“What would it seem like if it did seem like a global, digital, sound, open source, programmable money was being cracked by quantum computers?”

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I still can’t believe that Ethereum moved to Proof of Stake. Of all the dumbest self-owns in history, that has to be close to the top.

BOB THE AVERAGE AUSSIE BOOMER After seeing one too many “I pAiD iN aLL mY LifE!!” Boomer posts recently, my autism got the better of me so I decided to debunk Bob The Boomer’s rubbish once and for all. Boomers born in 1958 are now eligible for the aged pension (at 67) in Australia - $29,874 per year for singles. If Bob entered the workforce at 18 in 1976 and worked the average job his entire life, he earned $2,049,181 and paid a total of $413,082 income tax - equivalent to 13.83 years worth of pension (less actually, as the pension is indexed and goes up each year so he will receive more). Those taxes are meant to, you know, HAVE FUNDED THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT over the last 50 years and all the free shit they doled out. But in fact, if Bob lives the average 18 years of life he has ahead of him (per the ABS), he will receive more in aged pension than the entirety of his income tax contributions paid in. So he had free school, free Uni, a military, emergency services, R&D, everything that the State provided, and now he gets more than all of his money back via the pension. 10% of annual Federal expenditures go to givING Bob more money than he ever paid in. But wait, there’s more! Bob paid $33,283 in total Medicare levies over his career. The Government pays about $6,717 in Medicare expenses per year per person - the figure is much higher for seniors but they don’t make this data easy to find lest we all realise another place Bob is robbing us blind. So not only is Bob getting all his taxes back and then some, but he’s also getting all his Medicare levies back plus 3X more than he put in over the course of his pension years! When Bob says “I pAiD iN aLL mY LifE!!” the reality is, on net he didn’t pay a damn thing. He lived at the expense of future generations and continues to do so without even a modicum of understanding that is what he is doing. This system MUST NOT CONTINUE. It has already destroyed us economically, and it’s destroying future generations not born who are being forced to carry this ridiculous parasite on its back.

Money is the social contract.

US$15.35 for a panoramic mouth x-ray, teeth clean and scale, and 1 small filling (done properly, to size) in #Vietnam. That’s $23.34 in Dollarydoos - would have been $600+ in Melbourne. All staff spoke good English, patient intake form was in English, rooms and equipment were super modern, and no waiting for appointments, same day if I wanted. No fan of dentists but I’m going back for whitening next week; US$115 / $175 Dollarydoos. Vietnamese fly home for dental work because it’s cheaper even with flights and hotels to do it here than get treated in the West. They’re going to have a medical tourism boom here I reckon once others catch on. View quoted note →

How does anyone eat 3 meals a day? If you’re doing heavy manual labour then maybe, but office work with some gym/exercise is just not enough activity for 3 meals a day

Trump regime is getting desperate for JPow to cut rates, they know they need to print soon in a big way. Posted by Bill Pulte on Xitter:

There is a ~$120 Billion bounty if someone can crack Satoshi’s #Bitcoin holdings. If quantum computing was near-term viable, why wouldn’t someone loan $10 Billion out of thin air to fund a team to target this with such a payout on offer? The only thing I can think is that this tech is going to be restricted by government for cyber warfare; you could bring down a country in weeks if you could target and break the encryption of all their banks, utilities, infra, ecommerce, healthcare etc. And ultimately as hard as it is to get Bitcoin to change, updating it for quantum is going to be much easier than getting those aforementioned institutions coordinated to update their encryption.

Can’t the IRS get buy it on the dark web?

This is excellent framing. Bitcoiners are gambling not only on themselves, but on other Bitcoiners, as well as #Bitcoin itself. Either we become the new financial elite and have the means to shape a new world, or we fail and are a footnote in some few fiat history books. We each of us have immense faith in the former but know the latter is possible. If anyone SHOULD be the elites it is those who are willing to make such long-sighted gambles; this would truly be a better direction for humanity - but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. There is no in between. The boats have been burned, we march forward to victory or humiliating defeat.

My next review for #bookstr is of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. This was a re-read for me, more than a decade since I first picked it up with my worldview having changed enormously since that first pass. It holds up pretty well and remains interesting on a second look. Particularly because my political views have evolved from what would have been disengaged “left libertarian” (fucking lol) back then, to whatever you call it now (see image 2). Different things stand out to me now; other peoples and cultures having different morality’s is much clearer, the good in religion, why the right wing seems so fragmented with their more complex framework for a few examples. Haidt repeatedly notes that leftists really only use 3/6 pillars for their framework whereas rightists use all 6. I was left wondering whether this is simply a case of arrested development of the former; he never really grapples with the why in this book which is the only disappointment as there isn’t any real explanation. The concept of Anomie which he pulls from Durkheim could have done with further elaboration but at the time of writing it was probably less obvious what was happening in the culture, particularly from Haidt’s vantage. Overall its a good read. Worthwhile. Approachable for normies to these ideas whilst offering to sharpen edges for those more advanced. A book where a leftist displays some actual introspection feels rare which might be why it became so popular, but the content itself is worthy of the draw.