Reminder that the state NEEDS inflation

Democratic Bitcoinism

Probably going to have to vote for Reform UK after reading this in their manifesto: "We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it." Only party not virtue signalling about "Net Zero". https://www.reformparty.uk/energy-and-environment

I really enjoy reading ACX (Scott Alexander) - fairly orthoganal perspective to most others I follow.

Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll

...

Chain analysis techniques work so well that they have to KYC you harder and criminalise coinjoins

It hits hard when @MartyBent says "stop working on that B2B SaaS product" 😅

Nice short piece about FATF by @L0la L33tz

The Rage

Meet FATF: The Financial Bullies Memberclub Trying To KYC The Planet

There's assholes, and then there's FATF. The Financial Action Task Force is an intergovernmental body created in 1989 to "combat money laundering ...

This is one of the most undemocratic imperial forces in the world. I'm hopeful that one day a group of countries decide to defy them and render their influence irrelevant, but that seems too optimistic. In the meantime, best to just mock them and contribute to and use open source tools that cannot be controlled or surveiled.

We need more of this in the world: brands openly mocking the government as part of their advertising. South Africa has been ahead of the curve on many things like power cuts, failing currency, corruption etc. The silver lining is that the people widely enjoy shared mockery of the state.

🤡🌎 Good for re-election if labour market slows 🙃

We live in a world where governments have access to most peoples' private communication and control their finances. Now they also have access to insanely powerful AI that can process all your communication and automatically punish you financially. This is why privacy and money that no one controls are the most important topics of our time.

If the government just printed money instead of collecting taxes, then it couldn't force you to use their money in order to pay taxes. It's a very practical matter for them. The humiliation ritual part is just the cherry on top.

Main criticism of MicroStrategy DID thing is that their use case should be easily replicable by enterprise email providers like Google and Microsoft. Strangely it doesn't seem to be a current feature of those providers, but it seems trivial for them to just add an icon with "this person is in your organisation" (or the inverse). It's also odd that they didn't use the Web 5 stack, but designed their own "inefficient" (thanks @Deleted Account for pointing this out) implementation. I honestly really want to see some kind of user-controlled alternative to today's current digital ID schemes, but I think best case scenario is that Orange becomes a helpful failure case study.

Robosats ➡️ new Tor Mutiny wallet ➡️ Phoenix KYC-free spending stack

"Inflation more than expected" = "Deflation more than expected" * -1 The errors are in one direction at the moment. That will change, but the error making will continue.

I've tried my best to listen to Joe Rogan the last couple of months. Every now and then there's an interesting guest who's not a podcaster/comedian, and I'm intrigued. But it just turns into a really tedious conversation where the guest seems to be trying to accommodate Rogan's interview style, which is actually just to interrupt their more profound insights with comments about exercise. He seems like a good enough guy, and it's great that he's popular and sometimes asks tough questions, but I can't do it - let alone for the typical 3 hours!

I thought "Four more years, pause." would make a great t-shirt, but the White House outdid themselves with the transcript: "Four more years (inaudible)."