My husband recently observed to me how important conditioning is for people to accept things as normal.

He said that when he first began reading my articles, he was like “Okay but I mean, fiat currency censorship isn’t really *that bad* as you describe”. But then in the years that followed, he was like “oh shit, it actually is. The fact that we have to ask permission to access significant amounts of our own money at banks and say what we will do with it is fucking insane. Why is this normal now?”

In Europe especially but also elsewhere, it’s increasingly common to make cash transactions illegal above a certain threshold value. Above that value, you have to go through centralized, surveilled, corporate/government systems, or you’re doing an illegal transaction.

That seems absolutely insane if introduced out of nowhere, but instead it has been introduced gradually through conditioning and so people are like, “well I don’t use cash anyway so that’s okay I guess, in fact I don’t even know that’s a law now”.

The same is generally true for social media. Filtering communications through centralized pipes is actually a radical position but it’s increasingly the new normal. In fact, the centralization of banking and communications in the hands of the state were two of their ten steps proposed in the Communist Manifesto.

really enjoying faphouse.com membership

it's my 2nd time trying it - first time i was upset some videos are extra charge and not included in base membership but after trying other sites i came back to faphouse.com because i realized it wasn't realistic to expect to get everything for $12 a month when even $30 / month sites have quite a limited selection ...

the selection in the base $12 / month faphouse membership is fairly decent with the option to pay a lot more for additional content ...

i think this is the right model. free sites are aggravating to use ( slow connection, annoying ads, short and poor quality videos etc. ) and the usual paid subscription sites are even worse as they typically have content from just one studio that runs them.

the base faphouse membership is like an upgraded version of something like Pornhub - with higher quality, longer videos without ads and it isn't limited to one studio or style of content. but just as with PornHub there is also premium content except that its sold in packages by the studio that offers it.

i would have just used PornHub premium but they don't accept credit cards because apparently they were dropped by credit card processors over Child Porn.

Faphouse is the solution !

if you're a serious gooner you owe it to yourself to try it !

the killer ( literally ) feature will have to be when somebody from here says they will assassinate a politician, then do it.

if they never get caught that will put NOSTR on the map.

if they get caught then NOSTR is no different from any other site like GAB which will sell you out to the FBI.

nostr is still mainly used alongside twitter. in the best rare case, as a replacement. and only because people are running away from something about twitter they don't like.

there is nothing that people want to run to nostr for yet. zaps were promising, but bitcoin is still a hurdle (one that primal is doing the best at overcoming), and it's doubtful lightning could scale to a massive adoption moment.

nostr needs a feature or experience that's unique and sets it apart. i *think* that is the ecosystem of microapps over the long term...but it's definitely not in the short term. and that might be ok.

for twitter the initial draw was the simplicity and weirdness of 140 characters (we started with zero network effect, facebook had it all...that's built over time). later it became the conversation which lead to the "public square" (owned by a private corporation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). and then as it grew, it had a single point of control/failure people could attack.

nostr doesn't have to worry about that last bit. it's an incredible feature. but not one the average person cares about (no matter how much they yell "FREE SPEECH!"...if people actually cared about free speech, bitcoin and nostr would be all they used...they don't).

all this to say, we're not doomed. but what we think is the killer feature isn't right now. who's going to discover the one that is?

When I was a kid, I was interested in aerospace engineering.

My half-brother (who is 30 years older than me and was therefore old enough to be an uncle and had that kind of relationship to me) spent his career as an engineer and then an executive at a major aerospace defense contractor.

He was the most accomplished person of my family and was raising a happy family, he always kind of represented a role model of who I wanted to be. Hard-working, successful, well-off, and with good priorities around building a happy family.

As I studied math and science in high school and engineering in college, I assumed that would probably go work for the same company as him one day (which two of his three kids do now). As a teenager, I could tell you how many aircraft carrier groups the US had, roughly how many B-2 bombers the US had, how much they cost, the technical pros and cons of various fighter jets, comparative missile arsenals among global powers, etc.

But when it came time to graduate and go into engineering (during the Iraq War which I opposed), I couldn’t do it. It’s not that I am opposed to advancing aerospace or making weapons for sovereign defense per se, but rather that I didn’t agree with how the US military structurally uses its weapons globally.

I began focusing on industrial automation instead, and then ended up in civil aerospace engineering (with a focus on electrical engineering). That area captured some of what I liked about the field of aerospace engineering, but was focused on making aircraft safer and more efficient, rather than more deadly. I spent a decade there in a rewarding career, and followed a similar career path as my half-brother, meaning that I went from engineer to senior engineer to management and finance for the engineering facility, and so forth. But for peace rather than for war.

I eventually left the work due to my financial research business growing and overshadowing my engineering work in terms of scale. I had always done financial research work part time as my passion, but at some point it took off and that made it uneconomical to work in engineering/management anymore.

After several years of focusing on financial research, I got into bitcoin venture investing in part to help fund engineers and assist them in building things, which was basically what I was doing in my prior role in aerospace and is something I am still strongly drawn to.

Anyway, I thought of this as escalations flared in the Middle East this weekend. It’s amazing how small decisions or pivot points can affect where we end up in life.