When the narrative is "be fearful of this impending disaster! Here, just give us a little more power and control and we'll protect you." That's a good time to be very very skeptical.
IMO this is also the primary reason politics has become an exercise in female antisocial behavior over the past 70 years. All the identity politics, victim mentality, cancel culture, censorship, collectivist action, safety over freedom, emotionally driven patterns that make up the "nanny state" seem to reflect a fundamentally feminine temperament and method of relating to the world.
If people want to be treated as individuals, they have to take individual responsibility themselves and also treat others as individuals, not immediately appeal to group identity versus group identity when they encounter obstacles.
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It's a struggle of good versus evil. Unfortunately many people on the side of good don't have a mental model that includes landing in prison for doing good. When that possibly becomes obvious, they'll switch sides immediately out of either fear or genuine confusion. Sad, but inevitable. Beware who you trust.
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Same, except I never started listening to NPR.
It's been an amazing few years since then, like seeing the matrix for the first time
It is nuts, no doubt.
I must have misunderstood your point, I thought you were trying to say that the difference between the inflation rate and the mortgage interest rate means the bank is losing purchasing power by making the loan.
Who on Nostr wore a mask for 2 years? Are you confusing us with Fakebook and Twatter users?
The global monetary ledger is an SQL database at the Federal Reserve. Every other fiat currency is just an L2 on the dollar network. The L2's will collapse or survive based on the Fed's decisions.
The real change happens when the L1 goes too far in their bailouts, and people abandon ship to a new and better L1. Like any other sinking ship, the people who panic first panic best.
If you aren't panicking yet, today is a great day to start.
This article explains the banks' incentives.
https://open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the-big-bank-lie?r=3i492j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
They aren't losing anything. Once you understand how banks actually work, a lot of other things will make more sense to you.
If you're able to buy a house at those rates, the banks are giving you an amazing opportunity to short fiat against a hard(ish) asset for 20 years.
The layer 2 mints are just code, they can run on any server anywhere in the world.
I don't know how fully retard the US empire wants to go, but I wouldn't want the job of trying to shut down specific servers globally. They might find it more difficult than they anticipate.
They also might get their ass handed to them in court, although that would be a miracle.
Way too relatable...
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another L for the golf-cart-as-a-vehicle crowd 🤣 #zapathon
Klaus Schwab: "One factor for success is public-private co-operation."
"I'm propagating what we [now call] 'stakeholder capitalism', which means... business is also a social organism, and business has to take care of society, and has to take care of the environment."
"So the objectives of business and governments, even if the roles are different in execution, the objectives have become identical."
What we now call "stakeholder capitalism"? Sorry, I'm not calling it that. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And it already has a name. It's called fascism. No thanks 👎🏼
Capital gains tax is disgustingly immoral to begin with. If you buy assets to avoid getting diluted by the completely unconstitutional and undemocratic inflation tax levied by the unelected banking cartel, they turn around and confiscate the "gains" you made the minute you sell, even though those "gains" just maintained your purchasing power, and may not have increased your purchasing power at all.
Levying the cap gains before you sell the asset is just rubbing your face in the shit sandwich before they pry your jaw open and shove it down your throat.
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Given global birthrate trends, we're about to find out ...
I wouldn't call it financial regulation, I'd call it theft. Physically coercing a population and taking their resources is a dangerous thing. The parasitic bureaucracy isn't going to do it, they're going to hire some goons to take that risk and exert that force. But that's a game with diminishing returns, because the more you take, the harder people resist, the more force it takes to coerce, the more you have to pay the goons. Eventually it's going to cost a dollar in goon wages to extract a dollar in peasant resources, and there's nothing left over for the parasite class.
The ability to issue credit means the parasite class can extract resources like you say, without leaving their desk, simply by skimming off everyone's purchasing power. This has two advantages. One, it has zero cost, since it's not physical force, so spineless bureaucrats don't even have to hire a goon squad to do their dirty work for them. Two, the amount extracted can be much higher, since most people don't understand who's robbing them, how much is being stolen, or how to protect themselves.
If the government sent a SWAT team to each house and physically took half of everyone's belongings, let's just say mortality rates would rise rapidly. But a government can enforce 50% inflation and no heads will roll.
To your point, Bitcoin removes this "point and click coercion" cheat code, which is exactly why the parasite class will fight it tooth and nail as soon as they grasp the reality of their fate.
Not a lawyer either, but I know money laundering is a fake crime, so I doubt the technical definition of money is any obstacle to persecution under that law. If it's advantageous for Bitcoin to be money for the purpose of criminal prosecution, and a commodity for the purpose of taxes, that's the ruling I expect from the courts. The history of Societ show trials makes that the likely outcome imo.
“Many, let’s not forget, believe America is heading for bankruptcy. The deficit is massive, the national debt is exploding, and underneath it all lies the underreported but truly eye-watering figure of $175 billion, which is what the US Treasury projects it will need to actually fund its social safety net. And what is America’s political class doing in the face of this looming fiscal disaster? They are quite literally borrowing money to send to Ukraine and Israel instead — a move that, in the corporate world, would be considered asset stripping.”
https://unherd.com/2024/04/why-the-west-will-refuse-to-fight/
As one of our leading congressrats so politely pointed out, most of that money doesn't actually go to Ukraine, it goes to US military contractors who manufacture weapons to send to Ukraine. Since using weapons quite literally destroys wealth, it doesn't really matter who gets the weapons or whether they're even used. The real purpose is wealth redistribution from the US tax donkeys on dollar savers to the military industrial complex, the banksters, and their political puppets.
This is classic looting of the Treasury, the typical last gasp of dying empires throughout history.
Absolutely, I've been under the impression that a day of reckoning on that question was inevitable ever since the Salvador legal tender law. It seems like a strong argument could be made for Bitcoin being a foreign currency rather than a commodity.
But we're in the stage of collapse where the verdict will be whatever benefits the power structure, so asking logical questions is really a waste of time.