There are places in countries where laws are interpreted and enforced differently than other places in the same country.
How free a country is depends on how you want to live your life.
Some places you are freer to live quietly, others you are freer to pursue bhag.
It’s actually very nuanced, but nowhere is there a libertarian Wild West.
Yeah this is really a pet project that I’m doing with kids. FBA means we can offload a lot of the actual work and keep this as a side project.
I’m really just teaching my kids some biz skills.
Already own nostrmarketplace.com and knostr.io for future use.
Interesting problem…
Last year I started a micro business (UK) with my kids, part of which we are selling some imported goods via Amazon. This is a neat lesson for the kids because Amazon allows us to reach 1bn people across 23 countries.
Opportunity…
The EU requires us to have a person who is resident in the EU to act as point of contact for CE marking and for any stock that is delisted and needs to be returned to seller.
There are lots of people putting up websites offering this as a service, essentially a glorified mailbox, but they all seem to be saturated with demand. Hence the opportunity.
So does anyone in on nostr who lives in EU want to earn a few € a month to do this role for our micro biz? If so DM me. Only requirement is you should have a responsible character. But ideally you are WFH, maybe freelance, contractor, w/e?
More broadly… If anyone is an EU based dev, there is an Amazon imposed deadline for everyone to adopt this by 31st March 2024 and this looks like an great shot at capturing some recurring income potentially for years.
You missed the fact that sperm counts are down by 70%. Are men choosing to have lower sperm counts?
🚨 Crazy Talk 🚨
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the way birthrates are collapsing all over the place and this is often associated with higher income people wanting fewer children.
However that doesn’t really make sense, unless income is negatively correlated with sexual activity and I doubt it is, or it hasn’t ever been shown.c
So why are birth rates collapsing and why do wealthy countries lead this?
1). Sperm counts have collapsed. Everywhere that births are down, sperm counts are down. It’s not some choice, it’s not abstinence or contraceptive. It’s sperm. The data is in and wealthy sperm is bad sperm.
Why does sperm go bad in wealthy countries when poorer countries don’t have this issue?
2). Nanoplastics are everywhere. Nanoplastics are smaller than microplastics, nanoplastics are actually small enough to diffuse across the cell membrane and into cells. Whilst your skin is good at defending your body from this kind of stuff by dropping dead cells, it’s much tougher on the inside.
Last year medical studies measured that mice who ingested nanoplastics would become infertile because nanoplastics accumulates in the testes! They observed nanoplastics accumulating in mice testing and this correlated with infertility.
More recently scientists discovered that bottled water measurably contains 100,000x more nanoplastic than previously thought…
This seems like a smoking gun, it seems like lung cancer and smoking.
It seems that plastic packaging of food and drinks causes infertility we now have a mechanism for the hypothesis and this hypothesis is very strongly correlated with data of national wealth, sperm counts, and fertility rates across world population groups.
So fellas… no plastic bottles, no plastic packaged food.
But perhaps more so… boys and young men should definitely not be eating / drinking this stuff.
I think some governments are going to put all this together and figure this out in the next couple of years. But no need to wait for that. 
This chart proves the case for bitcoin.
The S&P500 has never topped the 1929 all time high, when adjusted for m2 money supply (inflation, or dilution depending on pov). 
As the ice on North America and Europe melted and dumped into the oceans, those two landmasses then rose up.
My house where I live is still actually rising above sea level today by approx 20mm/yr, even as the global sea level rises due to climate change.
… and my house is 1/2 mile from the beach.
We live on a very dynamic planet.
Atlantis speculation is fun.
It’s also wild that aboriginal stories exist about the flooding that happened circa 15,000 years ago with the meltwater pulse of the last ice age.
Neolithic history had to put up with climate change that was an entire order of magnitude more dramatic than anything we are worried about, as Europe and North America shed enormous land ice sheets that were miles thick.
When nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m was CEO of Twitter and Trump was president there were many calls to ban Trump from Twitter. There were many people demanding Trump be removed because either he violated the TOS or because they saw Trump’s tweets as dangerous.
While catching up over kombucha at the Square office, Jack mentioned some of these conversations and how there were compelling arguments on both sides. He asked lots of people what they thought twitter should do. So he asked me about Trump and other accounts, like Richard Spencer’s and the alt-right.
I’m very anti-Trump but I said I thought Jack shouldn’t ban him, because he’d face a shareholder revolt. Everyone said that it was Jack deciding things at Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg for the meta empire, but that wasn’t really true. The real power is in the money and that’s shareholders and advertisers.
I can only imagine what a hard and stressful job it would be to decide what can and cannot be said in the public sphere, as twitter effectively was at its height. It was an impossible job, one which shouldn’t exist. Jack did incredibly good at managing to find balance, and everyone hated his decisions because there was no right answer.
The reason for Bluesky, and now Nostr is to make it so no company or person has that kind of control. That the public sphere that is social media shouldn’t owned or controlled by any corporation or government. When something of value is held together without being ultimately owned by a person, organization, or government, the it is held in common.
What we’re building together on Nostr is a commons. By making it a commons that’s held up by our software and contrbution as users, we escape the trap that caught twitter.
A commons where we come together to make and sustain space.
A commons where we can do business freely without someone who can arbitrarily shut us down.
A commons where groups of users can decide the rules for themselves, and everyone doesn’t need to follow some universal set of opaque rules.
Well said!
Hmm, we had energy price fixing across much of Europe and it’s not been so great for inflation, public debt, erosion of living standards, etc.
Some people didn’t freeze to death though, so some balance there. But price fixing just breeds inefficiency, waste and has a high cost burden for society at large.
Was the persistent trend? 🤣
In the good old days, you had to walk up to a girl in a bar with a beer matt and a pencil and ask for her number.
If her friends didn’t like you… no pass.
Then you had to call her house and her mom or dad would answer the phone.
If her parents didn’t like the sound of your voice… no pass.
Today girls have DM’s and I can’t even imagine the horrors therein! I think this alone explains the collapsing birth rate. 
At what point do we in the West wake up from our childish stupor and acknowledge the reality of the world we live in?
Annual CO2 emissions. 
Loving the timing of this too.
The fact they dropped it the same day as EU AI Act is just 🤣
We had approx 15 meetings after Sunday dinner and that’s where everything was done, maybe 90mins each. We just sit around the table after cleared up and do some stuff.
Physical goods, we just used the internet to organise / manage everything.
We bought some stuff and we sold some stuff.
We are just ruthlessly systemic and efficient.
One of my favourite lessons though is that speed of turnover is what matters, not margin.
Return on capital = margin ^ turnover cycles
So we are starting with stuff that is high value density, fast turnover and we are saturating out those opportunities before moving into more scalable things.
Think we underestimated the addressable market for our first stage though, so we are overachieving at the moment.
Good business just boils down to math.
People complicate it with moronic stuff and feelings.
But I’m an MEng^2 + MBA so you probably shouldn’t listen to me. Very not cool.
Amazing to see Tim Sweeney and Epic Games have defeated Google over the Play Store monopoly.
Now they move on to Apple and the App Store.
It also seems significant that the California court has declared “monopoly”.
Really changes in the landscape are coming, with AI and now the demonetisation of hosting stores. Things are really going to get a lot more fluid again.