You probably weren’t one of the people calling in.

It’s a sport I know little about! Mostly cover NFL, NBA, MLB, occasional tennis. But glad to see it!

Not many on NOSTR seem to care much about sports, but if you do, Real Man Sports is my other account: nostr:note1rvp9hpfkrdhl4vtd4m6nxz7xt50rqfs5tezxal6jgvc6txj5pplslvg0pn

So did Sisyphus

Reality is too complex to be encoded in bits.

Once you realize this, you know AI will always be just a tool.

There is no singularity, we cannot build a simulation that ever approaches reality and there is no chance we’re part of a simulation unless you define it so loosely as to mean reality, which is to say nothing at all.

BELIEF

I used to wonder why people went to war over religion. So what if you bow to the elephant with 17 heads, and I worship a burning bush? Why does anyone care? But that was before I read Charles Peirce’s “Fixation Of Belief.”

In it he argues being uncertain, i.e., having a doubt, is a kind of discomfort or dissatisfaction. It’s unpleasant and irritating not to know, and just like an itch calls out for a scratch, a doubt calls out for its own kind of relief. That relief comes in the form of a belief.

A belief fills the uncomfortable void of doubt and puts one at ease — at least with respect to that particular decision or uncertainty. In my prior job, this dynamic could not have been clearer to me. The phone lines would light up during our “Chances To Win” radio segment wherein I would speculate on each caller’s likelihood of getting enough points (or his opponent failing to get enough) on Monday Night Football. Never mind the callers knew I was just making it up, and never mind that the game would go as it was always going to go, and nothing I said could change that. They lined up to hear their odds so they could quantify and therefore affix a belief to their chances, replacing the void of nebulous doubt and anxiety. Virtually no segment on the entire channel received so many calls.

If uncertainty for a few hours about one week of fantasy football could motivate so many to queue up on the off chance we’d get to their call, imagine the stakes when we’re talking about religion! Religion spans the gamut from how the universe came to be to where you might spend eternity. From the meaning of life to the proper way to raise your children. The doubt religion placates runs deeper than the Marianas Trench. Man has historically gone to great lengths and suffered immensely to affix durable religious beliefs over the cavernous uncertainties in his soul.

So if you, seemingly prosperous, intelligent and healthy person differ from me in certain core beliefs, you are a threat. Not only to turn others against me, but worse, to erode the beliefs I took such pains to affix over the dreaded void in my soul. If what you believe might be true, then what I believe might be false. And *might be* is a massive problem because it takes from me the hard-earned certainty that undergirds my entire life’s purpose.

Unless I upend my entire worldview (something of which few are capable/willing), I have no other choice but to destroy you. But because my self-identification as a good person forbids violence except in self-defense, first I must conjure up some grave offense you have committed against me. I am not thinking this consciously — in my mind, I am merely responding to an acute threat I feel in my bones and revulsion I experience when confronted with your unbelievably selfish and evil beliefs. The stakes are so high my brain manufactures the offense effortlessly. Your views are a violation, your existence a problem, and if I can’t kill you, at least I can shut you up or see to it you are excommunicated and viewed as a terrible person to whom no one would listen.

In 2022, at least in the west, many people do not subscribe to what we think of as religions per se. They might be nominally Catholic or Jewish, but those traditions only peripherally inform the most important pillars of their reality. Instead, many take their worldviews from their social, economic and political tribes, where things like for whom you voted, your views on masking or whether you took Pfizer’s latest have bizarrely become meaningful. (The particulars of what has significance are often dictated by mass media, and they could be, and increasingly are, arbitrary.) It sounds insane, but merely hearing that someone does not believe the new Pfizer shots are necessary, or that one prefers a different politician in office will often be perceived as a grave offense. “You are killing people with this tweet,” seems correct not because there is good (or any) evidence of a tweet killing people, but because “killing people” is the only language strong enough to match the emotion felt by the person reading it.

When we realize what’s at stake in this battle of worldviews — the fixation of beliefs to stem the dreadful uncertainty in a time of rapid and unsettling change, during which there has been a collapse of trust in institutions and an information ecosystem so polarized people often cannot even agree on the most basic premises — seemingly insane and inexplicable behavior makes more sense.

