This study doesn't offer much hope for reaching consensus between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives allocate more moral consideration to their immediate family and friends, and progressively less moving out from there. Liberals are exactly the opposite, to the point that they allocate more moral consideration to inert entities such as rocks than to their own immediate family and friends.

From the study:

" Procedure. All participants completed a moral allocation task, in which partici-

pants allocated 100 “moral units” among the following 16 categories, pictured as

increasingly large concentric circles (see full depiction of task in Supplementary

Note 4): all of your immediate family; all of your extended family; all of your closest

friends; all friends including more distant friends; all acquaintances; all people

you have ever met; all people in your country; all people on your continent;

all people on all continents; all mammals on all continents; all

amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds; all animals on earth including

paramecia and amoebae; all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms; all

living things in the universe including plants and trees; all natural things in the

universe including inert entities such as rocks; all things in existence. Participants

read the following instructions:

'In this section, we would like to think about your capacity to help, to give,

to be charitable, to show empathy, and to be generous—in other words,

your capacity to behave morally. We can think about people having

different amounts of moral units—like currency—that they can spend on

others and can allocate to different moral circles. Some people devote all of

their moral units to one circle whereas others try to divide up their moral

units amongst multiple circles. Again, by moral circle, we mean the circle of

people or other entities in which you are concerned about right and wrong

done toward them.'

We also explained to participants that these categories were non-overlapping

such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an

inclusive category (e.g., immediate family). Participants completed two iterations of

this task (order randomized). In one, they were asked to allocate moral units how

one should ideally divide them. In the other, they were asked to divide them as they

personally do so in their daily lives. These allowed us to assess differences between

actual and ideal moral allocation, but no meaningful differences emerged. The

categories allowed us to create composite moral allocation scores for humans only

(average of units allocated to the first nine categories) and for nonhumans (average

of units allocated to the last seven categories). In addition, participants also

completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking

on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral

allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4). This measure allowed us to create

heatmaps to visualize the relative sizes of liberals’ and conservatives’ moral circles.

This task was also counterbalanced in presentation with the moral allocation task,

and no order effects emerged."

Okay, this one really tests my understanding of the financial system. Let me see if I can work through it...

So the US decides to peg the dollar to bitcoin. They have to acquire the bitcoin to back it with. That's the part that seems most dangerous to me at first glance, where do they get the coin? Say they 6102 the ETFs, that actually seems like it might be the least painful and threatening way. Say they end up with 2 million coins. If they decide to peg at 40% backing of the $5.8 trillion money supply, that would be $1.16 million per coin. So they announce that dollars are redeemable for bitcoin at the rate of 86.2 sats per dollar. Let's say for the sake of argument it's only redeemable by nation states like the end of the gold standard era pre-1971.

So the only immediate price change in dollar terms is the bitcoin price, your "god candle." Everything else should stay relatively the same in dollar terms, at least initially.

Now I'm trying to understand why nation states would need bitcoin for international trade. They don't use bitcoin now, they use the dollar. Just because the dollar is now backed by bitcoin, why switch to using bitcoin? Why not keep using dollars? Isn't the whole point of backing the dollar with bitcoin so that people will KEEP using the dollar? If everyone is still using the money the US banking system can print, why would they ever consider backing it with a hard asset in the first place?

Unless you're just talking about the fact that bitcoin is now worth 20x more and governments are keen to steal that increased wealth by any means, I'm not sure I understand why they'd suddenly be confiscating bitcoin from people any more than they currently confiscate dollars from citizens in Argentina or Ethiopia or China or Venezuela today. Plenty of people in other countries use dollars (cash, stablecoins) today and the governments aren't generally hunting people down en masse to confiscate it, even though they could use it for international trade.

