If you've never had grilled ribeye with heart and brains, what are you even doing with your life?

#foodstr

*sends unsolicited feet pic*

What should be Amethyst's next big feature?

The American Dream is a harmful narrative.

The traditional expectation in American society is that if you put in a basic level of effort, you will be successful. You go to school, you study, you graduate, and you go to college. You don't do drugs, you stay out of trouble. You start at an entry-level job and get promoted every few years. Financial success is supposed to follow. Not extreme success, but a stable job that pays well, marriage, kids, owning a house, vacations, etc.

Those things are supposed to happen because you followed the rules.

When you follow all the rules and are not successful, it creates a psychological disconnect, and people react in different ways to that disconnect.

Some people react by rejecting the traditional expectations and redefining success. So you get things like minimalism and child-free lifestyles and the sort of Bohemian hipster ideal that it's okay to not settle down. A generation ago it was hippies and communes.

On the other hand, some people react to this psychological shift by forming the belief that they were not successful because they failed to follow the rules sufficiently strictly.

So they become fundamentalists. They lean into following the rules and they make following the rules a core part of their identity. The whole grindset thing is not about work, it's about an identity. It is doubling down on the idea that if you work hard and relentlessly improve yourself, you will achieve success. Along with it comes the idea that people who have failed did so because they did not work sufficiently hard.

The people who post endlessly about the grindset mentality are trumpeting their own moral purity. They are successful because they are following the rules. And they know that they are successful because they talk about how much they are successful.

The flip side of this phenomenon is that some people will encounter this psychological disconnect and form the mindset that the rules are bullshit and people only achieve success if they are willing to break the rules. Thus there is nothing morally wrong about it because everyone else must be doing it too. It opens the door and creates a motivation for criminal behavior because there was no success achieved from following the rules.

There is no formula for success. Nor is success even an objective goal. Folks should seek validation from within rather than Keeping Up With the Joneses.

having way more trouble finding a reasonably priced used truck than I expected

have a theory that inflation is felt in the truck market first

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, there were a lot of capital controls, lending restrictions, securities restrictions, etc. And it was for two different but intertwined reasons.

One obvious reason was that, among countries involved in trade wars or shooting wars, they wanted to reduce capital flows to the enemy.

A second reason was that, due to the war, sovereign debts became so high relative to GDP that they had to inflate away the debt, which was a form of default. It wasn't just 6102; it was a broad range of controls. Carmen Reinhart described it well as “creating a captive audience” in an

IMF Working paper:

“High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or belowmarket real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for government debt, limiting tax-base erosion. Financial repression is most successful in liquidating debt when accompanied by inflation. For the advanced economies, real interest rates were negative ½ of the time during 1945–1980. Average annual interest expense savings for a 12—country sample range from about 1 to 5 percent of GDP for the full 1945–1980 period. We suggest that, once again, financial repression may be part of the toolkit deployed to cope with the most recent surge in public debt in advanced economies.”

-IMF Working Paper No. 2015/007

Unfortunately, as most here know, both conditions are once again present in the 2020s. The US/Europe vs Russia/China contest is providing a useful excuse for governments to crack down on privacy, p2p exchange, money transfer, etc. Meanwhile, western governments have a similar sovereign debt problem that ultimately necessitates inflating the debt away.

Some of this Operation Chokepoint 2.0 stuff is just targeting scammy crypto companies and things like that. And the SEC enforcement actions are also going after crypto securities fraud and so forth. For bitcoiners, those things are not particularly relevant.

But under the surface, the bigger risk is all of the ongoing pressure on privacy, p2p, and the free flow of capital, including tighter bank restrictions and debanking.

What’s the best non-bitcoin podcast you’ve listened to recently?

Ok my favorite thing about Nostr so far

Friendly bitcoiners

Open source - multiple apps to access

The 🤙 instead of 👍

Twitter is a shitcoin

Love that state…..my dads side of the family are all cheese heads.

Zap a Noob

Zap a Noob

this is why nostr

Doing the show qith #[0] tomorrow. Pumped!

good morning, modern air travel is a case study in how over regulation can destroy a once vibrant and innovative industry