Things sober people say to normies that don’t land properly:

“Enjoy your meeting.”

🤣 🤣 🤣

If you think I can’t get more awkward, hang around awhile

Looking back I wasted so much time being loyal to the wrong people.

Massive miscalculation.

Probably a self worth issue on my end.

I extended loyalty to those who didn’t deserve it and of course it blew back on me.

It was my fault, not theirs.

They never deserved it in the first place.

This is what stoicism is all about.

Looking back and realizing that you were actually the cause of all your suffering.

Not others.

Both taxes and money-printing redistribute capital, but the difference is that money-printing does it less transparently.

With money-printing, the effect works behind the scenes in ways that are harder to quantify. That's why when a government can't find a solution between hard spending choices, they print money. It's the easier method.

People know their personal tax rate, they will riot if their taxes are too high, and they know exactly who is responsible for tax levels.

But inflation is a more complex beast. It comes with a lag, for starters, since it takes time for printed money to work its way through the system. And when it comes, propaganda built on grains of truth is effective at making it unclear to people who is responsible. "It's the greedy corporations that are responsible for raising prices, not the fact that we increased the money supply 40% over the past two years!"

And so money-printing effects people not directly based on their income, their need, or other things, but based on their level of awareness of what's happening. It rewards people who are aware of it, and are borrowing the devalued currency, owning scarcer assets, and denominating contracts in harder currency. It harms people who are not aware of it, who are earning wages in and keeping their savings in cash or bonds. Many of them are led to believe that CPI is the target to beat, which is a false low target. The real target is the money supply growth rate.

And capital gains taxes, if the cost basis is unadjusted for the rate of money supply growth, further recoup some of that value from the various harder assets that aware people try to protect themselves with.

A lot of MMT advocates act as though they found some grand formula. But really what they have re-identified is nothing new: it's that the less transparent that government spending is, the bigger it can be before people will complain. People will complain about taxes right away, but currency debasement is the sneakier method for which the consequences come with a lag. So it sidesteps hard decisions this year, and leads to bigger issues a year or two from now, when someone else can be blamed and the whole ordeal can be obfuscated.

And it's not new, despite how some MMT advocates would spin it. Currency debasement has been occurring since the adoption of coinage. And even MMT-scale currency debasement has been occurring since World War I. It is turned to so frequently because its lack of transparency allows it to occur at times and magnitudes when more transparent taxes would not.

There is a common phrase: “he/she woke up today and chose violence”.

I like it. It is funny. But it is imperfect.

“Violence” is now a verbal defensive phrase that means too much. To “wake up and choose violence” in the modern parlance of people who know zero struggle means to choose public verbal opposition. Okay, sure. But not really.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. Not violence.

I spent years doing mixed martial arts competitively. I know violence. I am trained in a dozen ways to choke someone out, and have been choked out in’s dozen ways. I have had a 200 pound male fireman try to beat me unconscious and fail to do so. Even that wasn’t really violence, since it was controlled. Assholes on my trailer park bus stop in my teenage years were violent.

Verbosity isn’t violence. It is rhetoric.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. I woke up today and chose to defend noncustodial privacy tools with language and resources. Coordinating messages between entities shouldn’t be a crime per se.

Bitcoin is anti-fragile and will continue to be so, thanks to all the people who work hard for it. But it is not without a fight.

Privacy is necessary in a free society in the digital age. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made this clear three decades ago and is still true.