The person seeking to destroy you is revealing his own desperation. He needs to reaffirm his increasingly fragile sense of the world, and he feels he’s being righteous not only for himself but by protecting the epistemic foundations of his likeminded peers. He is on a crusade of sorts. The tell for religious fanatics on a crusade is that the end always justifies the means, for the end is the glory of God, so to speak, the triumph of what’s right and true and necessary, lest the whole world be plunged into the darkness, and by the darkness, I mean unfathomable, awesome, soul-destroying doubt from which we desperately seek r(b)elief.

If someone makes false claims about others, advocates for censorship, or argues others must be coerced to take medicine for the greater good, it is a tell. The reason citizens in western democracies have rights is precisely that this religious mindset, to which people are prone, has historically caused so much damage. Rights act as a failsafe, firm lines which, no matter the urgency of the cause, must not be crossed. In the end, we all want to assuage our doubts. We all want to be correct about our worldviews and the moral frameworks that allow us to view ourselves sympathetically. We want to feel good about ourselves, while navigating our lives in uncertain times.

But the difference between an earnest, openminded person and a dangerous fanatic is the willingness to suffer doubt, to face the anxiety that arises when others have different, even what we deem counterproductive or abhorrent, views. That doesn’t mean anyone likes it — tolerant people are invested in their beliefs too — but the threat to his worldview by competing ones is a discomfort to be borne by him, not a scourge by which to be offended and marked for eradication.

Tolerance, then, is literally a kind of emotional pain tolerance — the capacity to suffer through the prospect of doubt rather than stamping it out at all costs. And discomfort notwithstanding, an encounter with a dissident view is also an opportunity to ask oneself an important question, perhaps the most important if one wants to adapt and survive in the real world rather than simply optimize for emotional comfort: What if I’m wrong?

https://chrisliss.substack.com/p/belief

Actually even better would be for nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9 — if it hasn’t already — to let you spend fiat and convert to BTC instantaneously (but not convert back to another currency) and send to the merchant. That way, you spent only fiat, but the recipient got BTC via nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9, and you are not even engaging in a taxable transaction at all.

Would love to see them stack real sats with other people’s fiat and obsolete themselves.

Don’t know why this just occurred to me now but if one deterrent for buying things with BTC is not wanting to deal with the tax consequences (realized gain) why not just (instead of buying with fiat) just buy the BTC on the spot and use it to transact.

IOW, if you buy and send immediately there’s no capital gain, unlike when you buy from a appreciated stash.

I know nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9 allows you to do this for Forex (wish they could do it for euros) but would be cool if you could buy $100 worth of meat at the farmer’s market buy going through Strike and they send it to the rancher in BTC.

OFF THE CLIFF

It occurred to me while walking Oscar this morning what might happen.

If there’s not enough bank reserves to cover everyone’s deposits, and people become aware of what that means, not just as a vague concept, but concretely, they will want to withdraw their funds. After all, even Bernie Madoff’s clients could get their money out early, before the rest of them had caught on and tried to do the same.

It’s not as simple as withdrawing money, however, because you have to put it somewhere. If you put it in another bank, you’re speculating that bank has the reserves to cover you or, once there’s sufficient consolidation of deposits among a few large banks, they won’t start dictating the terms of how you can use your money.

(Remember Twitter and Facebook didn’t start restricting what you could say until the network effects were large enough that they had monopolies of sorts. Do you really trust the banks not to do the same when there’s no serious alternative other than the last few standing?)

So the question of where to put your money is a difficult one, and personally (even though I opened a small second checking account at Chase last week just in case) I don’t feel great about sending my money there because I know I’m accelerating the process of consolidation and control.)

One alternative is to spend or invest the money. Buy a house or a piece of land or even just live it up at nice restaurants and expensive trips.

Of course, those purchases have their own problems. For one, spending the money is well and good, but most people prefer to have some savings set aside for when they really need it. While the hedonistic purchases are better than getting rugged by Madoff, they don’t solve the core problem.

Real estate has been good for a lot of people, but any property you’d want is likely to be expensive, and then there’s maintenance, property taxes and other ongoing expenses. Yes, you could rent it out, but then you’re a landlord in a bad economy (which is a job many don’t want), and if you hire someone to manage it, that adds another significant expense.

