What health-related changes or activities had the most noticeable impact on your health?

#asknostr

Although it was predictable ahead of time that so many Palestinian civilians including children would die as a result of Israel’s response to the attack on Israel by Hamas, as the numbers continue to add up it is increasingly hard to watch.

Half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. There is not much more sad in this world than children, cut off from electricity and communication, violently dying from air strikes in darkness.

And sadly this happens in other places of the world too.

For much of human history, people were only aware of their own local area. Now we have awareness of large swaths of the world, and so we can keep track of tragedies in real time. We then desensitize ourselves out of necessity. Like, the sheer amount of negative information and unsolvable problems hit us through media, and in order to productively do something to add value to someone else, there is little choice other than compartmentalization it. An electrician can’t be caught up in the troubles of the world as he goes out each day and fixes things and building things, for example. In order to add order to his small part of the world, he can’t be fully caught up with its global chaos.

And then, I see these crazy protestors tearing down flyers about kidnapped Israelis, as though that activity could possibly be the best use of their time. People have a strong tendency to want to be part of something bigger and longer lasting than themselves, whether it is their religion, their community, their ideology, or their work. But some people chose such fruitless ways of doing it. Yes, you can and should advocate for not bombing children. No, you shouldn’t try to erase what happened to murdered or captured Israelis either. It is not rocket science.

The world is an increasingly polarized place, and my biggest concern is for those polarizations to be used to take rights away in a more broader context, or to wage war between larger opponents. Politicians will propagandize any small share of “crypto funding” to bad groups to justify more restrictions on those technologies and privacy in general. As countries go through sovereign debt crises, having some sort of enemy to point to helps their narrative for capital controls and keeping their citizens in currency and bonds as they are inflated away. I’ve studied the 1940s financial environment too much to be unaware of this.

Always look through to the bigger story, and ideally with a perspective of empathy toward many sides of any complex issue. Strive to be able to articulate your opponent’s view as well as they can, so that your counter argument can be most effective and surgical in its nature. And then, when there is nothing you can do about something globally, try instead to bring order and reason and improvement and kindness to whatever small portion of the world that you can.

Fear versus hope

An eternal battle inside each of us - with our thoughts and actions reinforcing the world we each see.

Fear slows/stops some people from moving towards hope, which is why it is such an effective tool for control.

But in the end, hope is more powerful because it unites us - speaks to a higher purpose.

Keep the high ground my friends!

Our choices and actions shape our future.

#Bitcoin

#Nostr

As developed nations continue to enter sovereign debt crises akin to the 1940s, there are a few main outcomes.

Option 1) In a world without bitcoin, or if bitcoin fails, central banks and their governments recapitalize themselves with gold, devalue the people, and do another cycle of this inflationary policy for the next few generations. The Treasury/Fed handbook literally has a written option for this, although it is stated more opaquely. It can be done in the US (and probably many other countries) based on current laws if shit hits the fan. Denmark's central bank and China's economic ministers have also written similar things regarding extreme outcomes. It's pretty straightforward based on the past.

Option 2) We go into a centralized technocratic future. Centralized AI and CBDCs win. People have cuck money that the AI+government control. It's like Brave New World, 1984, take your pick. Hard to say, but not free.

Option 3) Open source money wins. Bitcoin and its ecosystem win. Governments get defunded from their fiat printers, and have to be more honest with their ledgers or default and get reconstructed since they can't print what their people hold as savings, or in the hegemon's case, can't print what the world holds. Probably a world of chaos for a time during the transition, but also an opportunity for peace and building the next era. Keeping track of the nukes would probably be a big deal, like when the Soviet Union fell. It's actually kind of remarkable that they collapsed economically and politically but in an orderly enough way to keep track of and secure most of the nukes.

I don't know which one will win, but I consider Option 3 to be the honorable method; the path of transparency. That's the one I am rooting for and building for.

If I fail, I would like it written that it's the method I tried for, but realistically the AI+government will probably delete most of the records of all of the failures anyway, since that is how history works, without any sort of objective truth keeper. Our best hope is to hide records in a distributed way and hope they can remain undisturbed for a while. At least bitcoiners have a tendency to write stuff in steel and make low time preference things. Some psychopath will hopefully carve a life work in steel in a cave or something, but who knows, lol.

