A random, non-ordered collection of things people usually learn too late in life. I’m sorry if some of them sound cynical, but they are true:

1. You’ll have to fight for your veteran’s benefits if you come back maimed from combat in military service to your country. Today’s western military isn’t about national defence. It’s about nation building, enabling the pillaging of other countries’ resources, and protecting the 1%’s financial interests.

2. As idealistic as you may be early on, a career in law enforcement never primarily turns out to be about helping people. It’s about revenue collection, stopping the occasional mess already in progress, documenting things after they have already happened, and when the rubber meets the road, acting as the muscle for a corrupt government. You will learn this late enough in your career that you can’t or won’t switch tracks. Cops are not your friends. Don’t speak to them about anything, or invite them onto your property. Don’t consent to searches of your person or your property.

3. Banks and credit card companies have one goal. To get you in just enough debt in cooperation with overtaxation of your wages by government that you’ll forever be making payments and never pay off your balance.

4. Everything of real value that you will learn and unlearn happens after you escape public school and socialist-captured centres of higher education. Read and travel.

5. The government does not have your best interests at heart. Obviously.

6. Do everything you can when you’re young to cultivate skills that you can sell for cash or trade goods. Employment income is overtaxed, and a hamster wheel designed to keep you at zero.

7. The money you contribute involuntarily every month in the form of government pension payroll deductions, if invested instead at a modest 10% rate of return over the course of your working life, would be worth MILLIONS. Not a measly $800-$1200 cheque every month. If you even end up receiving it. Try to turn something you love into a means of earning income, and buy assets not liabilities.

8. Your ability to create consequences in your life usually grows faster than your ability to consider consequences ahead of time. Always think about the consequences of what you are about to do before you act.

9. Commitments made through marriage are not just emotional. They involve optionality that you may or may not have later in life, ranging from where you choose to live to whether or not you really want to take a stand or be a martyr against tyranny.

10. Learn everything you can about what money is and how it is currently being used as a tool of enslavement through taxation and inflation. Learn what money is, how it came into being, and how it has been utterly corrupted to enrich the few.

11. Take control of your food security, water security and your ability to defend yourself and your family. Be able to survive if the bank machines and the grocery stores suddenly stop working forever. Buy land and build an off grid capable place to call home instead of buying a fiat house in the burbs.

12. The “majority opinion” is usually wrong. Don’t be afraid to not fit in.

13. If you want to know what kind of person you are, look around at the people that you surround yourself with. If they are all been-nowhere, done-nothing laggards, guess what? If it’s nobody, guess what? Try to always have a mentor or two in your life, and be a mentor to others if you are so blessed.

However…

14. It is better to be completely alone in the world than in the company of one idiot.

GN ❤️

The US DOJ

I hope they have a redundant sealed bearing system and fire suppression onboard.

He’s just brilliant. I was pretty impressed with his grasp on the fundamentals of Bitcoin and the implications regarding traditional real estate lending and mortgages.

I watched this last night on Netflix. Riveting.

https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81664509

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ddn8dvpc4fLZsiOWHYnue?

Now that’s a representative I can get behind. 🔥. Go Colorado.

If I see a X link or TikTok watermark on anything, auto scroll-past.

One of the best and most educational pods I’ve listened to in the past half year. Leon is brilliant and super well spoken. He knows Bitcoin and real estate development inside and out. nostr:note1mqpat73dtudsrwwutecpfxxxqz3qt73xfzpazyq7fg9rn5qsa0qszrtn6j

Sorry I got heavily sidetracked after we traded messages, getting a standalone install of Ubuntu on an external drive and barely avoiding a major data loss by the skin of my teeth. Then back to the fiat mine today to a big backlog of work.

I still haven’t been able to see a .sparrow folder through webtop, but the ease of connectivity between sparrow and my Start9 node on a full Ubuntu install has made the exercise unnecessary. I bit the bullet and got a new 1TB external SSD to get my feet wet on Linux and enable me to do some Linux courses. I can’t wait to get a dedicated Linux laptop set up as a portable means of coordinating onchain activity and supporting self sovereign messaging and file storage, and eventually ditching Windows for good.

