The Maga crowd cheering on tariffs and insisting that they make America strong and will force their opponents to capitulate sound exactly like the Brexiters did five years ago. They are certain that their country imposing sanctions upon itself can only hurt the foreign countries and could in no way ever make their own country smaller, poorer, and it's people more impoverished. How could that be? After all punching yourself in the face is a show of strength! We are strong! 👊 They fantasize about Canada capitulating (to do what?) in the same way as the Brexiters fantasized about the German Car Industry forcing the EU to capitulate. These things come in trends, tit for tat, soon all the countries will be punching themselves in the face to show strength. Then they'll start punching each other. Britain once again leading the world! This time at autoimmolation. #tariffs #brexit #uspol #ukpol

Rachel Reeves is delivering her speech from Siemens rather than to the commons, I guess because Business is the most important thing now? She's explaining how she'll make the economy grow. She thinks thriving businesses create jobs for workers, rather than the workers creating wealth for the businesses. So that's a bad start. Apparently as she wonders around the UK she finds our dying high streets optimistic! Because of AI and Deep Mind and Siemens. All those other politicians before her have lacked courage and not prized growth, she thinks. 😕 So she wants: * Stability Which means budget responsibility, fiscal rules, no taxing business, and thus no government spending. There is No Alternative, apparently. Growth though government spending to build state-owned infrastructure is unmentionable! * Reform to attract investment Make is easier for business to borrow and trade and build. But NOT rejoining the common market of course, only a "reset". 😆 It means improving our relationship with Trump instead. He's all about free trade you see. 😖. They'll cut benefits to create jobs somehow?? And reduce immigration, because extra workers are notoriously bad for growth? 😖 Also let companies raid their pension funds more easily. 🤯 They'll change the monopolies and mergers commission so it allows bigger more monopolistic business. Planning reform, to streamline the process and reform environmental legislation to help business ride roughshod over local objections and build data-centers and nuclear power plants and airports and windfarms even if they're environmentally unsound and bad for bats. * Get investment from abroad Because the UK can't print it's own money to invest with I guess. Expand investment schemes to bribe billionaires with lower taxes and more subsidies. National wealth fund to give billions to companies to build private charging network, and a private metal refinery to build solar power panels. Remove marine protections to allow building windfarms even if they kill the fishes. Launch an "industrial strategy" to give money to billionaires so they will build AI data-centers and life-sciences labs and deliver a privately-owned infrastructure like a crossing at Dover owned by a private company. New investment rule to allow counting government owned infrastructure as an asset (oh, a good one! 😃 ) Upgrade some railways especially in the north and so attract private business to build houses at the stations. (eh, okay, maybe some council-owned social housing too would be nice?) Finally, she's going to allow Heathrow to try and build a new runway, which definitely will not be a boondogle project that runs for years and costs billions because we don't have the workers to build it, and ends up cancelled because it's environmentally unconscionable. -- So all in all, they are determined that they will seek private growth and billionaire investment in private enterprise and ignore almost all opportunity to grow government-owned infrastructure or enterprise. Which means they will be nice to Billionaires and crack down on the sick people and the environment and state owned enterprise to achieve it. Which also means they will fail, because in reality billionaires don't cause growth, they are parasitic upon it. Growth comes from the workers, from a rich middle class proving the demand which the billionaires and businesses then exploit. Not to mention that growth at the cost of the environment might end up dooming us all. #ukPol #economics #growth #rachelReeves

Lots of folks spreading warnings: Oh, careful what you type into DeepSeek! It might be spying on you for the communist Chinese government. But really, if someone is gonna be spying on me, would I rather it was: * the Chinese communist party who have essentially no affect or influence over my life at all and are based half a world away or * western capitalist corporations who try to control everything I see and hear and push adverts in my face and bribe my government and affect my life in ways innumerable and uncountable? ⚖️ 🤷 I mean I'd rather none of them were allowed or able to spy on me but if someone has to...

