Sometime earlier this year I found out that Canadians buy milk in bags. I have not been able to successfully integrate this information and my worldview has been eroding ever since.

I do not think your voice is boring and I highly suspect this is the very common phenomenon where everyone hears their own voice differently than others do.

For instance, I was doing the podcast for over a year before I didn’t hate listening to myself. I didn’t even review my own episodes before publishing. Now it doesn’t bother me, but I’m 5+ years in now of doing it every day 😆

But that said, it isn’t as easy as it seems from the outside. It’s very often a pain in the ass and takes a huge amount of time.

same. I’m like oh God.. why do you do that? 😂

MicroStrategy's bitcoin acquisition strategy has been really on-point.

I analyze a lot of stocks and see how they manage their shares. Most companies are rather pro-cyclical in this aspect. They buy back a lot of shares when times are good and shares are expensive, and then when there's a recession they reduce or eliminate their share repurchases, ironically when shares are cheap and it would be better to buy them.

A small percentage of companies have more forward-thinking executives that manage to do this more counter-cyclically. They buy back more shares then they are cheap, and they retain more cash or do other things with their cash when their shares are more expensive.

MicroStrategy has been doing this quite well, except it's about the strategy of issuing shares for bitcoin, which if bitcoin continues to be successful will have more impact overall.

When MicroStrategy wants to buy more bitcoin (which is always), what they seem to be optimizing for is how many bitcoin can they get per share. That's what builds shareholder value in this context. So when MicroStrategy stock is trading at a valuation premium relative to its underlying bitcoin, they can take that opportunity to issue more of these expensive shares, and buy bitcoin with those proceeds. When there is not a valuation premium, they can focus more on just buying bitcoin with incoming cash flow, or exploring other low-cost financing.

So far, they have been really on-point about managing this.

Outside of a handful, the majority of podcasts are repetitious enough these days that I would rather listen to a bunch of theater nerds play through a long Dungeons and Dragons campaign together than listen to those podcasts.

Losing someone young, or losing an older person while you are young, is always hard.

When my father passed away from cancer while I was in my early twenties, it wasn't surprising at all. This fact had been coming for two years, slowly. But when it came, it hurt just as bad. And till this day it still hurts.

I was at work and got a call; it was a hospital. They said my father had been suddenly transferred to hospice, and it wasn't looking good. He probably had a week at most. He was in another state. The doctor transferred my father to me on the phone and my father was weakly like, "hey...." and I said hello, and I said I'm coming now. He said, "No don't... uhh.... don't worry... you are far and have work... I'm fine...." I asked then why was he transferred to hospice if things were fine. He was like, "uh well... well you know.... uh.... it's fine...." And I was like, "holy shit I'm coming right now."

So I went to my boss and looked at him. I had previously told him that there might be a moment where I would have to just immediately leave without notice, no matter how important the meetings and such, because of my father. So in this moment I literally just looked at him in the middle of a busy day and was like, "I gotta go" and he was like "of course". So I drove there, two hours away and went straight there. My father weakly said on the phone not to go, but he never sounded like that, so I went immediately.

I got there, and my father was in a hospital in the death ward, and the guy who greeted me was a pastor rather than a nurse, which was not a great sign. I asked what was going on and he told me straight up that this was not good, that my father was likely dying within a week. So he brings me to my father. My father is barely awake. His memories and statements are all over the place, but I just hold his hand and tell him that it's fine and I love him. I'm just there. He kept fading out and I was like, "it's okay, just relax". He could see me and talk in a rough sentence or two and thanked me for coming, but started to fade away.

And then after like 30 minutes, he went fully unconscious. He was still roughly gripping and shaking the bed headboard and so forth but wasn't conscious (and I was like, "Are you all giving him the right pain medicines, this doesn't look good", and even the pastor was like, "yes I have seen many and this is not comfortable" and I was like an angry 23-year-old so I went out in the center area like, "what do all of you even fucking do here?! He is shaking the bedframe and looks in pain, and even the pastor agrees. Holy shit." So I went and got medical attention to deal with this, but felt slow and ineffective at this. They gave him more morphine and it calmed him down, but while it relaxed him, he ultimately didn't wake up again.

I spent the next couple hours there, and then left and called various family members for my second round when he was unmoving. I said if they want to see him, come now, in the next day or two.

But a little while later after I left, I got a call and was told he had died. Only I (and the nurses) saw him while he was still briefly conscious.

During that call itself, I was stoic. I was like, "Yes, I understand. Okay." and then hung up. And then I sat there for like five minutes in silence... and then cried. I got over it quickly and we did the funeral in the following days. My father had been struggling with cancer for years, so this wasn't fully surprising.

But what lingered was the memory. It has been 13 years now, and yet whenever I am in my depths I still think of my father. The memory never gets weaker. I think of his love, or I think of how attentive he was, or how accepting he was, or what he would say about my current problems.

People we love, live on through us. We remember them so vividly, and we are inspired by them.

If he was a lame father, he wouldn't have so many direct memories 13 years later. But because he was a good and close father, he does.

All of those memories are gifts. All of them are ways of keeping aspects of that person alive in our world. It's how we remember them in the decades that follow. Their victories, their losses, and everything in between. Virtues they quietly did that you find out later. Virtues you realize only in hindsight how big they were.

My brother Dan wrote something beautiful about our little brother Andrew.

I miss you, Dewey. 💧

Do you prefer Deontology, Consequentialism, or Virtue Ethics, among the three major philosophical schools of ethics?

If you’re like “what, lol?” that is fine. I’ll have some long form content on this. But I figured I would gather Nostr feedback beforehand to be more useful or specific.

I see a lot of posts about Thanksgiving discussions on bitcoin. It’s usually from the American-style perspective, like trying to convince your normie drunk uncle and aunt, and they often don’t see the demand since they have top-tier money and their downsides are subtle. They are like, “why the fuck does someone need a BitCoin?”

Meanwhile, my husband’s equivalent Thanksgiving discussion will be far easier, since he is in Egypt with our family managing a new property build-out for nine people that we are doing, and their bank just blocked my payments to them for the next capital infusion for no stated reason. So now we have to do a bunch of janky high-fee remittance workarounds for a time-sensitive payment (like making your mortgage) and then expend our human capital to go to the bank in the US and figure out where this got blocked (our bank didn’t specify, but implied on Egypt’s side). Every bank sucks here. None of them were clear, which means the customer has to investigate.

The idea of self-custodial global open-source money would be inherently interesting to my family’s dinner if it catches on and starts to have more liquidity points in Egypt like it has in Argentina, Turkey, and Nigeria.

Meanwhile drunk Americans will be like, “What does a BitCoin do, lol?”

It’s going down.

Whenever a bank blocks me from sending a routine international payment which helps support seven family members in Egypt I'm like:

Who is a musical artist currently alive whose dynamism and creativity, in your opinion, most closely approaches that of David Bowie?