I hate this

Fuck the debate, let’s bring back duels.

Hey Nostr, guess - WHAT CHART IS IT ? 😎

I grew up in a different country to the uk of today.

Every single service in the uk is in utter decline.

The only thing the uk has going it for it now is breakfast and Glastonbury.

And I didn’t get tickets this year 😢

I’m scripting a video about the decline of the uk and it’s so cathartic to voice just how shit everything has got.

I grew up in a different country to the uk of today.

True, but this one is recent, specific, and not as extreme as communism. This is a mixed economy but with a very specific decade-long burst of central planning expansion on top of it.

It shows, yet again, how a bunch of reasonably intelligent people who want mostly rational things (better transportation infrastructure, well-designed cities to alleviate major Cairo congestion, new development on beautiful coasts for tourist inflows, more energy generation, etc) can still fuck things up pretty badly, because central planning inherently has so many massive shortcomings and inefficiencies compared to private alternatives.

Because a lot of it is visual and measurable, and occurred within the past decade, Egypt is currently providing a useful case study in the perils of central planning.

The country over the past ten years (when current leadership took over) took on $120 billion in external debt, and also used a lot of local deficit spending, with the reasonable goal of building lots of new infrastructure, alleviating congestion with new cities, and boosting international tourism to what are some of the best beaches in the world.

But details and order matter. And an entity with a monopoly on violence has less incentive to get the details and path dependence correct, and has fewer error correction methods built in than private developers do.

So the government built a big network of roads and bridges, which helped somewhat, although many of the roads are badly designed and always delayed. They built an entire new capital city for the government and military HQ, along with business and residential districts, which nine years in is still mostly vacant. They are developing the north coast city of El Alamein, but unlike well-designed private developments (eg in El Gouna on the Red Sea), the government was heavily involved for El Alamein, did massive overbuilding with incongruent designs that will take decades to fill (by which time the buildings will be deteriorating).

Now they have chronic power outages due to insufficient power generation. They are building their first nuclear facility, but it only began in 2022 and won’t be finished until 2026 or later (probably later). Maybe they should have started that facility earlier, before their now-empty city…

The average Egyptian pays for a lot of this through currency debasement. They look around and say “yes there are new bridges and entire new cities, but it takes me more hours of work to afford a car than it did ten years ago and there are three-hour power outages each day…” Basically they get taxed in opaque ways via debasement, and don’t benefit from most of the development that they are paying for.

And while those developments might make sense if successful, the order of development, the details of development, and so forth have clearly been suboptimal.

Anyway, good morning.

hopping on Bloomberg TV in a few minutes

time to orange pill 🫡

Buy $200 worth of #Bitcoin each week and everyone tells you how risky it is.

Spend $200 each week for a bottle of alcohol in a club and people will give you fist bumps and tell you how good of a friend you are.

Society programs you to be poor. You gotta find your own way.

I’ll zap the first person who knows who this is

How to look great, feel great and live longer for FREE.

Five simple things literally anyone can do right now…

1. WALK

Literally just walk.

It’s easy.

It’s free.

It’s good for your body.

It’s good for your mind.

People who walk more live longer.

Just walk.

—

2.

SUN

Sun is good.

Sun is good for YOU.

It’s literally the only reason anything is alive on this planet.

Without the sun we all die.

People who spend more time outside in the sun live longer.

Plus, everyone looks better with a tan.

Get sun.

—

3. WATER

Your body is mostly water.

You should drink more water.

Water is the essence of wetness and wetness is the essence of beauty. — Zoolander.

Your body works better and your mind is sharper when you’re hydrated.

Your metabolism is better when you’re hydrated.

Drinking water is good for you.

People who drink more water live longer.

Drink water.

—

4.

LIFT

Just lift stuff.

Stuff is everywhere and you can lift it.

You don’t need a gym.

Literally just pick stuff up and put it down then do it again.

If you don’t have stuff just lift yourself.

Your body is heavy.

Lift it off the ground or hang from stuff.

Lift stuff.

—

5. FAMILY

Family is the best.

Spend time with your family.

People who spend more time with family live longer.

Make babies.

Hang out with your babies and your spouse and your parents and your siblings and your relatives.

Family is everything.

—

To recap:

1. WALK

2. SUN

3. WATER

4. LIFT

5. FAMILY

That’s it. It’s not complicated.

#healthstr (idk if that’s a hashtag people use but I’m doing it)