And ironically, if Option 3 wins, any of the losing factions could still insert their ideas and paths into the Bitcoin blockchain, now or in the future. It's the most immutable database that we know how to build, and would preserve their ideas as it does our ideas. Like, you know what? I *want* the Communist Manifesto to be in the immutable Bitcoin blockchain, because I want people in the future to know how *bad* it is. It might already be in there; I don't know. I wouldn't want people centuries from now to think about those ideas and believe they came up with something new; I want to preserve my enemies' texts because I believe I can win through markets, force, virtue, and truth.

I think that's almost always what determines the winning side. Losers want to burn their enemies' texts to ensure that their good ideas don't spread too much. Winners want to preserve their enemies' texts to ensure that their bad ideas are never repeated.

ten years into the future:

nostr didn't make it, no one uses it, no relays exist

what killed it?

Avoiding posting on Twitter at the moment. I’m just watching there. There’s enough overnight-expert Middle East hot takes and emotions are running high. The violence and scenes are terrible, and my heart goes out to all victims involved and those who will be caught up in it going forward.

I’ll instead post a few things in my lane here as it relates to global finance and todays actions relating to things I’ve already been covering but that now obviously have updates. Helps me get my thoughts together for what will eventually be my next client report.

-Actions like this show the difficulty of multinational currency agreements. Saudi Arabia and Iran have been having more peaceful relations lately as China brought them together (“enemy of my enemy is my pragmatic financial friend”, and so forth). They are both set to join BRICS+ in January 2024.

-But, Saudi Arabia has also been working with the US and Israel on normalizing relations with Israel, in exchange for US arms deals and such. Saudi Arabia was also making promises to raise oil output to alleviate oil prices if they grow too quickly, which the US wants.

-So this attack (w/ Iranian involvement and public support) puts Saudi Arabia in a weird place. Lots of division and competing goals within BRICS+. Has all sorts of implications for Saudi/Israeli relations, Saudi/US relations, and what happens in the coming weeks will affect how those go.

-Egypt and Ethiopia are also joining BRICS+ in January 2024 and they have had a multi year ongoing feud regarding the Grand Renaissance dam on the Nile.

-China and India are well known as not being on good terms. Border disputes and all that.

-Building trade and currency and military agreements between so many different cultures is a bigger challenge than doing so between US and West Europe.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War.

Took me a moment to remember that, given today’s events. 💔

If a book had a decent number of diagrams and charts, would you want the audio version or would you want the physical/ebook (visual version)?

Secondary question- if those charts and diagrams are described in the audio version by someone who knows what they are talking about, would that affect the answer?

My thoughts to Brad, I think are worth broadcasting, as I work how how to best use and support Nostr: nostr:note1zudecullqey4rw6wdrkgpc2ajjtyqcrfwqedgwcyvfajlklpzt7sxrc358

Like IG shops.

Our minds are easily hijacked by things or people that we violently disagree with - strengthening them by our focus. If that works for you, continue….

But, if you focus on the best in people and the world you want, it too will expand, and everything else will fade out.

#Bitcoin

#Nostr

Maybe shops, a wallet that can easily convert sats/btc to usd.. my two top guesses.

Before you develop the next project or write the next code think of small business owners & service providers. How can you add value to their businesses and make them use #Bitcoin as their main currency even if they don’t support it now.

Speak their language, they’d love it.

💤 💭

I agree for digital things in the digital world. Fortunately many thinks in the physical world of bodies, food and objects have their value in just the mixture of their singularity and temporal/local availability. 🌹🔥🥰

Free choice, right, but I can still tell you why it's stupid.

dergigi.com/vew

Nostr allows for distributed entrepreneurship.

Big tech companies have no incentive to invest in locking a user base in a distributed value-sharing protocol since the users can seamlessly migrate with their data to the next value supplier.

This allows many micro-entrepreneurs to cater to the audience previously crowded out by said big tech. The network rapidly judges these many small products by their value to and interconnection with the entire network of users and other products. This distributed entrepreneurship process increases value for all at an ever-increasing rate.