You could invest in stocks — and people do — but the economy is bad, and without knowing how much of the money that props them up is actually people’s deposits that ultimately might not be accessible, it’s hard to know how far they could fall. In other words, a person with a $10M stock portfolio and $1M in bank deposits surely will sell stock if a bank run reveals that the $1M he uses to pay his bills was merely some bits on his computer screen and not actually redeemable in full. Imagine thousands of such people being forced stock sellers to pay bills and consider where the market would be in that case. Both the stock and real estate markets.

The problem generally with spending money you’d prefer to save or investing in instruments on which you have no interest in speculating is you’re using money just to salvage some value from it rather than calmly keeping it in reserve for something important. You’re taking risk when you simply want storage, and/or buying and consuming more than you otherwise would.

Of course, you could just keep most of your money in physical cash, but that has obvious risks — theft or even flooding and fire — not to mention you have to deliver it personally rather than electronically, and you will look awfully suspicious attempting to buy a house with physical cash. And that’s not even considering the debasement of that cash via inflation which if properly measured (taking into account housing, higher education and health care, rather than just CPI) might be 15 or 20 percent per year now.

You could put your money in bonds. Treasury Bills are paying decent rates finally, and the US government, though not without counterparty risk, might be the one counterparty that has to exist for any of the other investments to have value. So many people reason the US is good for it, and if they’re not good for it, we’re screwed anyway, so there’s nothing else I could have done to preserve my wealth.

The problem is that assumes the default risk is non-payment rather than inflation. The US could plausibly avoid default by printing money. In that case your $100K 30-year T-Bill earning you five percent ($5K per year nominally) might be a terrible investment if in two years $5K is only worth $1K in today’s money via inflation. And good luck selling the T-Bill for anything close to what you paid if the US goes on a printing spree. Who wants to buy an instrument that locks in a five percent return in the face of 20 or 50 percent annual inflation? Your real return is negative 15 percent at best.

You could buy shorter-term bonds, but being locked in for two years — or even three months — is disastrous in hyperinflation. And hyperinflation is a plausible (maybe even the most likely) outcome for a system that can’t pay its debts.

Another option is gold. But that too has problems. For starters, if you have a third party store your gold, the better an inflation hedge it is, the greater the incentive of the third party to abscond with it. Second, you have to ascertain whether the gold you own is actually pure or even gold at all, and that requires third parties and special equipment. Third, it’s hard to buy things with physical gold and even harder to transact remotely with it. It’s expensive to send and secure. And while unlike physical cash it can’t be destroyed or easily debased (if the price went up enough, people would put resources into mining more of it), it can be stolen. Not many people I know want to have millions of dollars worth of gold in their closets.

In summary, once the counterparty risk posed by the fractional reserve banking system is exposed — and it’s being exposed now — there will be a strong incentive to get your money out. But while some will spend it, and others will gamble on risky investments, there will be massive demand for a safe place just to store it.

And lest you think printing by the Federal Reserve can solve the problem, it can’t. Because the core problem isn’t that there aren’t enough reserves to cover the deposits, it’s that there aren’t enough goods and services to cover the perceived purchasing power represented by those deposits.

For what are goods and services but commodities, energy, technology and labor? And if we consider labor as a kind of human energy and commodities as a kind of stored energy (Einstein showed matter was energy), and technology as techniques to more efficiently extract and distribute energy, we start to understand that it’s a problem of the available energy in the world not being commensurate with the claims on it via bank deposits.

In other words, the world’s ledgers attesting to the amount of power due each person are overstating it. The purchasing power you think you have is only there if you’re early to exercise it. People have traded their labor, managed their savings, set up their lives in exchange for access to this power in the future, and those managing the power have siphoned off so much of it for themselves and their cronies, what is promised can never be delivered.

And now there is a race between those who are catching on and want to pull whatever energy they have from the system and those who will try gradually to reduce their claims and normalize this theft of power so that what people imagine they have more accurately matches with what’s actually available.

