The standard American diet is so toxic and addictive that you’ll literally have withdrawal symptoms if you come off it.

I give them the same argument. 🤔

However it seems they believe that growth is what makes an economy healthy. The argument is that Apple, for instance, could not be successful without having prices rising. While it’s production efficiencies are increasing, it cannot repay its debts if it reduces prices. Apple has to have prices rise because it has to service its debts. The argument continues. How can Apple invest in greater amounts of capital equipment without borrowing money first? It would need debt for that. Then later, sales would provide the money to pay off the debt. My answer to that is Apple would have to save enough money to invest in the capital equipment first. The response to that is “fine for Apple… that have lots of money but how would a startup get going without debt? …and if the value of money keeps going up, why start a new business if the return on savings incentivizes just hodling?”

Prices falling to their marginal cost of production does solve. Just hard to see from our existing system that dominates your view.

You don’t pay for the air you breath - why not? Marginal cost of production is zero - except in space or underwater where marginal cost is higher to service that air.

As jobs are replaced, prices fall naturally allowing people more for less which is the entire point of technological progress.

I haven't played guitar in almost 20 years, but this makes me want to pick it up again.

Reasons why I still cross-post to Twitter:

1. It’s still a good way to reach nocoiners with Bitcoin content, and even more important now (imo) with all this doge crap and environmental FUD

2. To troll Peter Schiff

I should have chosen my words more wisely when I criticized @JasonPLowery on Twitter. It wasn’t conducive, and I regret it. He blocked me, and I can understand why.

I apologize, and if some of you are in contact with JL, you may forward this note to him.

I criticized him for supporting the idea that the Fed should print money to buy bitcoin (see picture). I’ll explain why below.

I also fell in the same trap as I sometimes criticize others for, because I questioned his motives for writing the book. That was just plainly stupid of me, and I have deleted the tweet.

JL seems to believe that the Fed can do good, and that today’s monetary system was created because «physics» dictated that a system with central banks had to be adopted. (The What is Money? Podcast, The Jason Lowery Series, ep. 5, 46:42 – 47:15).

This argument seems to be founded on the same understanding of our current system as his argument that the Fed should print money to buy bitcoin.

But seeing central banks as a potential force for good runs contrary to our experience of why central banks were created, what they do and why.

It’s also contrary to my personal understanding of why we ended up with a global fiat standard.

In my view it happened because monopolizing and manipulation of the money supply, with inflation, deflation and channelization of money, is and has always been a policy, for approximately 2,500 years.

This policy has IMO always aimed at benefitting the few at the cost of the rest of humanity. Which is exactly what it does too. As time goes, it results in most people owning nothing and being miserable.

If physics (low transport speed, the need for physical storage) played a role in the demise of gold as money, it was IMO because it was used as a rhetorical argument in the political discussion.

The fundamental objective was always to ensure more government control of money, not to make the monetary system more efficient.

The «physics argument» is the same argument that I often hear people come up with, as they say that «gold lost the competition against fiat», because fiat moves faster than gold, and money needs to move fast in the modern age.

The problem with this argument is that gold became centralized in central banks as part of a deliberate policy that also included mandatory fractional reserve banking, setting up obligatory banking cartels, public licensing of banks and a regulatory regime fully captured by the financial sector.

In other words, it wasn’t an issue of «competition» or «physics». It was all about politics and coercion.

Without political intervention, gold would most likely have been decentralized and stored by private entities such as banks and warehouses scattered across the globe.

Paper receipts, digital receipts, and IOUs would have circulated as currencies, and today at speed of light.

Before aviation, gold would in a private monetary system probably have been transported by ships as an add-on service to their standard freight services and exchanged at the high seas and in harbors.

A lot of gold would probably have spent most of its time on the oceans and in harbors instead of onshore. In the aviation age airplanes and airports would have performed the same service.

The natural limitation of gold would have meant that small amounts of gold would have become extremely valuable over time, driving down transport, storage and settlement costs immensely.

Technological innovation in transport and security services would have had the same effect. In short, settlement costs and other transaction costs would have become lower and lower over time relative to any given amount of gold.

Such a decentralized system, combined with IOU’s could have been quite efficient, although not nearly as efficient as a system based on Bitcoin.

It would probably have been more resilient against competition from new forms of money, but also more accomodative to Bitcoin, compared to today’s monetary system.

It might be that JL believes holding bitcoin will transform central banks’ incentives, that it will make them do more good and less evil. Although the idea is enticing, I am somewhat skeptical.

