If the whole universe of atoms is a chord, Bitcoin is a melody overlaying it

Replace the words Nostr for Bitcoin, X for USD and you got every fud ever View quoted note →

Things kind of worked for some people on a fiat standard I’m looking forward to the transition to a sound money standard, slow and kick-screaming as it may be, because things will work way better for everyone

In the evening time summer afterglow I just walk right up the middle baby when I’m coming down the road

Wow. Really enjoying this. It’s such a cool exercise to have two 2013ers look back and assess their own thinking. View quoted note →

That 2002 hot September after school 3:45 pm kind of feeling, sitting alone in the back of a Previa cuz your mom went back into the school to pry your brother away from his friends and get you to football practice kind of feeling, stuffy school clothes don’t fit right and you gotta change your socks but don’t know how important sock changes are kind of feeling, then listening to System of a Down on a CD with your Walkman kind of feeling GN

Debating whether to show this to my dad or not 😆 View quoted note →

“…the level of "normie" you have to be to not experience problems with banks is slowly reaching inhuman levels.” Inhuman normies are like when the goblins in Zelda all start spawning as hobgoblins View quoted note →

People’s attention spans are too short for Bitcoin, even those of us that are in it. It’s just not built into the human psyche to wait for one or two giant moves per year, sometimes less.

My dad always overpacked when it was on him to get our lunches going. Two peanut butter sandwiches, two tree top apple juices, a bunch of beef jerky and stuff. I was so full View quoted note →

I just listen to Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn every Monday or Tuesday and that’s about it for the news

Here’s my latest essay on Springsteen’s album Nebraska. It’s about track six, “State Trooper.” If you listen to Nebraska through some kind of streaming service or even on a CD, the album’s tracks just flow sequentially, one after another. At the time the album was released in 1982, however, the predominant forms of musical media were still vinyl LPs and cassette tapes, both of which had to be flipped over at a certain point in the course of playing. This structural feature afforded compositionally-minded artists something of a brief intermission. For his part, Springsteen often uses this interlude as a kind of pivot point in constructing his albums. On Born to Run, for example, each side of the record begins with a hopeful, yearning number (“Thunder Road” and “Born to Run”) and ends with a song of regret or even death (“Backstreets,” “Jungleland”). Darkness on the Edge of Town follows a similar trajectory: on side one, the defiance of “Badlands” leads to the pattern recognition of “Racing in the Street,” while the Promised Land that kicks off side two turns out to be a spot out ‘neath Abrams Bridge. Nebraska is no exception. “State Trooper” closes side one of the record, and Springsteen’s intentionality in arranging the album is even more apparent in the slightly awkward 6/4 split between the album’s ten total songs. Why avoid dividing Nebraska into balanced halves of five and five if not to highlight a turning point of some kind? And a turning point “State Trooper” is, in the way that rock bottom is a turning point for people that survive it. If “Nebraska” invited us into Charles Starkweather’s reflective mind as he sat in custody awaiting execution, “State Trooper” puts the listener in the passenger seat of a stolen car with a criminal who hasn’t yet been caught. It’s immediate, creepy, and it sounds like the narrator’s mind is being wiped clean of any texture of right and wrong in front of us. There are several lyrics in “State Trooper” that reflect and even quote verbatim bits of “Open All Night,” which is track 8 on Nebraska. It’s important to the long arc of the album that “State Trooper” presents these phrases first and that it does so in the context of a man spiraling out of control. When we get to “Open All Night” we’ll see how, true to form, Springsteen redeems his own words and presumably the narrator of “State Trooper” too. For now, though, this guy is adrift, alone and on his way down. A couple things to look into if you’re intrigued by “State Trooper:” there’s plenty to read out there about the rockabilly drone of the guitar in this song and how it sounds like the highway under a car’s wheels in the middle of the night. There are a few Rolling Stone articles on Bruce that make it clear the band Suicide directly influenced “State Trooper.” And there’s a French/Belgian movie called Rust and Bone that features it during a silent fight montage to great effect. I’d recommend looking into all of it if you’re interested. “State Trooper” is one of those tracks people remember after their first listen to Nebraska, even more so than “Atlantic City,” which they’ve probably heard before. Mostly, though, what I’d like to submit about “State Trooper” is that it’s the absolute bottom, the hallucinatory low point of an album that, as we’ll continue to see, represents a trip to the depths of the human psyche and back. Springsteen has spoken about how the process of writing Nebraska coincided with his first major experience with depression. Those shouts that come in at the end of “State Trooper” are the sounds of a man trying to make sure he’s still real, that his voice can still be heard by others, and it’s unclear if that man is a character or Bruce himself. New Jersey turnpike/Riding on a wet night ‘Neath the refinery glow/out where the great black rivers flow License registration/I ain’t got none But I got a clear conscience/bout the things that I’ve done Mister state trooper/please don’t stop me/please don’t stop me/please don’t stop me Maybe you got a kid/Maybe you got a pretty wife The only thing that I’ve got/Been bothering me my whole life Mister state trooper/please don’t stop me/please don’t stop me/please don’t stop me In the wee wee hours/your mind gets hazy Radio relay towers/gonna lead me to my baby Radio’s jammed up/with talk show stations It’s just talk talk talk talk/till you lose your patience Mister state trooper/please don’t stop me Hey somebody out there/listen to my last prayer High ho silver-o/deliver me from nowhere

Tell her there’s a spot out ‘neath Abrams Bridge where the tarp has sprung a leak The two musical poles of my childhood

Deutschland forgetting King Knut. Can’t stop the tides dudes. There are greater powers than the state. View quoted note →

Yyyyo. View quoted note →

A funny consequence of being a Bitcoiner is that you can feel tremendously optimistic about your long term future and still be fighting it out on the short term fiat time horizon when unexpected things come up. I can’t imagine not having that long term confidence though.

This is a more nuanced take than the classic “technology is just a tool” argument. That may be true, but more true is that technologies have characteristics built into them that tilt them toward one group or another holding the reins View quoted note →

First move out of a chip range may not be THE move… I’d be glad to see us break higher, but even more glad to see people sell into this and cause a little panic View quoted note →

GM How many of you are GMing from the bathroom be honest

If political cycles are anything like market cycles, maybe we’re on the cusp of a legitimately populist cohort of Democratic politicians emerging in America. Or maybe the Dems will just keep speaking to the West Coast and New England and lose national elections over and over until I’m an old man. Both feel equally likely at this moment.