One way to do this is by discouraging power consumption. Just like that 1980s guru who convinced people to donate their wealth for spiritual enlightenment and then spent it on Rolls Royces, those in power now urge you to abstain from driving and flying while they navigate the globe in private jets. They want you to eat cheap, mass-produced grains and insects in exchange for a sense of virtue. Instead of spiritual enlightenment, you are “saving the planet.” Now euthanasia is available in Canada — a great resource saver! — and people are increasingly encouraged to transition to other genders, often destroying their capacity to reproduce. Fewer people means fewer claims on resources, which delays or avoids the reckoning for those who have been skimming off the top.

While the global movement to reduce consumption is one tack to avoid accountability for draining resources, the other I alluded to above: Getting deposits sufficiently consolidated into a few banks that serve as more easily controlled conduits to a central bank — kind of a soft CBDC setup — wherein what you can withdraw and for what purpose can easily be regulated and surveilled.

The current system with lots of regional banks and credit unions is a problem because if the four biggest banks started unduly restricting what customers could do with their funds, people would flee them en masse. But if and when there are no viable alternatives, control over spending and withdrawing (especially if the reason is a good one like “saving the planet”, “preventing terrorism” or not platforming “hate speech”) would also serve to obfuscate the core problem, again, the mismatch between the amount of power we’ve been told we have vs. how much is actually available.

(There is a parallel process happening with respect to rights too. If we learned anything from the covid pandemic it’s that there is a mismatch between what we were told are our civil and human rights via the US Constitution and what are our actual rights once the government unilaterally and arbitrarily declares a state of emergency.)

But back to the present, rather than the dystopian future to which it could lead, instead of an old school physical cash bank run, we might have a digital cash/credit-purchasing run (in some sense that’s already happened with real estate, stocks, higher education and healthcare). Yes, they could make the money available to you via inflation, but withdrawing the nominal amount isn’t going to make more real estate, goods and services appear, so those higher nominal amounts will just translate into higher prices, accelerating the bank run even more.

Now you might have noticed a contradiction between on the one hand stocks being risky investments because people will need to sell them to raise cash once they get rugged on their bank deposits, and on the other, stocks being inflated due to money printing. Which is is?

It’s both. The best analogy I’ve heard is when your car starts to hydroplane on a wet road, and you’re headed toward a tree off the right side of it, there is a far greater chance you go off the cliff on the left side than had you not started hydroplaning at all. That’s because it’s the loss of traction and control that puts you at risk of swerving off either side of the road (your frantic reaction is also part of it.) Once you’ve lost contact, both outcomes are plausible.

Because the bank deposits don’t match up with the reserves, there is not nearly enough actual money in the system to justify the current prices for stocks, bonds and real estate. Those levels assumed demand as though the banks were good for all the money represented therein. As such, those markets should plummet into a deflationary collapse. But because a deflationary collapse is so devastating and confidence destroying, the government will want to do everything it can to prevent it. We’re skidding toward a tree, so the Fed swerves hard in the other direction by guaranteeing all the deposits and vowing to print the difference. Now the car swerves to the other side of the road off an inflationary cliff.

Why can’t the Fed just regain control of the car and keep it in the center of the road? Because when a central authority can arbitrarily print money there is no longer real-life traction between the perceived purchasing-power represented by the digital bits in their accounts and their actual purchasing power in goods and services. That snug connection between tread and asphalt has been suspended by a layer of water. Once it’s gone, you can try to get lucky and stay in the center of the road, but there is no longer anything in reality anchoring it.

What people need and for which there is a massive demand is an instrument that can’t be arbitrarily inflated or debased by a central authority, that has no counterparty risk, that’s easy to verify, that can’t easily be stolen or taken by force, that’s durable over time and cheaply transmissible over distance, that doesn’t have ongoing maintenance costs and that doesn’t require an undue amount of time and effort to manage.

In short, there is a demand for money that actually does what it’s purported to do. And of course that money is Bitcoin.

It would be awfully ironic that if in trying to consolidate final control to cover for the decades of skimming and theft, the central bankers and policy makers inadvertently drove everyone into a money they can’t control and accidentally ushered humanity into an era of unprecedented freedom and prosperity, a real-life Gollum, biting off Frodo’s finger, and dropping the ring into the fires of Mordor.

https://chrisliss.substack.com/p/off-the-cliff

AI can only master the map, never the territory.

“Nonetheless, I ran a simulation forward. The Third Reich was run by committee. There was a front man, someone of whom I had never heard, who was more charismatic than Hitler, but decision-makers behind the scenes, including some of Hitler’s generals, were just as ruthless. There were concentration camps, though oddly in different locations, and the result was seemingly as bad.

