"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known"
― Carl Sagan
A key decision for every person in the world to make everyday for the next ~20 years is which money to trust. Money controlled by unaccountable politicians? Or money guaranteed by an incorruptible protocol?
This isn't a decision people will make once and be done. They will have to choose every time they transact. Every time they remember money. Every time they awake in the night with the question on their mind again.
Money is a language of value. It takes time to speak a new language. More and more the world will learn to speak Bitcoin because the other languages are corrupted. Bitcoin is incorruptible and unstoppable.
Just finished the Platform on Netflix. Makes for an interesting metaphor showing how the Cantillon Effect creates wasteful consumerism.
The food represents scarce resources. The levels represent one's proximity to the inflation, one's access to cheap credit.
The Cantillon Effect means those at the top grab as much as they can as fast as they can, saving nothing for the bottom dwellers. In this case, saving your money instead of spending it to consume scarce resources is the equivalent to leaving food on the table. If you're on a high floor with privileged access to cheap debt and you don't spend to consume scarce resources, somebody else will, and you will be left with less and less since consuming scarce resources in the real world moves you up to higher levels, making it easier and easier to access cheap credit.
Thankfully, Bitcoin fixes this.
Those infuriating scenes where people stomp across the food just because they can reminds me of this guy.