It's hard for me to analyze the situation because I just don't believe it's workable on first principles. Again, the gold standard only worked because gold is worse than fiat as a way to transact, especially over distance, and is also difficult to store securely. As soon as you try to back a fiat with bitcoin, you'll run into the same problem the gold standard ran into, but 1,000x worse. Every nation state that holds dollar reserves will be cashing some of those in on the market and requesting bitcoin from the Fed instead. But they won't need to send a battleship like France did, just send a bitcoin address, and if that bitcoin doesn't hit their address in the next block all hell breaks loose. With almost $35 trillion of outstanding debt, it takes less than 6% redemption to shrink the base dollar supply by 40% and drain the Fed's $2.32 trillion bitcoin balance.

But of course the idea they'd even do that in the first place seems impossible, because it would completely obliterate the entire banking and financial system overnight, the instant reality struck. Running a fractionally reserved credit/debt system on top of bitcoin is absolutely impossible, as every bitcoin lending platform collapse over the past decade has shown.

And I don't see it as something the US empire would do to maintain their power. The ability to print the world reserve currency IS the empire's power. As soon as they give that up, they cease being the global superpower. The US can't compete on an equal footing with the rest of the world and come out ahead. If they could, they never would have had to close the gold window in '71 to avoid going broke.

There are more angles of discussion here, but that's my initial thoughts.

The problem they might run into with pegging a fiat currency to Bitcoin, is that Bitcoin works better than fiat already. Pegging fiat to gold works because fiat works better than gold for commerce and transactions. But Bitcoin transaction>>>>>>>bank wire, lightning/e-cash>debit card, and so on.

So all they'd accomplish by pegging to Bitcoin, is to instantly reprice everything into Bitcoin for us. Then it would be completely seamless for the NPCs to say "oh so I can just use Bitcoin directly like I do cash and avoid the headaches with banks and taxes like cash, I think I'll do that."

And pegging to a hard currency "for real" (redeemable) kills the banking system's ability to create unlimited credit/debt. Without that ability the whole system collapses tomorrow. So I think things would have to be really desperate for the parasite class before they tried that.

But who knows, today we have bonds down, dollar up, and Bitcoin up. That's the kind of crazy action that might push things to "desperate" levels faster than I expected.

Sound money is like equity in civilization; increased productivity benefits holders of the money with lower prices, or increased value of the money. It's similar to how increased value of a company accrues to holders of the stock.

Bitcoin is still small enough that it's obvious how improvements to the network accrue to all hodlers.

They're great for athletes though. Eliminate the need to wear a cup, just slip them on once and as the testosterone drains from your body, your balls immediately retract so far you'll never have to worry about a crotch injury again.

Couldn't agree more, I've also been happy with Start9. I'm not a tech guy and frankly don't have the time to mess with anything that's finicky and takes hours of babysitting. That thing just sits on my desk running my node and other apps and I don't touch it or think about it for months at a time.

nostr:note1x9rw08t26vla09npgutvfghqxxul2weczn7c7ucpj85xfyp5zmfq2z3rgd

"Intrinsic value doesn't exist." Goldbugs have cost themselves billions by failing to comprehend that simple fact. The obvious natural Bitcoin early adopters let themselves be cucked by Peter Schiff. Oh well, NMP. HFSP

nostr:note168tsjvdsdzl7apeel53t6ggsfarn4syuhfwes3zuan0erz5xc7hq8702la

if only...

#memes

🤔

Took a century to accomplish, but we're almost at the endpoint now. The constitution has been legislated into irrelevance, and the permanent bureaucracy is a dictatorship in all but name

There are too many possible combinations, the odds of finding one within say a thousand years of compute are infinitesimally small

note1cg2zjtla3q6tg7tymlnth9c42fj60c6948lg50tnd5hw3d5ts4eqj3jq3m

Thanks! Had to do a deep dive into this mess to understand how money works, I go more in depth with how I understand it here https://open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the-big-bank-lie?r=3i492j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Also if you haven't seen https://banklies.org/ you'd probably find it interesting, lots of documentation to back up how this works.

