there is clearly a material difference, yes, and, to be fair, I did say it’s not *as* stupid and not *as* fraudulent.

but closer inspection doesn’t paint a much rosier picture: there is no reason to believe these assets will retain their original value, against which they were leveraged on an already razor-thin equity buffer. SVB’s book in liquid securities is marked to market, not to expected future cash flow, so we really don’t know how much money they’ll recover. which of course ties right back to the absurdity of fiat because the original value obviously reflected their monetisation on account of artificially low rates. will that return? I have no idea, but it’s hardly prudent capital allocation to blindly assume the answer is yes.

also, ~10 years is an obscene amount of time to have hundreds of billions of dollars locked up in bankruptcy proceedings. *especially* the coming 10 years, over which I would strongly wager the dollar face value will go to shit in real terms (to whit, see above). that’s before even needing to invoke time value of money - it’s not even that there might be better assets with better return profiles to swap into in markets you used to think were liquid. it’s that you just don’t want these ones at all. it has turned into a 10-year zero-coupon, illiquid fixed nominal return. ew.

so in some sense you are right on a technicality. but in another, this is the absurdity of fiat banking in a nutshell: the losses *have always already happened* - they just aren’t evenly distributed.

haha yes, there is a nonzero chance these mythical reserves exist.

that’s still a fraction. it’s 1/∞

“vaccine hesitancy” is such an insidious euphemism. you cannot take anybody seriously who says this unironically. in fact, you should assume malice.

that’s an interesting point. it does seem questionably constitutional to impose a tax on a private activity of a good that has already been paid for. the economic transaction in question is for “power” not “hashing”.

I realise, btw, that trying to be reasonable about this is probably the wrong approach, but it at least makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

likewise 🤙

you guys realise that SVB was/is literally punting around in liquid securities markets, right? this is the insanity that fiat brings to “banking” - commercial banks have to fail because raising the everything price hits their book of mortgage backed securities (I can’t even believe I’m typing this it’s so stupid) because there isn’t enough of a yield in making *actual loans* and the maturity mismatch is too scary anyway. SVB is FTX, just with mildly less stupid and fraudulent shitcoins - but stupid and fraudulent shitcoins nonetheless. so is every other “bank”.

fuck me sideways. it causes me acute emotional distress that people think this is normal and don’t see any problem with it. we live in such a clown world 🤦‍♀️

no, just make something up and I guarantee you reality is that, but a bit worse.

fractional reserve banking, amiright?

I think the optimal strategy is to pay lip service to the totalitarians at the federal level, but do everything possible at the state and even local level to sabotage their efforts and support bitcoin. the reason being that getting too aggressive too soon will invite violent pushback before it can be effectively resisted. if we wait long enough, they literally won’t have the budget for violence, and they will be preoccupied with the collapse of the social fabric in their cities.

bitcoin is going to drive secession (and not just in the US)

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/09/us-treasury-department-proposes-30-excise-tax-on-crypto-mining-firms/

no, we are going to win because of people doing, not talking.

there literally is no plan. that’s the point.

so I’ve basically given up ever arguing with normies about bitcoin coz I feel like I put in a good shift and it’s not rewarding anymore. occasionally I’ll dive back in if the idiot in question is famous enough for the audience to make it worthwhile. but for the most part my attitude is that it just doesn’t matter: we are going to win, and it doesn’t matter whether or not the high priests of fiat understand what is happening.

but I just realised something pretty hilarious. the high priests of fiat *really do think this matters* because, in their clown world, winning the argument literally is affecting reality. that’s how fiat works: whoever convinces the most, and the most important, people, gets to do what they want with the money.

it’s not about accurately reflecting reality. it’s not about capturing time or causation. it’s not about being mindful of unintended consequences. it’s entirely about *sounding* impressive.

it’s pretty fun to think about how this will play out as the collapse of fiat accelerates. my prediction is they will get louder and louder, thinking this grants more and more influence over the reality that is increasingly spiralling out of their, and anybody’s else, control.

and when they try to argue, I’ll just shrug.

“but can we fix it faster than it’s falling apart?”

- #[0]​

this was said pretty flippantly in his chat with Kelly but it hit me hard 😢

I love the smell of undeplatformable wrongthink in the morning

mrs allen just made a hilarious observation about the US covid “vaccine” border control: you need to be “vaccinated” if you are coming by air and as a tourist. if you cross by land, you’re fine, and if you are an immigrant, you’re fine.

so the only people it really applies to are those from rich countries that bought a shit load of “vaccines” from the US and dared not to take it. it has sweet fuck all to do with “science” or even common sense, but it’s also not just kinda dumb and not well thought through: it’s explicitly political. it’s a punishment.

my alternative theory is that you can’t have people running around both talking about and proving by their very existence that significantly less insane “vaccine” regimes exist in just as developed countries and everybody is not only fine, but better. but that suggests a lot more nuance than I think these clowns are capable of. mrs allen is probably right.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/proof-of-vaccination.html#:~:text=Noncitizens%20who%20are%20nonimmigrants%20and,States%20from%20a%20foreign%20country.

not as exciting, sorry. I will die on this hill. 2006 was the all time peak.

sometimes I like to just look at the lineups of the 2006 World Cup final and marvel at how unbelievably good both teams were 👀

but without the government who would pay for tinkering with infectious diseases in labs and releasing them into the public?

Jim Thorpe, the world’s greatest athlete and all-around swell guy.