AML laws aren’t designed for the rentier class who control the money. They’re designed to control the rest of us.

Nothing challenging like many of these folks.

Nodes

Word processing

Fiat job (sync with some machines)

Miner monitoring

My 2.7 lb Air sure is delightful to carry…

My wife watches Netflix. I’m content with mempool.space.

Neither.

-Put that money in Bitcoin

-Use your old computer until after the halving

-Nibble off what you need for an Air then

One must remember prisoner-on-prisoner violence. Prisoners are always out of sight, our of mind. If one packs ten times as many prisoners in the same jail space designed for smaller populations, they are unlikely to get along, or to be managed in a humane way.

Real management of social unrest isn’t done by imprisoning the poor and disenfranchised, but by creating social systems that lift them up and disincentivize the gang life.

Glad to have read “Climate Challenged Society” the other week (Dryzek Oxford, 2013). A concise description of climate concepts, social policies, and economic and political considerations around climate management.

https://academic.oup.com/book/41692?login=false

🤦🏼‍♂️

Most of our “growth” is contrived…just a balance sheet rendition of the effects of inflation.

They preach that inflation is good. Inflation is good if you want to encourage spending over saving. That spending culture drives exchange, which fuels corporate profits and regressive tax growth. That culture also keeps people working longer, which further shifts work energy from the people to the neoliberals who design economic policies.

With extra resources, one can either pursue expansion, or an improved quality of life. Not both.

The allure of expansion is pushed on the people, because it justifies inflation, longer working lives, and austerity measures that shift value from social services to corporate needs.

I advocate for investing in improved quality of life at the expense of expansion. A steady-state economy, which incorporates a deflationary currency like Bitcoin, leads to less consumption, shorter working lives, resource availability for the poor, and more equitable social policies. The billionaire class, and the corporations and governments that kowtow to them, will have to give up their thrones of exploitation.

It’s not what you make. It’s what you keep.

It’s hard to keep, if your currency is losing value.

Today, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies. The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation. Tax favoritism for real estate, privatization of oil and mineral extraction, and banking and infrastructure monopolies add to the cost of living and doing business. Labor is increasingly exploited by bank debt, student debt, and credit card debt while housing and other prices are inflated on credit, leaving less income to spend on goods and services as economies suffer debt deflation. Today’s new Cold War is a fight to internationalize this rentier capitalism by globally privatizing and financializing transportation, education, health care, prisons and policing, the post office and communications, and other sectors that formerly were kept in the public domain. In Western economies, such privatizations have reversed the drive of industrial capitalism. In addition to monopoly prices for privatized services, financial managers are cannibalizing industry by leveraging debt and high- dividend payouts to increase stock prices.

Read Michael Hudson.

13th Amendment to the Constitution:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”

Where does the average 30 year old’s daily wage go?

43% Housing/Rent

10% Insurance

20% Debt service

Doesn’t leave a lot for production, saving, building a family, food, or study.

The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it’s not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.

-Michael Hudson

...

"The argument that bureaucratic organizations devote more energy to the maintenance of hierarchical relations than to industrial efficiency gains strength from the consideration that modern capitalist production arose in the first place not because it was necessarily more efficient than other methods of organizing work but because it provided capitalists with greater profits and power. The case for the factory system, according to Stephen Marglin, rested not on its technological superiority over handicraft production but on the more effective control of the labor force it allowed the employer. In the words of Andrew Ure, the philosopher of manufactures, introduction of the factory system enabled the capitalist to “subdue the refractory tempers of work people.” As the hierarchical organization of work invades the managerial function itself, the office takes on the characteristics of the factory, and the enforcement of clearly demarcated lines of dominance and subordination within management takes on as much importance as the subordination of labor to management as a whole. In the “era of corporate mobility,” however, the lines of superiority and subordination constantly fluctuate, and the successful bureaucrat survives not by appealing to the authority of his office but by establishing a pattern of upward movement, cultivating upwardly mobile superiors, and administering “homeopathic doses of humiliation” to those he leaves behind in his ascent to the top."

Lasch

"When policy making, the search for power, and the pursuit of wealth have no other objects than to excite admiration or envy, men lose the sense of objectivity, always precarious under the best of circumstances. Impressions overshadow achievements. Public men fret about their ability to rise to crisis, to project an image of decisiveness, to give a convincing performance of executive power. Their critics resort to the same standards: when doubts began to be raised about the leadership of the Johnson administration, they focused on the “credibility gap.” Public relations and propaganda have exalted the image and the pseudo-event. People “talk constantly,” Daniel Boorstin has written, “not of things themselves, but of their images.”

Christopher Lasch

The Culture of Narcissism

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This is what I tell shitcoiners when they try to sell me on some new dog coin. Bitcoin isn’t about speculative gains. It isn’t even designed for you, you wealthy entitled doctor in suburbia, US. Bitcoin is about stabilizing the lives of people who need a release from the bondage of oppressive governments, economies, and geographies.

Many who find fault with the financial system have a habit of quoting and promoting ideas put forth by its greatest advocates and defenders. Bankers, billionaires, and fund managers are not disparaging government policies because they love you. They disparage regulation because it impedes their ability to shift value from the masses into their own pockets. Let’s quote people who have something to say.