated away, and when the economic health of a country is measured by how much it consumes, it creates an environment in which money is practically all we think about.
Looking forward to a world in which this is no longer the case.
This sentence exemplifies why Nostr is infinitely better than X 🔥
Gm #nostr 
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
-Jorge Luis Borges
Gn #nostr
I’d actually agree here.
nostr:npub1zx0uydq67a62k5vhjcsvh0qvedk9ht9gz9t56et6j9k7wayj809qjghdct, thoughts?
Yeah I’d 100% agree. This is another idiotic Gensler move. I’ll be curious to see the language in the enforcement action, though. Politically this is kind of mind-numbingly dumb for Dems.
I will simply never vote for a candidate who proposes taxing unrealized gains.
On this issue I think slippery slope arguments are valid and historically grounded.
I also think it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding and economic illiteracy.
More troublingly, it indicates a perspective on the relationship between government and citizen that I think is anti-American. nostr:note1n5feqtv6nd4lvcrufnjvpdzaer2lv7cf07v38th6zlkzpt0w3e6qcej3vk
The mass adoption of #Bitcoin will make a more creative world. It will unleash reservoirs of untapped creativity AND, perhaps most importantly, it will restore the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift.
In other words, it will transform art’s role in culture and society. It will take back some of the ground ceded (and surrendered) to the forces of commodification and financialization.
Here’s how:
In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde described art as existing (with friction) in two economies: the gift economy and the market economy.
“A work of art can survive without the market,” he wrote, “but where there is no gift, there is no art.”
He’s referring both to the way art is created and the way it’s received by the audience. Art is the “emanation of its maker’s gift,” which is to say both the maker’s talent and his/her intuition, neither of which can be bought.
With respect to the audience, “art that moves us is received by us as a gift is received,” which is to say “when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.”
#Bitcoin improves the environment on both sides of this gift equation.
A lot of people allow their creativity muscles to atrophy in the daily relentless pursuit of sustenance and getting by, a pursuit that is increasingly difficult when you are running uphill against inflation.
More people getting on a bitcoin standard will gradually allow would-be creators to buy back more time, giving them room to breathe artistically. It’s almost like being able to give yourself a grant that vests in the future.
I also think we will see a boom in artistic patronage, as newly wealthy bitcoiners look to facilitate the creation of great works, support artists they love, commission and finance projects that take long periods of time to complete, etc.
On the audience side, the fiat system has gradually degraded the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift. We are working longer hours for less purchasing power, while things like houses, higher education, and healthcare grow comically unaffordable for most.
Our money loses value so, rather than save, we are incentivized to spend, invest, or speculate. We are also the most advertised-to humans to ever walk the earth. Not exactly the ideal environment for tackling a long novel, listening to a record front-to-back, memorizing a poem, staring at a painting, or watching a serious film.
Bitcoin, I believe, can help facilitate a return of the gift exchange ethos, in the Lewis Hyde sense, to creators and, more importantly, to the audience.
Bitcoin, by instilling a low time preference culture, restores the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift, a capacity which fiat currency’s high time preference culture has broken.
As a lover of the arts, this gets me really excited.
Gm Gm