When my dad died on active duty, my mother started receiving a death benefit intended for me. That was frittered away on a lot of indulgences - none of which made it to me. When I moved in with my grandparents, they gave me control of the money at 12 yrs old. I was taught by them, so I only focused on saving as much as I could and laddering CDs. When I got to college, I read plenty of Money magazine and Kiplingers. By the time I got out of college, I started investing in mutual funds...back in the day I had to send in a physical check. I picked them by again reading Money, Kiplingers, and heading to the library to read Morningstar...spent a lot of time reading forums on Prodigy (yep, dialup). So started investing around 22 yrs old (1990). Stayed steady, frugal, never panic sold...and it served me well. We are not rich - but we own real assets and have no debt...and got 2 kids through college and building their own financial futures. Didn't start buying bitcoin until my mid-50s (Jan 2022), but I'm glad for the extra piece of mind of having an asset they can't debase.

A few good memes from Robert Malone’s Friday Funnies.

Absolutely - and both my wife and I have degrees...and my daughters have advanced degrees. But I favor technical education, bring back the concept of apprenticeships that are plenty suitable for most jobs, and keep our youth from falling into unsustainable debt while getting indoctrinated.

Normally, I would say that a judge cannot be held responsible for the decisions of a "sovereign individual". However, if they make decisions to release - with numbers like this (that shouldn't have gotten to within 10% of those numbers) - then I would fully support holding those judges responsible and impeaching. Only need to make a few examples for the rest to fall in line and start upholding and interpreting the law objectively.

This is what we call irony... I can't stand Graham...can't stand McConnell either (glad he is stepping down like some of his other 80+ decrepit cronies). Both are corrupt, back-stabbing, uniparty war mongers.

And me with no dry powder...

But then, we already knew that (insider trading, mortgage fraud, election fraud, etc).

Interesting theory...enough already with the price drop. I have long-term horizon for almost all of my holdings, but I did make an effort this year to start living on a Bitcoin Standard. My retirement check and income go into BTC purchases each month (Strike and River), and then all of my bills get paid using Bill Pay with Strike. And with HIFO, I'm definitely clearing out a lot of $109k, $118k, etc. Stacking some nice capital losses for tax time, I guess. Glad my wife still trusts me.🤣

The only place I'll offer a counter-view is on the topic of H1B Visas in this video. This comes from the perspective of being an analytics consultant and IT business owner for close to 30 years. We could never get the appropriate resources - for software/mobile development, test/test automation/devops, analytics/datawarehousing/etc through just a US labor force. Since I coach high school tennis now, I also get to ask a lot of students what they plan on studying in college. Almost none are picking STEM degrees - preferring business, marketing, finance, psychology, etc. *** Now - side point - I do not even advocate for college education any longer (even though my wife and I both got nursing/engineering degrees...and both of our daughters got degrees). I prefer technical school - and wish our labor system had more of an apprentice-style approach for new employees entering the work force. Employers get inexpensive labor that they can train to their specifications - employees get paid while also avoiding college debt. So this dearth of STEM education has resulted in a dearth of analysts/developers/testers in IT. Not enough bodies for the work to be done, so we had to augment with H1B. This is a nuanced issue because I also interviewed many people who were unqualified and - in some cases - were sent to me by a body shop that produced false copy/paste resumes. They also paid those consultants pennies-on-the-dollar relative to their US counterparts. Our broken money system, incredible asset inflation, sense of entitlement, and understanding that they are a scarce (citizen) commodity has our US born job applicants asking for SIGNIFICANTLY MORE in regard to W2/1099 bill rate. When a client is driving down your proposal costs, and your competitors are willing to drop theirs, it becomes a work of art to build a team of US-based citizens as well as supplementing with H1B. Now - back to that dearth of STEM candidates. You do NOT build a backlog of them in a day...a year...arguably 5+ years. I think Trump came to that painful realization between when he said "no more H1B", to we need to have H1B to keep our universities open (don't care on that one) and our factories with a competent labor force. I very much want to reshore our manufacturing, and become self-sovereign as well as better national defense without dependencies upon our adversaries, but we will need to wean off of H1Bs over years while strongly encouraging our youth to get STEM/trade school education. We also need to Fix the Money, Fix the World...so employees do not have to constantly ask for raises that prices them out of the market (and perpetuating the vicious asset price inflation loop). We need more employers paying in bitcoin - and employees financially savvy enough to at least convert into bitcoin, so their hard work is not debased. Please share this post a little more - interested in driving the discussion to get other opinions. We do NOT get to recover in 1-3 years what took 40-100 years to corrupt. I would love to see folks like @Jeff Booth @Lyn Alden @jack mallers and @jack weighing in on this one...those latter two specifically because they also ran (much larger than my 100+ person shop that got acquired and grew to about 2,500) tech companies. That combined 2,500 employee company had an onshore/nearshore/offshore model to suit client demands.

Great read about the state of our society... ==== consider what this means for young voters: so long as the clear fiscal insolvency of the federal government impends and you suspect that you are being made to pay in to a system from which you will never be able to take out: why would you play? why not jack up your time preference to “immediate” and take as much as you can from the existing system before it falls over? it’s going to do that anyway and obviously, someone will benefit from plundering it to death. so why them and not you? ====

rational smash and grab

when you lose trust in system solvency, there is no longer a marshmallow test to pass