this guy shows up at your door asking how many chairs you have, what you doing?

⚡️🇪🇺 NEW - European Commission: "Independent, free media stands at the core of democracy."

I love bitcoin and sound money. But when bitcoiners talk shit about tariffs and the real world economic policy landscape I kind of roll my eyes.

Everything is not a zero sum game that will be fixed by sound money alone. 600 years of real world economic history is not lost in the fiat fire.

Below is a quote from Spain's finance minister to King Philip II in 1558 pointing out how the newly rich Spaniards are made the laughing stock of Europe.

From Eric Reinert's excellent historical study of uneven global economic development: How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor.

If you were to launch a website for your single person company, would you use a singular Me/I or We/Us in your texts?

To me, many phrases read much better using “we” but I don’t want to deceive anyone by suggesting they’d be signing up for a fully staffed company.

#asknostr

🔥James Lindsay on X:🔥

”George Soros describes the history-changing potential of his "reflexivity" method of social change as operating in the space between what's true and what people believe. He argues that big changes can only happen in states of chaos where most people don't know what to believe or believe the wrong things.

During ordinary times, he explains, the most you can achieve is incremental change. People prefer stability. You can only make "historical change" during times of great chaos, which is roughly defined as a wide gap between what people believe and what is true.

The reflexive method seeks to bring about a state of affairs through generating this kind of chaos, first, and then using it as an opportunity to misdirect people where you want them to go. He says it's a matter of putting down "guideposts" that lead people through the chaos in desired directions to achieve "operational success," which he says stands in place of truth in a reflexive situation.

To generate the chaotic environment out of a stable one, he advocates sowing the field with something he calls "fertile fallacies." These are things that are incorrect but that are "fertile" in the sense that they will make people believe and act on them even though they're false. Usually, they're deliberately incorrect interpretations for actual factual events that are happening, including agitating propaganda and doing a kind of drumbeat technique where you keep repeating, say, negative stories about a stock you want to push into crashing so you can short it.

Often these techniques are combined so that you generate a situation where everyone is talking about the content of one or more "fertile fallacies," which means more and more people are commenting on, feeding, and driving the reflexive environment on the terms set by the manipulators, who usually have selfish or hostile intent. The "Current Thing" is almost always based on arguing about an issue through one or more "fertile fallacies" that are being deliberately sown into the conversation to drive the campaign.

In my opinion, we can get a rough sense of the "reflexive potential" of an operational environment (say, a society) by assessing roughly how hard it is for people to make sense of what's going on and how many fully competing narratives there are for basic facts around us. By this point, the "fertile fallacies" have done their job, and the gap between belief and truth is wide, with no clear handholds or guides that can pull us back to stability. It's too hard to tell which narrative to follow.

The reflexive dialectical play (yes, Soros explicitly says it's a dialectic, like Marx and Hegel) is to become the "guideposts" that lead people out of the state of chaos, but not toward truth. The goal is to lead them toward a desired state of affairs that benefit the reflexive propagandists. Since people can't find truth, which gives them consilience and stability, carefully crafted, operational reflexive fallacies are offered strategically to create paradigm-shifting historical change that they'll probably never be able to walk back. We experienced this when BLM and then the whole Left provided the "guidance" after George Floyd died (after much operational preparation of the environment), or from our public health officials and media during Covid.

If my guess about reflexive potential being a function of how confusing everything is, is right, we're at a state of very high reflexive potential in our environment now, with Israel and Epstein being the two largest narrative environments that we're being manipulated through (how interesting that they both would work to undercut Trump and the MAGA agenda). That sense you have that something's about to blow is not wrong. You're perceiving the lack of ability to find a grip. Grips will be provided for you, but not ones that lead you to truth or anywhere you want to go.

That is, we're all about to be psyopsed, HARD.

That's my read on the situation at present. So, what can you do about it?

Start off by realizing this is coming. Reflexivity only works when the fertile fallacies are fertile. You have to believe the narratives being planted in front of you, and you usually have to participate in repeating them. That gives a way out: get skeptical of anything pushing you in a particular direction and turning the temperature up, up, and up; and don't participate in the bandwagon effect around those issues.

When the psy-ops pops off full-scale, which will happen after some big surprise event that sparks it off (like George Floyd dying) or some shocking revelation everyone has to talk about RIGHT NOW ALL AT ONCE, all you have to do to break the spell is suspect that it's a psy-ops. If you know they're playing you, you're a lot harder to play.

Think hard about the issues where there's the most emotion, least certain knowledge, high potential for a huge political wedge, most agitprop, and well-funded campaigns and expect to get psy-opsed there. Think hard about issues everyone generally agreed upon up until about a few months ago that are now suddenly contentious and divisive, and expect to get psy-opsed there. You're detecting operational preparation of the environment through fertile fallacies that increased the reflexive potential to a high degree.

Again, if you know they're going to play you on a particular issue, prepare yourself for that so you're harder to play.

The goal of a reflexive campaign is to turn you into a pawn in their game to make their vision come true. Don't let yourself be their pawn. Suspect you've been primed and setup to blow up at a particular trigger and cut the wire on the bomb before it happens.

Reflexive potential can be reduced. Fertile fallacies can be exposed. People can hold themselves together and not be taken for a ride by chaos agents, causing the operation to fall flat. Reflexivity requires mass participation to succeed. Do your part to be sand in the gears and even to prevent it. All it actually takes is awareness of the game, how it's played, where it's likely to play out, and some ability to master yourself and think without following the maddening crowd and the propaganda”.

The ₿ symbol for sats is growing on me. What do you think?

A billion seconds ~ 32 years

A trillion seconds ~ 32k years

37 trillion seconds ~ 1,17 million years

It took the U.S. 215 years to rack up $7 trillion in debt. Now, we’ve added that same amount in just 27 months. The national debt is rising by $1 trillion every 180 days.

I’ve had a few ppl over the past week, tell me they didn’t order, because I charge sats, and they wanted to pay in fiat.

If you don’t want your fiat, why do I?

I'm losing a fight I didn't even know I was taking part in.

One of the top sales guys at my work recently, proudly, told me how he was now using AI to write his emails as he was fed up with his own "brash style" of writing possibly rubbing people up the wrong way. He then told me that after doing this he got a really nicely worded email in reply, so therefore he must be doing the right thing.

I did point out to him that the person who replied to him with that professional writing style, also likely used AI to write it.

My argument was then, what's the point of you and him even being involved, just get another AI to write up the report and email it to the customer AI to do what it needs to.

The reason that sales guy is so successful is because of his personality. He can be abrupt and demanding, but his customers love that, they see him as someone who will fight for them. His emails are part of that. You learn that if you get a really nice, happy email from him, then you did something he really appreciated.

With AI writing his emails for him, all the personality is lost. The thing that made him popular was being diluted.

He had to agree with me that he would not have many of his clients if he didn't have his "tough but honest" personality, and since 80% of his interaction with them is by email or messaging, that was how he put his style across.

So what's the point of this ramble? Well I didn't convince him.. He walked away saying "yeah sure, but people now expect you to be more polished, everyone uses AI to write their emails, I'd look stupid if I didn't".

Its like we've become lemmings, racing over the edge to our own demise, cheerfully and willingly. I am losing the battle to try and get people I know to stop using AI so much, in offices its becoming a plague, worse, management encourage it, we're doomed. :)

AI has a purpose, I know it can be good, but people are starting to get a little too hooked on the easy mode, convenience thing.