Read a commentator on Twitter who suggested months ago that Trump is rejecting the Israel/neocon/MIC faction for the more lucrative Saudi/Middle East one and that the MIC will try and take its business to Europe instead. View quoted note →

Thought of this idea because of the scams involving AI impersonating some family member’s voice, saying they need money urgently. I realized if it were my brother, for example, I’d ask who his favorite football player growing up was, and there’s no way the AI could guess it on one try. He and I share unique knowledge that can verify his identity to me beyond its reach. And neither of us have to try to remember that knowledge, it’s just there, buried in our minds, without effort, forever. This is just a wider extension of that. View quoted note →

Idea for @jack mallers or @jack and anyone else who has the wherewithal to make what I would call the “boomer” wallet. You generate your seed via questions about your life that only you would know and that you would never forget. Save the order in which they are asked on a central server. Favorite NFL player, favorite movie actress, oldest child’s first word, etc. Make a menu of 50 of these questions, require ~20. Then add three passwords, two of which are necessary to reconstitute it. Or x or y passwords. So it’s a "seed” you can’t forget, backed up by more than one password, generated in an order that *can* be ascertained if necessary. Of course, these details are guessable especially with AI, so recommend no more than say $10K or so before iterating and getting more clever about ways to make the questions harder and more personal. And of course write down your generated real seed somewhere off line, just in case, but you’re not at its mercy if you lose/forget it because you can reconstitute with the questions. Maybe you could even start more simply with 10 questions and have a lower sats limit for that wallet. And if they want to increase the limit, you increase the questions. Bottom line, people should be able to access their money via personal knowledge alone. Being who they are is enough, and given everyone has unique knowledge, no one can steal your sats. And getting used to that ethos — sovereign money accessible by the individual’s unique life experience. An experiential DNA, so to speak. Could even make a biometric (fingerprint. e.g.) one of the “words” so it were necessary but not sufficient (don’t want someone cutting off your finger.) Also warning: Do not use if taking dementia-inducing medication like statins. (Maybe that eliminates the entire demographic, unfortunately, but I do not think this is just for boomers, but the word is good marketing.)

Are treasury companies the new banks? Or do we no longer need banks, and therefore these companies won’t be able support offices and employees who siphon off the value of their assets vs hodlers who don’t have those costs?

Which of you retards is selling?

Thank God Mother’s Day is over so I can stop being so nice to my wife!

Walking home from the Padel tournament yesterday because the metro for some reason was closed. In the park they had an temporary oyster stand for whatever reason. Initially passed it by, but it’s the nicest small park in Lisbon, and why not stop, have a few Setubal oysters and paper cup of vinho verde? Six oysters and a glass (cup) of wine 16.5 euros. They were great, I was thirsty from the Padel, and the cheap, fizzy, 11 percent alcohol green wine was perfect. Europe is screwed in so many ways, but can still be a very civilized place.

was talking with a Portguese friend of mine about the catastrophic socialist policies of his government (ours now that I have citizenship), and he agreed that the bureauracy and poor incentives are bad, but he differed with me on the need for a social safety net. I agreed a social safety net is important, but asked him, what’s the best way to go about building it? Is seizing significant portions of the population’s declining wealth via force and letting bureaucrats squander most of it, only to redistribute some of it, or to create the most prosperous society imaginable such that the amount needed for a safety net would be a tiny portion? I get that we don’t want to count on the beneficence of our overlords, but what if it only required 5 percent of a country’s wealth to take care of the elderly, infirm and incapable rather than 50 percent? What if that 5 percent were delivered with 80 percent efficiency rather than less than 50 percent? Per @Jeff Booth technology makes things ever cheaper over time, and an ever more prosperous and progressing society should be able to trivially take care of those who really need it. At 5 percent, it doesn’t take much beneficence to provide for those in need, but at 50 percent (and poorly managed), the immiserated many will fail the needy (as they do now) in myriad ways regardless.

Had an idea the other day after walking back from my run: MSTR is going to destroy companies like AAPL in growth and eventually market cap because AAPL has to sell products to generate revenues in dollars to accrue to its market cap while Saylor is just cutting out the middleman and stacking his directly. And it can never catch him because to try and do so would send the price to the strastosphere. So it can’t compete as a treasury company, and it will lose trading its products for dollars or stock buybacks. It will eventually have only one move, and that will be to take only sats for iPhones. In short, there is no reason treasury companies should be worth more than real companies that make useful things, but it will be the case so long as those companies are trading their products for the rapidly debasing asset instead of hard money. They will have to pivot in order to compete, and that’s when “suddenly” happens. The government won’t like this obviously because it will debase the dollar even further, but if the biggest companies in the world have no choice, it will have no choice too. Best they could do is back the dollar with sats and make it redeemable at a fixed rate, in which case AAPL could still take dollars, but it would first have to acquire so many sats that that were possible. We don’t want or need 1000 treasury companies. Actually we don’t need any, but that they exist is going to force everyone’s hand.

