I want to really highlight this, since I've noticed it has gone under the radar here on Nostr.

One of my absolute favorite identities on Nostr is Cris Cyborg.

Cristiane, or Cris, is one of the most award-winning MMA fighters ever. One of the GOATs. She is a grand-slam champion, meaning she has won the champion belt across four different organizations (including the biggest, UFC).

Several MMA fighters publicly appreciate bitcoin, including Cris. Professional athletes, and especially MMA fighters, inherently understand proof-of-work in practice, and so many of them also get it faster than many other professions when it comes to money.

But, as we look around, how many of those pro-bitcoin MMA fighters are active on Nostr? Hardly any. Cris Cyborg is. And she's been here for a long time, posting regularly. Many bitcoiners come and go, but she's here.

Cris has far larger social accounts on Twitter, Instagram, etc. She gets far bigger engagement elsewhere. And yet she regularly posts on Nostr. And English isn't her first language.

What an absolute champion. Give her a follow, give her a like, give her a big zap, and thank her for being one of the first pro-athletes to consistently post on Nostr for over a year now.

nostr:note1klt84ef5q26gu9q6465l8smexzwv9eytzp3632zlh5uc4ejqv0esn6jfhl

Here’s an observation about shitty Twitter algorithms.

I’ve actually never blocked or muted anyone on Twitter. Never felt the need. 690k followers, countless comments, no filters.

If someone is an ass, I tend to just ignore them or akido them and move on.

I just went over to Twitter and checked my notifications. Some guy posted in an unusually negative way in one of my threads. For a brief moment, I was provoked. But then I looked: he has 8,700 posts and 6 followers. Briefly skimming his profile, it is pure negativity. Imagine this. Like actually take a moment to think about what that process feels like for him, let alone how he impacts others.

Posting eight thousand and seven hundred times, mostly negatively, and after well more than a thousand of those posts, someone elects to follow him.

The algorithm trains us to see this and get angry. When he shows up in our feed, he seems like a normal person who disagrees with us. But he’s not normal. Someone like that is literally and sadly more in the mentally ill camp, even as the algorithm presented him to us like any other normal person, saying we suck.

Imagine if we had more programmable filters and algorithms. Like, mute people with over a thousand posts but with less than one follower per five hundred posts. That filters him out, similarly to how we would visually filter out and thus physically avoid a man holding his own shit in his hand in public on a street, who needs help but not public attention and proximity.

The centralized algorithms we have normalized, are not real life.

We give people virtual access that we would not do publicly, partially because we can program our real-life algorithms with various behavior rules that we can’t do on most virtual platforms.

Good afternoon.

The Bitcoin conference currently has a lot of political theater, and the Trump headliner is front and center much to everyone’s joy or frustration depending on where you stand on that, but I’ll take a moment to highlight something that’ll get lost in the shuffle.

Today on the main stage, Jason Maier (author A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin) interviewed progressive congressman Rho Khanna. They talked about a lot of stuff but the TLDR headline takeaway statement from Khanna was “Bitcoin is about freedom. Bitcoin is about human rights.”

And around the same time, a bunch of Democrat Congress people sent a letter to the DNC chair saying the party needs to embrace this industry better, and basically that the Warren wing of the party isn’t the way to go here anymore. Whether it’s polling data, sheer numbers about how many Americans own this stuff, or more knowledge conversations about bitcoin’s energy impact and other things, being anti-bitcoin is a losing strategy.

Yes, a lot of this will be forgotten after the election, both from Republicans and Democrats. Politicians gonna politic. And there will be shitcoinery. Politicians are currently in their pandering phase. But when I began writing about this industry nearly seven years ago, I would not have expected to see this much explicit support by 2024.

The builders, the educators, the advocates- all of your work does matter. At least when it comes to protecting Americans and others against some of the most potentially hostile government positions, the narrative war is working. We need more work on the right to privacy, and that imo is the harder battle, but given how successful things have been on other fronts, I think that front is workable too.

Immutable money. Unstoppable voice. Endless memes.

In everyday life, people hate to be the exception. They want to fit in.

And yet, legends are told about the exceptions. Legends are born from the extraordinary.

Men who led extraordinary military campaigns. Men who were born poor but built a dynasty. Women who fulfilled a man’s role out of necessity and became an outlier success. Men who created timeless art but were likely gay at a time when it was not allowed.

The woke view tries to pull everything up or down to the average, regardless of merit.

The fascistic view tries to suppress the exceptions and keep them down, while propping up those who haven’t earned it but who support the leader.

The truly based view, however, invites everyone up toward excellence. Especially the exceptions.

GM.

There are many different subcultures in Egypt, and waves of religious and cultural changes over time.

Most well-known is the fact that alongside the majority Sunni Muslim population, there is a significant Coptic Christian population in Egypt. Some of the oldest still-standing churches in the world, dating back to the third century, are located in Cairo.

