You ARE the ingredients.

The shitty drive to Egypt’s northwest coast is worth it, ultimately.

Some of the clearest and warmest waters of the Mediterranean.

In Egypt, even the sandcastles are pyramids. 😅

You really only have one shirt

Welcome to Italy Jack!

Great talk, wish I could have been there, next time.

I DCA Bitcoin but also a little fiat for just said volatility.

In Egypt, even the sandcastles are pyramids. 😅

The shitty drive to Egypt’s northwest coast is worth it, ultimately.

Some of the clearest and warmest waters of the Mediterranean.

I’m going to call this cat “Ghost”.

It likes to sleep under peoples’ cars in an underground parking garage and startle them by running out super fast at the creepiest possible moment.

🫂 nostr:note13jg0d67hn0vtgznn3k648792s2p6ep6dpsg2fr5zr0yuz3taw3ksy62jt8

Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

If you’re missing all the macro content from Twitter while you’re here on Nostr, don’t worry, I got you covered. Here’s the macro summary for this quarter.

(You can now safely go back to not giving a shit about macro.)

nostr:note1kl3f6pcec6j0dxdumezwgr9xqdfqdtmhmtakrzgnrgnj5lcy8gzs0v2ylv

I feel like Nostr doesn’t have enough cat pictures yet. That’s how the internet won after all; it reached a critical mass of cat pictures and thus people couldn’t resist. Or something like that.

My friend took in three rescue kittens off the street several months ago, who are now around seven months old, so we went over and played with them yesterday.

Sometimes people ask me what my favorite food is in Egypt. It’s the common thing people generally ask about regarding travel and such.

I often say grilled fish and vine leaves. That’s my favorite main course.

But the *real* answer is dumber. It’s the ubiquitous pita bread and tahini sauce. I eat way too much of it when I’m here, considering I normally eat low carb.

And there are these little walnut-sized specific type of lemons that are served with many meals to squeeze on your food. My father in law instead squeezes them into his water to make unsweetened lemonade with his meals, and I started doing it and find myself drinking it whenever there are lemons around with the meals. So good.

So for me the dumb but true answer is the pita bread, tahini sauce, and mini lemons. The cheapest, most basic appetizers/garnishes around. 🤷‍♀️