The reason is that I think such a policy likely would go hand in hand with a regulatory war against ownership and mining of bitcoin. Although it wouldn’t be successful in the long run, it could seriously delay private adoption of bitcoin.

In the meantime, the governments and the financial elites would also take the opportunity to use money printing to acquire as big a share of the real economy as possible, which was what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The result is that one percent of the population today control half of global wealth. This control acts as a “claim on bitcoin” and other forms of money, just as much as money is a claim on economic goods and services.

Therefore, I fear that even though JL may have the best of intentions, his proposals might produce a very different outcome than the one he wishes for.

I started this tweet apologizing to JL for the wording in my criticism and that I attacked his motives. And I’ve explained why I have questions and why I disagree with him.

I don’t expect that the two of us ever are going to have a discussion on these topics. Regardless of this, I must nonetheless consider reading his book book. As an intelligent guy wrote in a group chat today:

«It’s nonetheless useful to understand other peoples’ understanding of what Bitcoin is. Everybody has had different life experiences. And having a broad framework to describe Bitcoin to beginners is positive».

Wise words. I will try not to forget them.

The Case for Apprenticeships

——————————————

The classroom setting is very unnatural. You sit there for an hour or two and just listen to someone talk while you dutifully take notes, or more likely, doom scroll your social media feed and maybe check your email. Learning by just sitting there and absorbing is against everything that we are as human beings. We are built for action. Moving our bodies around and imitating what others are doing is a much more natural way to learn.

The traditional way in which people learned was through apprenticeships. You went to train with another person that was an expert in their craft and you did what they did and learned through imitation. Instead of watching them for hours and then maybe practicing some of it at home right before an exam, you watched and did what they did with a much faster iterative loop. You got feedback and corrected and tried again.

The only thing that's like that in school today is with sports, where the movement of bodies and trial and error are unavoidable. They're also highly competitive with an objective metric of wins and losses, so they trend toward doing what works in practice rather than what should work in theory.

Theory versus Practice

———————————

And indeed, that's what we're talking about, the difference between theory and practice. Lectures and classrooms are all theory. There's way too little practice.

This is why theory has such pitiful production. Social sciences are pretty much all theory. They're usually some twisted rationalization of some political goal. Since it's not based on truth and has very little in terms of objective competition, it tends to stray far into political power games.

We've been seeing this trend in academia where even hard sciences get deep into theory with very little practice. For example, string theory has been around for over 20 years and hasn't produced any results. Yet it continues to be popular, largely because of the investments PhD's made decades ago that are being bailed out by universities. That is to say, it's a giant circle jerk subsidized by political power games.

The real work has always been done on the ground, by people who are building. And to learn what they do isn't easily taught in classrooms, it's taught in factories and garages and labs.

Unscaling Education

———————————

So why isn't apprenticeship more popular? The main reason is that it doesn't scale very well. Apprenticeship was mostly practiced within families where a parent would teach a child their trade. They had a natural incentive to make sure the child learned what they needed to as they shared a last name and would carry on a legacy.

To do that in a modern setting would be prohibitively expensive. There are way more people that want to get into certain trades than are spots available, so how do you choose them? We can see how restrictive this requirement is when looking at medical doctors. Part of why there are so few spots for doctors is the requirement of doing a residency, which is a form of apprenticeship. Medical schools typically have 5% or below acceptance rates, showing that there are way more people that want to be doctors than are doctors. In other words, apprenticeship is very hard to scale.

But nonetheless, I think it needs to be brought back, because we're losing a lot by not doing so. The best in a given field rarely pass on all of their tricks of the trade and sadly, they're re-learned through painful experience by others in the same trade. Diffusing that knowledge and experience is a way to not lose the progress we've made.

Trying out Nostr… 😳👀

Message is the same:

#Bitcoin will save your energy.

#Truth will save your culture.

#Jesus will save your soul.

🧡

The majority of traders, and overseers of the broader financial layer in general, don't care too much about underlying fundamentals. Instead, they focus on market structure and want to trade digital pieces of paper within a multi-week window.

As such, many of them look at "blockchain technology" and ask "how can this improve trading settlement times from three days to a few hours?" That's why a lot of Wall St people are into "crypto". They view it as a better set of procedures for fiat settlement.

Very few are interested in changing the underlying money. Few know what money is. This remains a niche focus, of which I'm all in.

yeah, sex is cool, but have you ever seen someone’s face light up when receiving their first zap?⚡️

hello #nostr 👋

Truth is not necessarily in the middle. It can be, but it can also be found on either side politically.

@“The truth is somewhere in the middle” is an absolutely abysmal heuristic.