But that was only one version of events. The Simulator (through randomization of certain parameters) could run infinitely many different futures from any given point in time. I ran a few more, and they were all dystopian in different ways. There was one version, however, that particularly struck me.

In it, Hitler rose to power as he did in the real world, and things unfolded more or less the way we’ve read about them in history. At first, I thought there must be an error — after all, every simulation began the hour after I smothered him in his crib…"

https://chrisliss.substack.com/p/the-simulator

The greatest of all time, standing on the edge of a 100-foot cliff.

I’ll follow anyone who posts anything remotely interesting or insightful.

To reject my experience-based heuristics/instincts for probabilistic thinking.

Great way to squander your hard-won understanding of something in exchange of garden-variety midwittery.

Still trying to unlearn that lesson.

THE ALIENS

When the aliens finally invaded, it wasn’t the way most people had expected. There’s was no Independence Day shootout or War of the Worlds capitulation.

That’s not to say they were benign — far from it. I would describe them as indifferent, though I would not be surprised if some took pleasure in the suffering they inflicted.

They were interested in our resources, mainly the energy supply. And for that they needed us — at least some of us — to continue working and producing that energy. Of course, it was more complicated than that because they needed human consumers too to incentivize energy production. Just as we need bees to extract the nectar from flowers to make honey, they needed our machines and markets to consolidate the resources into a usable format.

Once the energy was sufficiently consolidated, they used an advanced technology to extract a small percentage of it. The amount was noticeable, but it disproportionately impacted the poor and powerless who didn’t know the cause and in any event lacked the resources to prevent it. It was a small, regular depletion, a rake off the top, so to speak...

https://chrisliss.substack.com/p/the-aliens

Sudoku

I do a lot of Sudoku. They’re logic puzzles, using the numbers one through nine in a nine-by-nine grid. The goal is to use all nine numbers once and only once in every nine-field row, column and box. If you find yourself with two sixes in the same row, for example, you’ve blown it.

It’s pure deductive reasoning, no probability, no induction (if it happened this way in nine of the last 10 puzzles, it’s probably the case here!), no guessing. You do not want to fill in a number unless you are absolutely sure it’s the only place it could go. As in bet-your-life-on-it sure. If there’s more than one place for it, you do not guess. It’s like Highlander: “There can only be one!”

I find it relaxing — there is no ambiguity, no argument. You either know for sure and know why you know, or you don’t know.

What a contrast to the information environment the last few years, where there are so many people, wittingly or not, feigning certainty while espousing bullshit. Compromised fact-checkers relying on captured science and medicine, misleading the demoralized and credulous, desperate for a narrative to hold off the tidal wave of fear and doubt. A giant chorus of the obedient protecting themselves from dangerous dissent with their various incantations: “Conspiracy Theory!’ “You Are Not An Epidemiologist!” “Trust the Science!”

But if the 6 can’t be here and here, and the 5 must be there, then there’s nowhere else for the 7 except there. And once we know the 7 is there, the 7 in the bottom left box must be there. That means the 8 is in the lower row, so we can eliminate the eights from the upper and middle rows of that box…

Even when you can’t immediately solve a Sudoku, when the lightning bolt of insight that opens up the whole puzzle hasn’t yet struck, at least you know for sure what you don’t know. No matter how difficult the puzzle, there is such simplicity, order and peace in the realm of pure deductive logic.

. . .

The harder puzzles require you to make assumptions. That is, you might have a box with two possible candidates, and you assume one is correct conditionally and go through the implications of it.

For example, if a box can contain only a 1 or a 3, you might assume it’s a 1, see what happens to the boxes around it, and then alternatively assume it’s a 3, and see the effects of that. If some other box has three candidates, say 3, 4 and 7, and the 1-assumption, makes it a 3, and the 3 makes it a 7, you can be sure it’s not a 4.

Eliminating the 4 doesn’t tell you what the answer is, either for it or the initial box, but it narrows down the possibilities and enables you to play out further conditional scenarios more easily. In other words, by running scenarios for both, “if x is true” and “if x is false” you can find out that “z must be false” even though you still don’t know the truth with respect to x.

