Everyone should just recognize that libertarianism is the only reasonable form of politics.
It’s ok to be left or right of center, but at least recognize that you’re there not because you’re right, but because you care primarily about yourself.
A great indicator for a bad take is when it is one-sided or unbalanced
A summary of how this conversation goes…
Destiny : All the answers, no questions.
Peterson: All the questions, no answers.
2 smart people who are absolutely stuck in the game of political ideology, good points from both ends but a high level of cognitive dissonance following.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/53nOWMC9TFfu4StQzs6DbU?si=9jGPjPBrTN2IPrE83UypvQ
haha great summary. Haven’t listened to the podcast yet but sounds about right :)
My favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson quote is:
“Who you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear a word you are saying.”
The idea that we ultimately ought to judge people by who they are, not by what they are saying, portraying or displaying outwardly deeply resonates with me.
One expression of this, in my opinion, is to avoid overindulging in credentials.
Credentials are superficial. While one personally may be linking an experience or memories to them, using them to posture is superficial and ultimately misleading.
Those who overuse their credentials for status, often seem to be insecure overachievers. Often they don’t have enough trust in the substance of their being to do without external accolades.
Credentialism is tempting because sometimes it can promise shortcuts, but the reliance on external validation risks disconnecting us from our authentic selves.
Why I predict an Ozempic train wreck:
nostr:note1fn3xlyeeuj33w4e0crusvwz06antlyhclazqxv9w3ghw5pxdu4asngs4xw
Tim Ferriss is not a scientist. He’s a self-proclaimed human guinea pig.
His study of the human body may not be rigorous, but he and others who self-experiment and introspect still offer valuable insights. Their experiences can help us understand health and wellbeing more completely, and they deserve a seat at the table.
Last month Tim posted an insightful article (https://tim.blog/2024/02/02/no-biological-free-lunches/) about his perspective on the project of physical performance optimization in humans.
The basic premise: there are no biological free lunches. Most optimizations of one trait come with a non-negligible trade-off in some other trait.
I would go further than Tim: I believe his premise expands beyond just performance optimization to almost every aspect of human health.
Look at his first three heuristics:
1. Assume there is no biological free lunch.
2. Assume that the larger the amplitude of positive effect of *anything*, the larger the amplitude of side effects.
3. Don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut.
If you agree with these, why shouldn’t they apply to almost every pharmaceutical, or in fact every exogenous compound?
Which brings me to the title of this post: Ozempic. Ozempic is proving to have enormous positive effects on the dimension of human weight loss. The barber recommending the haircut, Novo Nordisk, is now Europe’s most valuable public company.
I predict that we’ll find out that what looked like a biological free lunch was too good to be true and that Ozempic will follow in the footsteps of other biological free lunches before it.
Thank you for the zap nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m
Looking forward to playing around with bitkey CC nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m
Loving the diversity of new joiners on #introductions!
Please don’t be shy about posting about other things than #nostr and #bitcoin!
People talk about the free market economy as if they are intimately familiar with it. They aren’t.
A system in which the words of one government bureaucrat are the single most important predictor of the price of assets and goods is not a free market economy.
As Sovereign Engineering comes to a close, I'd like to take some time to reflect on the past few months. It feels like it was yesterday when I was sitting in a Panera Bread in NYC listening to a Nostrovia episode when these guys nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft and nostr:npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc mentioned a crazy idea to bring a bunch of hackers to an island in the middle of the Atlantic to work on Nostr stuff for two months. At this point I had only recently heard about Nostr, in fact, I was still debating between building on Farcaster vs Nostr 😅. By the end of that podcast I was hooked, I knew I had to find a way to get myself into the Cohort and start contributing to the future of the web. So I started working on a client, learning all about the intricacies of the protocol as I did. A constant flow of Nostr podcasts streamed into my ears, fueling the next few weeks as I put together what eventually became Flockstr. (Funny enough, Flockstr was originally supposed to be a Patreon/Substack client where users could subscribe to creators and consume long-form content). Once my MVP was done I sent DMs to a bunch of the big names on Nostr to get some feedback. Luckily, despite not having much cred to my name at the time, I got some awesome encouragement from nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn & Pablo which pushed me to keep going. Fast forward 4 months and now I find myself sitting in a cafe in Madeira, writing this retrospective as I get ready to return home tomorrow.