The best economics video of the day though is Gary Stephenson again, on Novara Media's "Downstream" Gary is awesome.

Watched this morning. I like Richard, and agree with him quite often. But he has a very fixed idea of what he calls "money", which is a very new one really that's only existed since the 70s. From his definition of "money" there wasn't any money before that. Which is obviously wrong. He should surely really accept that there are more than one type of money. This narrow thinking about what money is leads him to the mistakes in that video: 1) "Deflation means every pound has to be be worth less". Not sure if he just misspoke there, but deflation means the value of the pound goes up, not down. In a growing economy with a fixed number of pounds each pound has to be worth more to make sure there's enough money to go around. 2) "When we face a deflationary situation people stop spending" - this may be a true fact, but what our environment and economy urgently needs is degrowth. We need people to stop spending, to stop heating up the world. Also: Inflationary money requires this constant growth but this doesn't mean spending is actually better than saving. saving is good too, and in a deflationary economy we get more saving. Is Richard against savings? 3) He seems to think volatility makes a thing useless as a hedge against inflation. My personal accounts would suggest otherwise. It's hedged against inflation just fine for me. The volatility is a result of the rapid monetization of the asset, over-leverage and speculation. But none of those things have prevented bitcoin going up faster on average than the money supply has inflated. 4) "Bitcoin can't be digital gold", he reckons, "because other cryptocurrencies exist". But this would imply Gold can't be Gold because other metals exist. It's just wrong. Those other thing's aren't Bitcoin. They do not have the longest chain with the most proof of work. Only Bitcoin has that. Bitcoin is now more limited in supply than gold. His suggestion that there is no limit to bitcoin issuance because other things can be used instead is wrong. 5) "At least gold has some uses", this is where he's wrong about money again. Having some use other than money is a BAD thing for a money. Gold is being taken off the market because people want it for electronics and for jewellery. That's bad for gold being money, and it's even worse for electronics and jewelry because they pay the monetary premium. A money is a better money if it has no other use than money. This doesn't make it worse, it makes it better. 6) "It is just an entry in a ledger, literally meaningless worthless empty. Bitcoin is a myth, it doesn't exist". And yet that is also all true of the pound. An entry in a bank ledger. Meaningless and empty, doesn't really exist. Only pounds of course are being diluted all the time, expanded by government as the economy grows. And when it doesn't. Growing less valuable every day. No money creates value. It's a measure. A meter ruler doesn't create space, only measures it. All money is a giant ponzi scheme, including pounds and dollars and bitcoin. And dollars/pounds may be worse because Tories can just print up billions of them to give to their mates in corrupt procurement deals.

Got my Strike account / app up and running. Seems pretty cool. Transferred some sats from my lightning node in a lightning payment to the bitcoin balance of the Strike app. Went though as quickly and easily. Can also receive on-chain with an address it offers. Gives me a "lightning address", which would allow me to link this account to Nostr for zaps/tipping over there, or for anyone to send me lightning sats now through it's system. I'll probably stick to using my own node though. The GBP account is fine, topped up with a sort-code/account-number from my bank, I can configure whether that gets automatically converted to bitcoin or not. Bank transfer took way longer than Lightning. Coz it's Sunday I guess? Or coz it's first payment there? About 40 minutes for that to appear. Tabs at the bottom to switch between BTC/GBP balances, looks like I can only withdraw into my own account here (or send to some foreign banks, not including UK or USA or EU 🤨 ). So can't be using Strike to pay my electricity bill, say. Until Octopus accept Lightning payments I guess, or "bill pay" feature gets added outside the USA. It's stated GBP price for Bitcoin is about 0.5% below Coinbase's quoted last-sale price right now. Plus charged me 64p in fees (Though it says they are not paid in reoccurring transactions). Got a little price-graph at the bottom. BTC is up 988688.75% in the default "all time" graph. 😆 You could have your wages paid in and automatically converted to Bitcoin, either immediately or with a daily or weekly order. Live your live paying with Lighting or some other bank's credit card, then pay your credit card bill monthly from the app. Live the 100% bitcoin standard life if you wanted. All custodial though, so if the balances get beyond hot-wallet amounts I can send out to a bitcoin wallet either over lightning or on-chain. Excellent stuff. Thanks @jack mallers