It’s important though not to treat your conditional findings as true. In the example above, assuming a 1 in the first box yielded a 3 in the second. If you fill in the 3, though, you just making a 50/50 gamble that might screw up the entire puzzle.

That sounds obvious, but that’s only because my example contains two boxes. Imagine you’re five or six boxes down the cascading chain, making assumptions (and then assumptions within assumptions — like the dreams within dreams of Inception — and you can see how easily you could get it confused.

There is a big difference between “this is the case if x is true”, and “this is case, period.” But sometimes when you’re deep down the assumption rabbit hole, you forget that the entire edifice is based on a conditional. That’s how you wind up with two 6s in the same box and realize the entire 40 minutes you’ve spent wrestling with this puzzle were wasted. You thought you were making breakthroughs, but it turns out you were living a lie the entire time!

. . .

The real world is infinitely more complex than even the hardest Sudoku. It requires us to make conditional assumptions within conditional assumptions all the time. Assuming, the data from this study in the Lancet is correct, assuming that its design is not flawed, assuming it hasn’t been influenced by its funding sources, assuming the subjects in the study don’t differ in some material respect from me (lifestyle, genetics, etc.), you should consider it’s findings.

But if you forget the assumptions involved and simply fill in the box based on the conclusions therein, you run the risk of making a serious error. Many people adopted low-fat, high sugar diets to defeat cholesterol, got on statins, avoided the sun, became vegan for health. It’s pretty obvious where I stand on those practices, but irrespective of whether they’re in fact beneficial, the decision to adopt them is based on many (dubious) assumptions being true.

. . .

The beauty of Sudoku is not only do you know — or find out soon at minimal cost — what you don’t know, but also your assumptions (at least initially) are explicit. You say to yourself, “assume this is a 1, and let’s see what it does, and assume it’s instead a 3, and let’s see what that does.” You are therefore capable of untangling the results of your conditional experiments and drawing sound conclusions from them.

Often when I talk with people about health, civil liberties, medicine or other matters of import, the conversation gets derailed due to conflicting assumptions. Can we examine a question and in so doing untangle the conditional beliefs informing it? Can we agree that what one is saying is only true if one buys into particular premises, and that those premises themselves cannot be taken as a given, but also should be examined?

If you support giving endless weapons to Ukraine no matter the cost, is that because you believe it is an innocent being attacked without provocation by the evil Vladimir Putin? Is that assumption beyond scrutiny? It doesn’t matter where you come out on that question so much as recognizing you are filling in a box based on that assumption, and should that assumption be false, your entire policy prescription is bankrupted.

Let’s say you do believe Putin invaded Ukraine because he is evil and will move onto the rest if Europe next, i.e., he’s basically Hitler. Why do you believe that? Do you have first-hand knowledge of him, or is it something you read in the New York Times? If the latter, then your belief about Putin being true depends on the Times being reliable with respect to geopolitics.

If you follow this sort of reasoning to its logical conclusion, you end up looking for first principles. What can I trust? How can I be sure to fill in the boxes accurately so as not to find out later I was living a lie?

I think it’s difficult in the real world to find certainty. Even René Descartes, who settled on “I think, therefore I am” didn’t get far*. The best we can do, in my opinion, is via the scientific method, offering a hypothesis that purports to fit the facts, and scrapping it as new facts and better-fitting (more explanatory) hypotheses come along. The allegory of a perfectly deductive world like Sudoku then isn’t in completing the puzzle. It’s in not filling in the boxes inappropriately. Forget about believing what’s true, but take great pains to avoid the lie.

https://chrisliss.substack.com/p/sudoku

*(And at best Descartes found an Oscillating Truth, if you think, then you must exist, but you could be deluded, so maybe not, but if you can be deluded then you must exist, but you could be deluded about that, so maybe not, but if you can be deluded about that, then you exist… ad infinitum.)

Part of the psyop is to assume everyone is an idiot. But it’s only highly educated people who can be so easily manipulated. Regular people know they’ve been scammed, and they don’t trust the ruling class. And even the nornies in the laptop class are catching on.

It’s also disingenuous because the authorities do so much in secret themselves.

“Public” servants they are not.

Be good to your dog, for you might be his dog in a future incarnation.