posts like these is what zaps were made for. time to unload some zaps folks.

freedom money 🤝 freedom nostr:note1eppuucmjkrux55k9gmtta9kxfua56tfrfy8sankwmlf34aach6zqggurwa

#FreeRoss

$3.50 for a bank eTransfer, what is this, Bitcoin base layer?? 🙄🙄🙄

🇨🇦🇦🇺Imagine living in Canada or Australia in 2024.🤣

2020 was the entree of tyranny, the main course is yet to come...

Democracy works on a local level, and local governments serve a meaningful purpose.

Democracy works poorly, if at all, on a national level. In many ways, it is simply "mob rule."

Serious questions:

- Does the federal government serve a meaningful purpose today?

- What benefit does the federal government provide for US citizens that cannot be performed (better?) by local governments and private industry?

- Are the interests of the US federal government the same as the interests of the American people?

Outside of coordinating efforts during WW2, I don't see much (if any) benefit of having a federal government... which is massively bloated and expensive for the American people to maintain.

My opinion?

Decentralization and downsizing of massive nation states--along with their monopolies on violence and money creation and distribution--is coming.

Improvements in agriculture technology would have eventually ended slavery without killing 655,000 people.

Worst three presidents of all time:

Lincoln, Wilson, FDR

Both taxes and money-printing redistribute capital, but the difference is that money-printing does it less transparently.

With money-printing, the effect works behind the scenes in ways that are harder to quantify. That's why when a government can't find a solution between hard spending choices, they print money. It's the easier method.

People know their personal tax rate, they will riot if their taxes are too high, and they know exactly who is responsible for tax levels.

But inflation is a more complex beast. It comes with a lag, for starters, since it takes time for printed money to work its way through the system. And when it comes, propaganda built on grains of truth is effective at making it unclear to people who is responsible. "It's the greedy corporations that are responsible for raising prices, not the fact that we increased the money supply 40% over the past two years!"

And so money-printing effects people not directly based on their income, their need, or other things, but based on their level of awareness of what's happening. It rewards people who are aware of it, and are borrowing the devalued currency, owning scarcer assets, and denominating contracts in harder currency. It harms people who are not aware of it, who are earning wages in and keeping their savings in cash or bonds. Many of them are led to believe that CPI is the target to beat, which is a false low target. The real target is the money supply growth rate.

And capital gains taxes, if the cost basis is unadjusted for the rate of money supply growth, further recoup some of that value from the various harder assets that aware people try to protect themselves with.

A lot of MMT advocates act as though they found some grand formula. But really what they have re-identified is nothing new: it's that the less transparent that government spending is, the bigger it can be before people will complain. People will complain about taxes right away, but currency debasement is the sneakier method for which the consequences come with a lag. So it sidesteps hard decisions this year, and leads to bigger issues a year or two from now, when someone else can be blamed and the whole ordeal can be obfuscated.

And it's not new, despite how some MMT advocates would spin it. Currency debasement has been occurring since the adoption of coinage. And even MMT-scale currency debasement has been occurring since World War I. It is turned to so frequently because its lack of transparency allows it to occur at times and magnitudes when more transparent taxes would not.

The secret to keeping your preferred kitchen knives sharp is to keep them away from your wife, but making sure there are knives that are as good and/or preferred by her in the knife drawer.

Google is changing their search results a lot based on their LLM experiments. This feels like a fundamental shift in how the internet works for people. It’s drastically reducing links to third party websites and focuses on both the AI driven results and then tons of links to video content mostly on youtube.

So we’re seeing both LLM’s summarizing content hiding the original sources and also creating a environment where a huge portion of the content on the web is LLM created.

This is a mess that threatens to break the internet as it currently exists. The shift is going to be massive, disrupting most internet businesses and by extension the broader economy.

You only ever hear the left talking about dog whistles because it is primarily people on the left who say things they don't actually mean. Socialists like to hide references to destructive & parasitic ideas in flowery language so that they will gain both the support of the uninformed & the support of those who already understand the references. But then they project that same sort of dishonesty & deception onto their opponents & claim that rightwing dog whistles are everywhere. Which as far as I can tell is largely untrue, but it persists because it helps them to innoculate their supporters against hearing anything that the opposition has to say.

There are people on the right with awareness that leftists have this paranoia about the language used and they will troll them by coming up with meaningless slogans specifically to elicit hysterical reactions. "It's okay to be white" & rumors about the OK hand symbol were consciously created to this end.

Some small subsection of people who identify themselves as "libertarians," the subset that is far too caught up in seeking approval from the rest of the political system, has tried to use halfway deceptive leftist tactics to trick some of the left into supporting libertarian ideas, but these are never the things attacked by the left. And the reality of the matter is that it really only works in one direction. The effort required to understand & apply the sort of ideas needed to solve problems is always greater than the effort required to create the problems, so you really can't trick people into supporting anything but destruction.

But everyone who believes a politician or political party is going to save them, no matter which side of the isle, is caught up in the same religious cult where the govt is their god or their imaginary paternal figure. It's not even all that unusual to hear people on either side refer to govt as a needed parent. It seems odd to me that grown ass adults would openly admit to such an infantile way of thinking.

Interesting how the prosecution needs to prove in #3 that the subject didn’t engage in sexual conduct. Seems tricky.

🫂

Donate to help Signal.

I’m really struggling with lifestyle FOMO right now.

I have been a good HODLer for the last many years.

I sold some BTC in 2017/2018, after taxes I used the money to invest in companies, diversify into real estate and take some trips / make some films etc general lifestyle improvements.

I wanted to buy a Tesla X and build a dream home.

After some thought, I chose to frig the Tesla (even easier decision to stick with when Elon started shilling DOGE) and take the same money I’d have spent on 1 dream house to instead use it to upgrade my family’s living arrangements.

For myself, I did some minor renovations and landscaping on my existing house and we purchased and renovated an older home in Cape Breton and a Class C RV to drive back and forth with for summer visits.

That felt like the right decision, a modest lifestyle upgrade for myself while elevating the standard of living for my family and investing in Bitcoin entrepreneurs building bitcoin startups.

I even managed to buy back some BTC with the leftovers, albeit at higher prices.

I’ve been practicing delayed gratification for many years…however over the last 2 mths I’ve been experiencing a very big desire to upgrade to a more comfortable home.

We found an estate locally that is incredible, my wife fell in love with it, and I’m really struggling with the decision.

I know this is the absolute wrong time to sell BTC.

The real estate market in Ontario Canada is likely to see big drops over the next few years, and BTC is likely to see big gains over the next 2 years.

I’ve regretted selling too much bitcoin in the past, yet here I am wanting to do it again.

I really don’t think it’s a good idea to take on a large mortgage right now either since rates are so high … I’d hate to be a forced seller of BTC at lower prices in case we don’t see a raging bull market.

Is anyone else struggling with this?

Is this a top signal 😅

Do you prefer Deontology, Consequentialism, or Virtue Ethics, among the three major philosophical schools of ethics?

If you’re like “what, lol?” that is fine. I’ll have some long form content on this. But I figured I would gather Nostr feedback beforehand to be more useful or specific.