I tell you what will really drive US government efficiency: A really slow redundant inefficient database! I tell you what will really protect important government data: making it all public on a really slow redundant database! What? How do you even? > Musk exploring blockchain use in US government efficiency effort >

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I can see a case for making government finance public, or for having a sign-off for every transaction, but there's no reason at all to do that with any kind of blockchain. Madness from the so-called government-efficiency department. #musk #uspol #blockchain

Hummm, was hoping I could configure it more directly than through Alby but if it's gonna require a proxy of some sort anyway. Hopefully that means that now not only am I able to zap, I'm also zappable? Probably won't ever say anything interesting enough to find out. View quoted note →

Right, well, I seem to have managed to connect a wallet such that I can send a zap now but my .onion "lightning address" isn't apparently valid for putting in my profile to receive them. Maybe have to do some kinda proxy, guess it ain't gonna work behind TOR. View quoted note →

Well, at least I managed to upgrade Debian and the Lightning Node and the Bitcoin node and LNBits, so my wallet will no longer complain lnd is out of date. View quoted note →

I feel like such a sucker having installed #Umbrel a while back only to apparently have them rug-pull the entire system and now (well, since April apparently, it's not supposed to need constant attending to here) they want me to wipe and reinstall it all. What is all this bollocks? I want to run Debian man, not some custom distro. I don't wanna download the entire blockchain again. I have no idea how to back up my lightning channels. Fuck off, not gonna reinstall a thing which already rugged me once am I? How long till they decide to only support their own hardware anyway? Meh. Guess I do have to figure out how to back up these lightning channels then.

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How to update from umbrelOS 0.5 to the latest umbrelOS 1.x on Linux devices

umbrelOS 1.x is finally here for users running umbrelOS 0.5 on devices using Ubuntu and Debian! If you prefer a fresh installation of the latest ...

Watched "The Ark", a SyFy show about a space-ship fleeing a doomed Earth, which is damaged by an accident killing half the crew as the rest come out of stasis in the opening scenes. The science is, uh, not great. Worse than Trek even, just barely even making sense. It sure ain't hard sci-fi. But its a fun space-opera. The story is pretty engaging and the characters are good archetypes. Captain's dead, everyone on-board seems to have a secret, and everyone's fighting for control and to hide their past. Lots of betrayal and plotting and political maneuvers. Watched the first two seasons. Seems like they are planning more but that'll have to wait till after the summer presumably. #watching #tv #scifi #theArk

Everyone gets a pardon today! Democrats all pardoned by Biden, Republicans all pardoned by Trump. It's a complete crime reset! A crime jubilee! Well, except for the whistleblowers, obviously. Nobody will pardon Snowden or Assange because in the corporate kleptocratic government the only real crime is reporting the crimes.

Trump: > "I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture... Keep it in good hands... Without US approval there is no TikTok. With our approval, it's worth hundreds of billions" It's exactly a kleptocract mafia protection racket. Nice app you got there. Be a shame if we banned it. We might not ban it if we have 50%. Just half. USA is the Mafia man. For reals. Sounds like TikTok have agreed terms, Trump has saved the day. What a glorious day for Trump and TikTok! His inauguration will surely be the most viral inauguration on TikTok in history. Democrats will get the blame for the ban (Which was initiated by Trump in his last term), Trump will get the glory, America will get half the money, and the USA will get control over their algorithm so it never again allows Bin Laden's speeches about American Imperialism to go viral or promotes anything implying Palestinians are real people. Hurray for the corporate web. 🙄

But there are so many trump shitcoins now, how am I supposed to know which one to buy?