And you're right, the reserve requirement used to be 10%. When it went to zero over COVID and stayed there, I really had to adjust my understanding of how banks work.

That's how the banks explain it, but it's somewhat misleading.

The loans come before the deposits. When someone takes out a loan, the bank creates 2 ledger entries. On the asset side is the loan, where you owe the bank the amount of the loan plus interest. On the liability side is the bank deposit that's created in your account, where the bank owes you the amount of the loan. That's all a bank deposit is, a bank IOU. You're an unsecured creditor of the bank.

The bank doesn't loan out deposits. They create deposits by making the loan. That's all new "money" (debt) that didn't exist before, the bank just created it out of thin air and charges you interest for the privilege of using it.

If you bring money from another bank to deposit, as for example a check, the bank doesn't hold that deposit in an account with the other bank. The banks settle up with each other using base money, so physical cash or bank reserves. Bank reserves are a special form of money equivalent to cash, held at banks' accounts at the Fed, and that's how banks pay each other. They don't accept another bank's IOUs as payment the way the serfs do.

So when you bring cash or a check from another bank to deposit, all that happens is the bank adds that cash or bank reserves to their pool of reserves, and creates a bank deposit (bank IOU) in your account instead. It has no bearing on the bank's ability to make more loans the way the classic fractional reserve banking explanation suggests.

It theoretically could increase the bank's capacity to make loans if banks were legally required to hold a certain percentage of reserves against their outstanding loans. But the US bank reserve requirements were lowered to 0 in 2020 and are still at 0 today. So banks can continue to create an infinite amount of new "money" by making loans, legally.

🙏🏼

Thanks for the feedback!

There are definitely serious problems to deal with, no denying that. But I think the evidence shows that the more people we have working to solve those problems, the more successful we'll be.

Topsoil degradation is one I can speak to personally as a farmer. Yes, it can certainly be a problem. But it's a problem we know how to solve. Topsoil can be created as well as destroyed, and it's really a choice in farming practices. Just the fact of growing crops doesn't destroy topsoil. The biggest threat is erosion, which is mostly a side effect of tillage destabilizing the soil structure and exposing bare dirt to be washed away by rain.

On our farm, we switched to 100% continuous no-till about a decade ago. We don't do tillage at all. That eliminates most soil erosion by always keeping the soil covered with residue, and never disturbing the soil structure that holds everything together.

To build topsoil, you need organic matter. And the more productive your crop is, the more residue it will produce, which breaks down into organic matter for the soil. So fertilizing your crop to make it lush and productive, and leaving the crop residue on the field will build organic matter and topsoil over time.

On top of that, we also plant a lot of cover crops. These are typically planted in fall after the cash crop is harvested. It takes up any excess nutrients and keeps the soil stabilized and covered over the winter. Then in the spring we kill it off and leave the residue to break down and build organic matter, while also serving as a mulch to keep weeds down in the cash crop.

The improvement in our soil since making these changes has been incredible.

And in spite of the problems with soil degradation, crop yields just keep rising year after year. Again, agriculture productivity is a complex problem. But with so many people studying and experimenting, we learn to be more productive every year.

The biggest threat to agriculture isn't anything related to resource limitation. It's actually the threat of attack by governments and globalist organizations who seem determined to handicap our ability to produce food.

Just finished a new article on the economics of declining population, check it out and leave a comment!

https://open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/population-resources-and-wealth?r=3i492j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Thanks! That looks fascinating, I'll give it a listen!

How does Bitcoin allow UBI? Seems to me like it's exactly the opposite. UBI is coercive wealth redistribution, like every progressive pipe dream. And the purpose of Bitcoin is to make coercive wealth redistribution impossible.

I'd love to hear more explanation.

Right. And since the main chain is global and open, anyone anywhere with enough liquidity can offer access. So if say the US "Bitcoin bankers" tried to censor someone on their L2, they can just access the main chain through an L2 network from Iran or Russia or North Korea or El Salvador.