Without bearer assets, escaping the clutches of the State becomes near impossible.

"I’ve started changing the prompt. Instead of “What does 2040 look like?” I ask, “What does your birthday in 2040 feel like?” Suddenly, the answers are different. They talk about who they hope would be there, where they would be, and what they would be doing. The future becomes grounded in something personal, emotional, and ultimately, human." "The key is to notice when you are repeating someone else’s vision of tomorrow and get curious enough to imagine your own." "You don’t need a time machine to imagine what could be; you simply need a prototype." "Too many future visions center on technology, markets, or efficiency and miss the beating heart of change: human lives. Human-centered narratives illuminate the values, desires, tensions, and trade-offs that define meaningful futures. They help us imagine what the future brings as well as what it will feel like to live in it." "If we don't notice the used future, we risk creating innovation theater, polishing legacy ideas instead of surfacing the truly new needs, emotions, and possibilities." The "Used Future" Trap Ideo.com

“The task in life is to recognise and seize upon our own agency.” View quoted note →

“Kids have been strapped into the back seat of their lives—dropped off, picked up, and overhelped. As their independence has dwindled, their anxiety and depression have spiked.”

Stacker News

What Kids Told Us About How to Get Them Off Their Phones \ stacker news

we asked parents what they thought would happen if two 10-year-olds played in a local park without adults around. Sixty percent thought the childre...

“It’s amazing what doors, saving in hard money, can open for you.” View quoted note →

“…we need to build a circular economy on Bitcoin. The more we do this, the more solutions get built” View quoted note →

While Western media outlets may obfuscate what's really happening, the spin in the BRICS countries couldn’t be clearer: World War III is well underway, and it’s a fight to the finish over the economic freedom of the Global South. -Doomberg

“there's a real risk of hiring people who can prompt but can’t debug”

Stacker News

Meta Is Going to Let Job Candidates Use AI During Coding Tests \ stacker news

Non Paywalled: https://archive.is/VVfCL Meta told employees that it is going to allow some coding job candidates to use an AI assistant during the ...

“the only way to strike a real balance between effort and results is to resort to a sound money” View quoted note →

“Bitcoin solved the double‑spending problem with a global ledger that is independently verified by all nodes on the network. However, to achieve this, Satoshi’s solution traded off the speed and privacy offered by physical cash. Chaumian ecash grafted onto bitcoin reverses that trade‑off. An ecash mint handles double‑spend detection, while users regain instant, local finality along with the option to collapse the token back into money whenever connectivity returns.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbirnbaum/2025/07/31/can-bitchat-build-a-free-internet-with-bitcoin/

“Bitcoin is replacing bonds, not dollars. The dollar's current global power comes from the bonds, not the token that spends.” View quoted note →

@Kudzai Kutukwa - great article! Extract 1: "Schaaf's core mistake lies in treating money as a state tool rather than a market phenomenon. This collectivist conception ignores the fundamental truth that money emerges spontaneously from voluntary exchange, not government decree. His worldview represents central banking's pathology of conflating institutional monetary socialism with individual sovereignty." Extract 2: "In all honesty, what are stablecoins redeemable for? More fiat, debt-based, inflationary paper backed by government credibility drowning in deficits. This creates multiple layers of counterparty risks: the stablecoin issuer, the banking system holding reserves, and the deficit-spending government backing the securities." Extract 3: "Claiming Bitcoin lacks value because it isn't "backed" resembles arguing email has no value because it isn't printed on paper. This represents the dying gasp of fiat apologists and Keynesian witchdoctors; a worldview where money is decreed, not discovered; where value is granted, not earned; and where economic truth serves political necessity. "Backing" isn't a feature, it's a trap keeping you tethered to the system Bitcoin was created to escape. Stablecoins aren't stable; they're pegged to a sinking ship, maintaining 1:1 backing with inflating dollars. As dollars bleed value through systematic debasement, so do they." Extract 4: "When Schaaf warns that USD stablecoins might "weaken ECB control over monetary conditions," he inadvertently reveals central banking's coercive nature. The ECB's euro stablecoins and digital euro aren't about empowering consumers, they're about re-centralizing monetary control under slick looking interfaces and Orwellian surveillance. Both CBDCs and regulated stablecoins remove bearer instruments while subjecting all transactions to state scrutiny." Extract 5: "Whether your chains are denominated in dollars or euros matters little when the shackles remain identical." Extract 6: "Stablecoins and CBDCs represent the old world's final attempt to prevent monetary evolution through technological camouflage and regulatory capture. They offer innovation's appearance while preserving monetary authoritarianism's substance."

The Irony Of Unintended Consequences

"Money is not an invention of the state.

“To be reliably able to focus on something, you need to be intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome.”

benkuhn.net

Attention is your scarcest resource

how to ration your shower thoughts • care viscerally • monotask • evade obligations • timebox bullshit

“…when Covid was at the peak of madness and the Biden Admin was about to MANDATE the poison vaxx on over 80 million working class Americans or they were to lose their jobs... the Supreme Court stepped in and the Biden Admin realized it had lost total control of the population, the Covid hysteria wasn't going to win them the next cycle... they sent Kamala Harris to Europe where she declared Ukraine would join NATO. They had set the population up for 8 years that Putin was the source of evil and they played that card to deflect from their atrocious policies on Covid. Putin took the bait/ or had to and the next day every mask wearing covid vax fanatic had shifted their emotional ire onto Russia. Classic bait and switch Wag the Dog ops.” View quoted note →

🤣 “If you can afford to off-board you can afford a Lightning channel without the trustodial shenanigans run by scammers.”

Stacker News

Playing Around with Ark \ stacker news

This week I've been playing around a bit with this working Ark protocol on Signet. It wasn't a deep dive down the Ark rabbit hole, just some superf...

“If we don't become obsessed with our own hardware we will not stay free.” View quoted note →