In that time I've:
1. Turned Flockstr into the first Nostr Calendar events client
2. Built Flare.pub the first YouTube/Video sharing app on Nostr
3. Built Find Me On Nostr a fun little game to spread the word about Nostr and share some sats
4. Contributed to the Nips repo
5. Visited Bitcoin Park in Nashville to meet a bunch of Nostriches like nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx, nostr:npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424, nostr:npub1yaul8k059377u9lsu67de7y637w4jtgeuwcmh5n7788l6xnlnrgs3tvjmf, nostr:npub1atn7mlwt08erz4ap47gef92xfey65a4z9ed9vec53u5kc9v94pusl6h4x3, nostr:npub1j8y6tcdfw3q3f3h794s6un0gyc5742s0k5h5s2yqj0r70cpklqeqjavrvg, and others
6. Joined SEC-01 in Madeira where I got to work with some of the most capable developers in the space and discuss the future of the web (I could gloat more about my time in nostr:npub1s0veng2gvfwr62acrxhnqexq76sj6ldg3a5t935jy8e6w3shr5vsnwrmq5 but this is a kind 1 after all so let's keep it somewhat brief 😂)
7. Created Seeker, an Events app for Bitcoiners built on Nostr ready to onboard the next generation of Nostriches.
8. Presented at Bitcoin Atlantis where I was able to meet some incredible people like nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m, nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8, nostr:npub16c0nh3dnadzqpm76uctf5hqhe2lny344zsmpm6feee9p5rdxaa9q586nvr, nostr:npub1zuuajd7u3sx8xu92yav9jwxpr839cs0kc3q6t56vd5u9q033xmhsk6c2uc, nostr:npub1jpvsahpy0vgq7gu8nfqjkeskce0gwjk8jpss590xkvjh5xxe4epsruqgsz, nostr:npub1zjx3xe49u3njkyep4hcqxgth37r2ydc6f0d7nyfn72xlpv7n97ss73pvrl, and so many more.
All of that in just a few months. I was just checking my GitHub, and my first ever Nostr commit was Oct 5th, 2023 marking tomorrow my 5-month Nostr-anniversary. It's amazing how much can happen in such a short time. Thanks to all who I've had the pleasure of meeting so far in this journey, I can't wait to see what the next 5 months have in store. 🧡
Sick! Where can I find Seeker and “Find me on nostr”?
Well presented, thank you! This will be very big!
What % of BTC holdings to LINER do you currently consider reasonable and why?
WAR IS A RACKET
There are a few pieces of writing that are modern beyond their age. One that comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, which reads like a self-help book written 2, not 2000 years ago. Another is George Orwell’s 1984, which is prescient in its description of mass surveillance and big data, although it was published only a few years after WWII.
Another extraordinarily modern piece of writing is General Smedley Butler’s pamphlet “War is a racket”. Butler was a US Marine Corps General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. “War is a racket” was published in 1935 and mostly pointed to his experience and cautionary tales from World War I.
Butler starts off by saying:
“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. […] It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
This is as true today as it was then and it is all the more shocking that our public discourse - most recently in the case of the war in Ukraine or even in the Middle East - still treats war as something that our governments wage for reasons related to justice, nobility or our safety.
“Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and ‘we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,’.
Look no further than the fortunes being made in Russia, Ukraine, the US and Europe to understand the real reasons for this war and why it’s still ongoing. If you think the people at the helm and their lobbyists want this war to end, think again.
“[…] fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.”
Who’s paying the bill? First and foremost those leaving their lives on the battlefield and their families.
“In our government hospitals are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.”
And then… way less importantly, we are all paying. All our purchasing power is being diluted and redirected into the pockets of the beneficiaries, by governments funding these wars through money printing.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a blue-eyed pacifist who believes Putin should not be resisted. But let’s call the means of resistance for what they are: The means are selected not to find solutions, not to reduce the number of casualties. They are selected to create another forever war and to fill the pockets of those running this racket.
The only thing that is not modern about Butler’s pamphlet is that it was written by a (former) insider criticizing the establishment and yet he was neither locked away nor forced into exile.
Next time you hear mainstream media propaganda about the evil enemy, alleged war progress or sanctimonious moral statements from our leaders, think of General Smedley Butler:
“TO HELL WITH WAR!”
