The only reason we’re not at 200k is you assholes keep checking the price. View quoted note →

I don’t “grow Nostr.” Just use it to post without conscience things in which most people are not interested.

On vacation in Croatia. Didn’t bring my laptop, only my phone which doesn’t have shitter. Been 5 days, no idea what’s going on in the world.

A watched coin never moons.

@Oscar Liss turned 5 yesterday despite having no concept whatsoever about it.

Everything is getting more expensive while everything is also getting cheaper. You get to choose which paradigm you prefer, but the “everything is getting cheaper” option is getting more expensive while you wait.

People sell their coins because they don’t know what they own. But people waste their time because they don’t know what they are.

School is mostly kid storage. And most jobs are adult storage.

Too many people view reality through the lens of politics when they should view politics through the lens of reality.

Friend asked when we’re leaving London, told him we’re going to Split on Saturday.

Friend had a brain transplant operation. Tells me it was amazing, feels like a different person!

Told my daughter not to travel to Asia until she’s older. Don’t want to have youth in Asia.

Copying from a Twitter post I made today: Being wealthy is just having the power to allocate capital. The question is who we want doing that -- those who have accumulated it via the market, or those who have accumulated it via politics. Of course, crony capitalism is a hybrid that disguises political accrual of capital as market-based, but ask yourself whether that problem increases or decreases the more we transfer capital into the hands of political actors. In an ideal world, those who accumulate capital and have the power to allocate it got that power by providing value to people who voluntarily traded small bits of capital for that value. It seems obvious then we want capital allocation to be in the hands of those who create value for people, rather than in those who got it via politics. Socialists who redistribute capital for political gain are not offering value via voluntary exchange, but via top-down edict. Capital *might* be more evenly distributed, short term, in a socialist society but by "evenly distributed" it means more people have less control over resources, while the political class (and those closely connected to it) have far more. Moreover, it's a recipe for much less total capital available for society as a whole, as individuals allocating capital top-down are far less efficient in creating new capital and effectively distributing it than a market comprised of millions making individual choices about what they want. I would rather live in a wealthier society that lets the market choose "winners" and "losers" than a poorer society that ensures everyone except the political class and its cronies are losers. Finally, with respect to social safety nets, I understand why people don't want to rely on the "beneficence" of the wealthy, but the "beneficence" of the state is equally suspect. (Look at the rampant homelessness in CA, for example, that allocated $24B allegedly to "remedy" the problem.) In the end, I suspect it would be easier to persuade the wealthy it's in their interest to cough up say 10 percent of their capital voluntarily, then to force people to give up north of 50 percent in a much poorer society, for example. The richer and more innovative a society is, the more trivial it is for them to provide for everyone's needs. The poorer and more regulated society, wherein the government disincentivizes innovation and crudely redistributes, has to strain to provide for its most needy. Bottom line -- capital should be in the hands of those who have earned it via value creation, not those who have stolen it by violence-backed wealth-seizure. I would rather live in an unequal via wealth (though equal via civil rights) society where the poorest have what they need than a more equal one where that equality is based on collective poverty. Unfortunately there is no third choice wherein wealth distribution can be made more equal by forced redistribution and prosperity still accrues to society as a whole. It's not the fault of the rich, but of reality itself -- it favors the wisdom of the market, comprised of millions, over the top-down edicts of the politbureaus. If you don't like it, take it up with reality (God, evolution, the universe, the Tao, whatever you want to call it.) We must deal with the way things are not the way we might wish them to be.

If the US ever repealed capital gains taxes on bitcoin sales, it would have to kill the treasury companies, right? Who’s gonna buy MSTR or MTPLF is you have to pay cap gains on stock sale, but no cap gains on the underlying? Now if they instead just repealed cap gains on *spending* bitcoin, it might have the opposite effect — people would spend and replace way more, shoot the price up, and both the underlying and the treasury companies would have no comparative advantage when traded for dollars.

Relatedly I’ve heard it said the purpose of propaganda is not to serve the masses false information but to sew so much doubt and confusion that no one knows what to believe. And that such a population, lacking all conviction in anything, is easier to control. It’s a similar point to the one below — that even if many of the conspiracy theories are actually true, the bigger purpose is served that nothing can be trusted, everything is up for grabs. That way, you can have good evidence of sex trafficking, election rigging, influence peddling, virus creation, mandating poisonous injections, even Clinton-esque serial “coincidental deaths” and it all just goes into the “conspiracy theory” bucket of “who knows?” View quoted note →

let’s try again — hopefully this IS the fantasy football one.

oops, not the fantasy football podcast View quoted note →

Fantasy football podcast:

we're never going below 108 again

Last night I found a giant cockroach in my office. Heard a rustling in the plant next to my desk, thought it as just a harmless moth, ignored it. Then I heard it again skittering along the floor, looked down, almost lost my shit. Was disgusting. I have no fear of most insects, even help ease spiders out the door gently without killing them, but roaches are truly horrifying to me, especially giant ones. You can’t even kill them because of how sickening it is to hear the crunch and see their filthy guts spill out. So I naturally got my 13 YO and her friend who was sleeping over to check it out, and they screamed their lungs out which gave me a good laugh. Then the three of us strategized on what kind of bowl to get and how to slide a piece of cardboard under it to throw it out onto the balcony. I was able to get the bowl over it, but my daughter insisted *she* hold the bowl onto the cardboard as we shuffled it along the wood floor and lifted it over the ledge to the balcony, wherein it escaped, but luckily it went out instead of in, and I slammed the door shut. Good times!