excerpt from new podcast:

Flip The Cube

Interstellar space travel, emotional reactions as collateral damage, building confidence

imagine your thought processes were like an AI, and you're burning untold tokens on your retarded political ideology

Think there's a misconception about traditional finance and debt that's similar to the misconception about capitalism itself. Capitalism presupposes private property, and in so doing, doesn't interfere with wealth creation. Crony capitalism is when people who already have capital use it to rig the rules in favor of the connected few. The existence of crony capitalism isn't a knock on capitalism, private property and wealth creation, it's an abuse by bad actors disguised as wealth creation. Lending and debt are not bad in and of themselves. They allow people and companies to raise capital at an agreed-upon cost. But money printing via debt is an abuse of this tool wherein banks can fund loans out of thin air. For example, if I want to lend money to earn interest, I can loan it to the government (T-Bills) or a company (corporate bonds), but in order to do so I have to raise the cash, maybe be selling some other asset or earning it. But when a bank issues a mortgage, it's not selling one of its existing mortgages to free up the funds, or selling any other assets. It gets to keep its existing assets while issuing a new loan. That means it's increasing the money supply, i.e., printing. It's subsidizing the goods and services (boosting their prices) for which it lends. So we rail against a debt-based economy that needs ever more loans to stay afloat, but it's not the act of lending and issuance of debt that is the problem, but the fact that it's issued from nothing.

There are two distinct threads of analysis re the middle east war right now: 1. Trump is in big trouble, whatever his ostensible aims were in starting this war, and the US is losing catastrophically, risking WWIII, the global economy and he's getting wiped out in November for starting an unpopular, pointless war. 2. Trump has reset the chessboard, now all the virtue-signaling "green new deal" Europoors are SOL when it comes to energy and will have to get it for themselves. Meanwhile the US has plenty of energy and will benefit from being the new supplier. I honestly don't know which is true. If I had to make a guess, I'm partial to 2 since those pushing 1 are the same idiots who pushed all the prior psyops like covid, Russiagate, etc. But believing the opposite of what liars tell you isn't a good enough heuristic. Liars are better off ignored.

new podcast excerpt Link to full podcast: https://fountain.fm/episode/ZYod4IgREMPXJeMDl23c

an individual investment is the foreground, bitcoin is the background

had a 90 minute nap that caught me up on years of lost sleep

My @Stacker News March madness bracket is busted, cost me 10k sats, had Florida winning it, and ESPN keeps emailing me to sign up for a “second chance” bracket. But a man must learn how to take the L, FFS. One good thing about sports betting, unlike politics, is you can’t fool yourself — if you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

anyone else finding it impossible to access your notifications on Primal?

I also remember in the height of the vaccine mania. I posted that you should take any medicine, given informed consent, if you deemed its benefits to outweigh its harms. And you should not take any medicine whose harms you deemed to outweigh its benefits. It really didn't matter what someone labeled that medicine. I think it's the same with actions of the state: if you think the actions will benefit you, you ought to support them. If you think its actions will cause more harm than benefit you should oppose. If you don't know, then you should wait and see before taking a position. I know most decent people don't like war and most wars have caused more harm than good. So people are rightly wary when one country attacks another. But the word "war" is not very precise. Do we mean a trade war, an information/propaganda war, a proxy war, a military operation, a ground invasion and occupation, all of these can be categorized under "war". But all are very different things. The question shouldn't be, "am I against war?" but whether this action is going to benefit my interests or go against them. There's no anti-war, there is anti-invading Iraq and killing a million people for non-existent WMD, squandering $6T to the MIC and destabilizing a country. That was not in a regular person's interest. There is no anti-vax, there is anti covid mRNA shots that don't stop the spread and have disastrous side effect profiles. Don't make vaccines (pro or anti) your religion. Don't make supporting or opposing politicians your religion. Be for what works, what helps. what's in your interest. And against the opposite. The core problem is people have attached "goodness" to some views and "badness" to others, so they are stuck in concepts and slogans rather than seeing things clearly and evaluating them on the merits.

People don't like it when you dissent from their religious beliefs. On Twitter, those beliefs were in "The Science" and experts and vaccines and anti-racism, etc. On nostr, it's libertarianism, anti-state, anti-"war", anti-government. Two sides of the same coin really, that coin making politics one's religion and the state its center point. Ideally, one should allocate only a limited amount of real estate in one's mind to politics and the state. It should not be a religion such that when someone doesn't adhere to its edicts, you call them "statist" or "racist". Truth is those for whom the state occupies the largest mindshare are the biggest statists. Just as those for whom race occupies the largest mindshare are the biggest racists. A tell is when you disagree with them, they call you names rather than think through the disagreement. My views are judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And judge government action by its harms and benefits to you and your broader interests, not whether it fits one label or another. You would think these were uncontroversial. And they mostly are. Until they come up against someone's religion. As someone who dissented from the bio-medical compliance, race-communist, trust-the-experts religion on Twitter and took some heat for it, the dynamic could not be more obvious. The main difference being the neolibs actually had power and they would use it to try and destroy your livelihood. The libertarian nostr people have much less and they'll just try to embarrass and insult you without consequence.