New podcast: https://rumble.com/v6t53i1-chernobyl.html

This is not it, but yesterday, went to the track, my entry card didn’t work. This was the second time in a row that happened, and the clerk/guard at the desk who I’m friendly with frowned and asked if I was sure I had paid my monthly 16 euro fee. I said yes, I paid more than a week ago, and I was sure. She said my payment wasn’t showing up in the system, and this was all in Portuguese which I only half-understood, so she brings a guy security guard over who speaks English and he says there’s nothing they can do, maybe I should bring a receipt? And so I showed them my bank statement (compromising my privacy, but I did not give a fuck), showed the 16 euros taken out, and the dude said there’s no indication of the payee. So I launch into an expletive-laden tirade mostly in bad Portuguese, some English (the expletives) how Portugal is a beautiful country, but the bureacracy in every smallest detail is destroying it totally. Like I’m going to carry around a fucking printed-out receipt for my 16 euro track re-up, which I’ve been doing for three years? How many fucking receipts (the paper for which is toxic, BTW) should a person walk around with just in case some bureaucrat needs to check some box. And for what? To use the shittier of the two outdoor tracks at the college which usually no one besides me is even there? The guard I’m friends with apologizes, says it’s not her fault, but in a bureaucracy two things are always true: (1) No one in particular is at fault; and (2) It immiserates and destroys the spirit of everyone. So I’m like fuck this, start heading back home, but I just took a metro to get here and walked half a mile, so after about 100 meters, I turn back around and say fuck it, I’ll just pay the one-time fee of three euros for this time and quit forever when I’m done. Even though I already fucking paid, and last month I had to pay 47 euros for “segurança” (health insurance) even though I fucking have regular health insurance, the track wants it too. But when I get back in, they’re like, “sorry, you can’t even pay piecemeal anymore." Maybe that’s when I really launched into the rant, I can’t remember. Anyway, at some point she just says go in this last time, but I have to get it fixed half a mile away across campus at the shitty office where you have to wait like 20 minutes for an administrator to see you to get your sorted in the system. So I run my four miles, my hamstring is sore anyway, and I’m thinking maybe I gotta fucking start doing yoga now instead, but I’m pissed because I bought these $130 running shoes that are great when I was in Colorado last month, but maybe it’s time to go easier on the impact anyway. And I fucking hate running, and the track is depressing. And by now all those mRNA compliant yoga pussies probably have sweat out whatever spike protein they’re going to shed already, and I can go back in finally. Can’t even imagine the cesspool of fucking spike say mid 2022 people were bathing in. So I finish the run, am heading out past security again, and my friend, the woman, stops me, shows me her phone translated into English that she called the office, determined I had paid, but it never went into the part of the system that activates my card because of the blackout last week. Basically she took some initiative, went the extra mile and got the entire problem sorted without me having to waste an hour of my life going across campus to the admin office. In my mind I had already quit for good too. So I apologized for excoriating her entire country, thanked her for her good work and she seemed genuinely pleased as she should be.

had a really good post in my mind earlier, but forgot what it was

Watched this apocalyptic show set in Buenos Aires Monday night with my wife called “The Eternaut.” In it the main character, who is around 60, keeps having visions/flashbacks to his time during the Falkland Islands war with the UK. Last night (Tuesday), talking to my mom who lives in NY, tells me she just saw my nephew (sister’s kid) who is eight. Says he gave her a history lesson while playing with his toy soldiers, re-enacting some war between “England and Argentina.” Portugal is 5 hours ahead of NY, so we were watching around 9-10 pm here, and she was likely over there in the afternoon, watching him re-enact it at the same time. We’re not talking about the American Civl War or WWII, but one of the more obscure wars of the 20th Century. My mom didn’t even remember it, had to ask Oliver when it was. Lot of weird shit going on these days.

Some of my based friends still get brainwashed by normies they hang out with. The news media is just one giant psyop, they know this and avoid it, but because their friends don’t they get it via osmosis. And it affects their thinking and reasoning. The problem is no one wants conflict, awkwardness, etc. So you “temporarily” alter your viewpoint to fit in, to make the dinner or the walk pleasant. But if you can’t be yourself, or embrace the awkwardness, the confrontation, then I’d just avoid those people altogether. It’s harming you.

When the climate change shills stop buying properties on Martha’s Vineyard, I’ll start to take this more seriously. Talk is cheap, focus on what these people actually *do*. (I do think a major cataclysm is possible, but more from non-made-made causes like magnetic pole shifts, solar weather and heat coming from the earth’s core (per the Ethical Skeptic), one of the valuable Twitter accounts I follow. View quoted note →

Posting on Twitter feels like a rip-off now. Like I bought the small pack of berries at the organic market for $4.99. I can afford it, but I don’t because it’s a shit deal. I get the same ones here at the farmer’s market for $3. It’s not only about what you can afford, but a sense of getting a fair price. I have more reach on Twitter than I do here, but I always feel cheated as I know the algo isn’t picking up my posts for all my followers. Plus Twitter owns my content *and* I pay for it. And for whatever reason I’m always bleeding followers, rarely acquiring new ones. With Nostr the people who are online see my posts. If people like them they follow, don’t like, unfollow. It’s free, and I own my posts. I *can* keep posting on Twitter. And I get value from some of the accounts there. But it feels gross, like I got a bit scammed, so I find myself increasingly posting here.

Except that the reading glasses were a benign handicap and the mask signifies deal-breaking zombification. View quoted note →

Dude is straight-up owning the sheep in the EU. View quoted note →

People wonder who will build the roads if we stop collecting taxes and also lament that it’s 2025, and we have social media algos instead of flying cars. But maybe the reason we don’t have flying cars is because the state kept building roads.

Now I get what @Laser was saying -- lot of LLM-reponses. Wonder if we can flag these as spam in certain clients, e.g., @Nostur, ban them en masse. Don't view that as censorship like that gross tagging bot Rabble built for using the word “retard,” because you are not censoring for content, but for spam.