*When a handful of politically aligned billionaires control where millions get their information, editorial independence becomes impossible. This isn’t hidden conspiracy. It’s visible consolidation dressed as saving an app from foreign control while enabling domestic ideological alignment.* View quoted note →

*If Bitcoin can be killed by one attacker sending one instance of illegal content, then it was never antifragile. This argument concedes Bitcoin can’t survive adversarial use, which undermines the entire value proposition* View quoted note →

*Asymmetric tech and non government money give unalienable freedoms and optionally to enough people where the state is essentially starved of bodies and capital and devolves into something many orders of magnitude less powerful…* View quoted note →

*Purpose isn’t found in the product, it’s in the process of removing weight*

Stacker News

Vibe Tools, Not Apps \ stacker news ~builders

And vibe them for you, because what the hell do you know about what other people want anyway? We've entered a phase of world history where basic co...

*Here’s the 4-step vibe shift: Find Your New Ore: What pisses you off in 0.2 seconds? That's not a problem, it's your personal gold vein wrapped up in a superabundance of quartz. Mine that. Enter & Center ( ): Stop asking ChatGPT for answers. Step toward YOUR pain? Sage advice? Idk. Your gut is the only compass that matters. Transmute (coagulate): Don't just complain. Build the exact tool that pins a problem to the mat. That's you turning lead into gold. Spin & Empower (values . curves): You just turned a headache into a tool. That's permanent power-up. The energy you wasted on base metal is now momentum.*

*The best apps will win on merit, not lock-in* View quoted note →

Paul Krugman: Economic reality has a habit of throwing you curveballs — events you didn’t anticipate when making your predictions. Specifically, most economists, myself included, expected tariffs to be the big economic story of 2025. After all, in just a few months Donald Trump has reversed 90 years of pro-trade U.S. policy, sending average tariffs to their highest level since 1934. Predictably, supply chains have been disrupted, consumers face higher inflation, and farmers can’t sell their crops abroad. Yet the economic consequences of the radically self-destructive turn in U.S. trade policy have been matched, perhaps even overshadowed, by a development that has nothing to do with policy: An enormous surge in spending on “AI.” Scare quotes because ChatGPT and its rivals aren’t really artificial intelligence. But they are impressive, routinely doing things that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. And the surge in AI investment — a tech boom the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1990s — has buoyed the economy in the short run, offsetting the drag from Trump’s tariffs. Without the data center boom, we’d probably be in a recession.

*A political party is a little like a religion. It requires people to believe in it for it to matter. Over a long and august history it might amass institutions, pomp and traditions, but these can easily become museum pieces if the idea underpinning it all ceases to be believable and believed.*

The one sign that shows the Tories are in real trouble — The i Paper

The Conservative Party cannot take its future for granted

*It’s worse to be ignored than to be insulted. Even their worst critics seem to have decided they aren’t worth the trouble of shouting at. That points to the danger that the Conservatives are in. If everyone simply stops believing that you are relevant, then it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.*

The one sign that shows the Tories are in real trouble — The i Paper

The Conservative Party cannot take its future for granted

*We’re living in a time of extraordinary capital concentration. On one end of the spectrum, trillions are pouring into AI platforms and a handful of megacap stocks. On the other, gold and silver, through breaking records, remain afterthoughts in most portfolios.*

The Case For Balancing AI Optimism With Gold Realism — Forbes

Prudent risk management demands that investors consider allocating to risk-off assets, including gold and silver.

*What's particularly missing… is a moral compass to properly evaluate what you've learned* View quoted note →

*Most people are oblivious to what money is, even those who spend thier lives in finance* View quoted note →

*As The British Empire declined the elites based in The City of London established the offshore tax havens to stash their wealth. Trump is doing the same thing but via virtual means.*

Stacker News

The Point of Crypto is Skulduggery (Financial Times, Jemima Kelly) \ stacker news ~econ

The Financial Times get a lot of crap from Bitcoiners, and by and large it's deserved. But this one by Jemima on the Trump family's shenanigans was...

*the people worth knowing… want to witness you becoming more of who you already are.* View quoted note →

*Real freedom isn’t being random. It’s being so grounded in who you are that other people’s perception of you becomes irrelevant. Most people spend their whole lives shapeshifting for an audience that isn’t even paying attention.* View quoted note →

*By reducing the brain to a computer, we elevate the machines to our equals while downgrading ourselves to machinery.* View quoted note →

*This platform allows for the realization of Kevin Kelly's idea of a thousand true fans* View quoted note →

*The greatest threat to Bitcoin wasn’t government regulation or corporate takeover, Marek had finally understood. It was the community itself becoming so certain of its righteousness that it stopped questioning whether it might be wrong. Satoshi had built a system that didn’t need heroes, priests, or prophets. It only needed mathematics and electricity and people stubborn enough to keep checking that the numbers still added up correctly. The community would do well to match that humility. But mathematics would continue working either way, which was perhaps the most beautiful and terrifying thing about it. Bitcoin would survive its own community, just as Satoshi had designed it to survive everything else. The code was set in stone. The people around it were not. And that had always been both the promise and the problem.*

Stacker News

The Quiet Fork \ stacker news ~BooksAndArticles

Prologue: The Promise In 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a simple statement that would reshape money forever: “The nature...

*And although most people were happy with their results, some reported things like acute anxiety following treatment, which suggests “elective aesthetic procedures may, in some individuals, exacerbate underlying mental-health vulnerabilities rather than ameliorate them”. Which makes me wonder, when Botox is marketed as empowerment, what are the long-term effects to your mental health, of getting your self esteem from a needle?* View quoted note →