Thanks for your replies. I really appreciate you taking the time. 🤙🏽

Willing financial illiteracy and reluctance to challenge held beliefs.

Welcome 🤙🏽

Good job Poilievre. Now finish up with the theatrical media whoring, make Bitcoin legal tender, end the Bank of Canada and give Bitcoin favorable tax treatment. And while you’re at it, end at-source payroll tax deductions, Canada Pension Plan deductions that we will only see a fraction of in our retirement, if at all. Oh yeah, and while you’re at it, get rid of the goon squad horse trampling RCMP and roll back firearms legislation about five decades.

#canadaisfucked

Wow. Learning a new operating system at a low level with the benefit of having ChatGPT as a guide is so much easier than the dark art that MSDOS and early Windows versions was treated as by the local computer shops.

I remember when I finally got my first PC in 1993, being down for a full month while I learned how to do a fresh OS install when I corrupted something critical. The vague answers I got from the local computer shop, aimed at getting me to just bring it in, just made me more determined to learn. I should have picked up Linux years ago.

#linux #ubuntu

Cycling turned me into a lesbian.

If you come up, bring a container load of pistol ammo and a bunch of M4 carbine uppers. And a new pickup truck that doesn’t cost $80k.

Man I am so impressed with Ubuntu so far, in my journey to ditch Microsoft. I ran it briefly on my miniPC back before I ran my first full node using Umbrel, but have since switched that miniPC to a dedicated Start9 box with a full time node and a Electrs instance for wallet connectivity to the node.

Now that I have a standalone Ubuntu installation on a separate bootable external hard drive connected to my main Windows PC, I am so impressed with how smooth it is and how seamlessly it is working with files on all of my backup drives. I’m also impressed at how easy it has been so far to replicate the functionality, app availability and user experience I’ve grown accustomed to with Windows, going all the way back to the mid 90’s. I’ve got a VPN and Tor access figured out, SSL terminal access to my node that just works using the same certificate, and Sparrow in Ubuntu even recognizes my USB ports for air gapped signing, with no messing around.

I will say a few things for those considering ditching Windows or doing a Linux install alongside your regular Windows OS. Image your whole system prior to starting, set a Windows restore point, and have a couple of external drives to save critical stuff on during the transition.

The install process is easy on a standalone machine, but the current documentation on how to create and manage partitions on a parallel Ubuntu install on an external drive is not necessarily what you’ll see in real life. For some reason I ended up with the bootloader on a separate drive that had a lot of important stuff on it. And it rendered that drive unrecognizable by Windows and Ubuntu for a handful of heart stopping hours till I realized I had the most critical stuff saved elsewhere.

The biggest panic was when I realized that 650GB my image files for my primary system were on that drive. Usually I have two full sets of those images, but the drive I was using for tertiary back has since been deployed as a backup to the Start9. So there was a time when I had to fall back to Windows Restore to rescue my ass. Not a good feeling. I pictured spending the next two weeks reinstalling Windows and everything on that box, including restoring SSL connection to my nodes.

Once I got that drive talking to Windows again and had knocked 25 years and 650GB of stored files I had accumulated down to about 5GB, my last step was to re-image the whole primary system…..chkdsk error while creating image. All of the forced stops to get past stalled Ubuntu installation attempts had corrupted something on my main Windows drive. Three hours to run a chkdsk, biting my nails. Then everything imaged properly.

TLDR:

- Ubuntu is a capable replacement for Microsoft products with better options for privacy and security

- storage is cheap. Back up your stuff before you attempt a parallel dual boot installation alongside Windows. The documentation sucks and skips a few key details.

- if budget permits, just get a dedicated laptop for Linux and start your journey there. Then transition your main machine over time if you feel like it.

#ubuntu #windowssucks #linuxmasterrace #linux

First day back after the break, and down to the wire on a half million dollar bid submission. No easing back into the grind here. https://video.nostr.build/b740f9a80a584724098bef41a8961524b5286b8bb4e1e1bcd855c588ea064c5d.mp4