But in addition, among the Muslim majority there are different types of Muslim conservatism vs modernism. There is a traditional conservatism that is rather ubiquitous in the Egyptian rural areas and stretches back very far, and there is a more recent religious fundamentalist conservatism (Wahhabism, and more broadly Salafism) that came from Saudi Arabia into Egypt over the past few decades that affects both the rural areas and the urban areas.

My Muslim grandparent inlaws, when you look at their pictures back in the 1950s, are not wearing any hijab head coverings, and neither were their adult children in the 1970s. It was less common to do so in the urbanite middle and wealthy classes back then. Rural traditionalists generally wore hijab head coverings back then and in the present, and have more conservative views. But as Wahhabism/Salafism spread through Egypt, even those wealthier and more cosmopolitan urbanites became more outwardly religious and conservative within the same generation. Many people who didn’t previously wear head coverings began to do so. Niqabs (full head and face coverings) also grew in popularity as well, alongside hijabs, but have always been a much smaller minority.

My in-laws came from the urbanite upper-middle class. So over time in the past, they went from no hijab head coverings to wearing hijab head coverings (grandparent and parent in laws) with the adoption of Wahhabism/Salafism in Egypt during that era. And then some of the younger ones (now in their 30s), who were raised with hijab head coverings from the start, began to take them off about a decade ago. They grew up being told it was wrong for women to dance or swim or show almost any skin or hair in public, but eventually shifted their views away from that, even as their parents still adhere to it. They are still Muslim, but interpret things more like their grandparents once did. Meanwhile among the traditional rural class there is no such retracement.

As a result of all this, there is a big spectrum of conservatism/modernism and religiosity across the country, and even within extended families.

In Greater Cairo’s 20+ million population, there is also a west vs east divide. Upper-middle classes in West Cairo are generally more cosmopolitan, whereas similar economic groups in East Cairo lean more conservative on average. Outside of Cairo, Alexandria, and coastal resorts, the rural areas and smaller cities all lean pretty conservative. And again, there are some differences between traditional blended cultural/religious conservatism which is generally correlated to socioeconomic class, and the separate wave of Wahhabism/Salafism religious conservatism that is more class-independent.

Among rural Egyptians, there are different subcultures north of Cairo (in the Nile delta farmland region) and south of Cairo (following the Nile down south to Sudan). A significant percentage of southern Egyptian families have a vendetta culture, similar in some regards to old-school Sicilians, which is not really present to any similar degree among rural northern Egyptians.

Nationwide Egyptian politics over the past 50 years have largely been defined by the conflict between secular military rule (who are usually in power) vs religious theocratic rule (who were only in power briefly). The secular military view is still Muslim and is conservative by western standards, but leaves most religious choices to individuals and families. They focus on economic matters, and want Egypt to be a place for global tourism and business. The religious theocratic view instead wants a more theocratic society, either through political means or in some cases through violent means and terrorism. The military secularists then become empowered by the broad public toward more authoritarian tendencies by being seen as the force that can stop the extremists and keep things safe and stable.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of scammers on Nostr, just like any social media.

All of the Lyn Alden impersonators with links to “trading signals” and stuff are scams.

Bakers of Nostr, where do you buy your bread flour? Especially if it’s very cheap.

I used to only use All Purpose flour for baking bread, and had found a great source of cheap, high quality AP flour. Switching to actual bread flour has made a huge positive difference and I’m looking for a cheaper source.

Bonus: what kind of wheat berries exactly are used for bread flour? Is there a wheat or flour even more rich in gluten that could lead to even fluffier bread?

#asknostr #breadstr #baking #sourdough #grownostr

I’m new in this platform, Jack, Gigi and Matt are convinced that in less than five years it will only be Nostr.

Have a sip fam.

#gm, and happy Saturday

I usually feel awful after flying long distances. Some people travel well, and that’s not really me.

I usually can’t sleep much on a plane, even in business class, so I forcibly skip a whole night of sleep basically, and end up with a headache and full body aches.

Over the years I’ve picked up some techniques to minimize it, but clearly not enough (travel for me used to be “hellish” and now it’s much improved to just “awful”).

What do ya’ll do to minimize the negative impact when traveling?

For about seven months after publishing Broken Money, I was so burned out from writing. I had written that book within a year, while also writing public articles and private client reports as usual. So I was basically just absolutely dead in terms of writing, had pushed myself a bit too far, and was kind of phoning it in for articles and reports the next few months with gradual recovery.

But within the past couple months, my writing energy has fully returned. So many articles in the pipeline, in various states of development!

Our first bunch of grapes from our vines.

We planted them a few years ago, they are being trained over our courtyard to provide shade in our hot summers, and they've finally started to produce.

#permaculture #permies #grownostr #growyourown #selfsufficiency

The world needs more electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers, carpenters, trim carpenters, pipe fitters, and other builders in general!

Who am I missing?

📢 Give a shout out to your trade or craft!

Let’s get some interesting ones 👇 !

#asknostr #grownostr #plebchain #careers