Wtf is wrong with you.

I'm not some bleeding heart animal rights activist. I'm not signing up for PETA any time soon.

This makes me extremely sad. You make a post full of what amounts to a litany of torture and horror, with photos, and then imply that the only flavor of argument that has standing among serious people is one about ... economic efficiency?

Jesus. Literally.

Correct. They have made that point rather strongly in every other circumstance.

Loved True Names; and Vinge generally. A very important one, that.

I wish @davidw would come back and tell us how Uruguay is going, if he's still there.

Your first post was a while ago. What's the best novel where btc appears in a non-trivial way?

I can't bear to say. The thought of giving the fucker readership makes me want to vomit.

I have personally witnessed more outright discrimination against white men than any other group. (Not talking about online hate, where I do see a lot of racism against non-whites. I'm talking about personal, offline experiences.)

I have a guess -- academic hiring stuff and University bureaucracy -- but I'd be curious if you'd share any details. Or even: broad strokes.

they insisted that they were owed the broad brush, and that was the scary part. [...] That's the shape of war though, two wrongs making a right, two sides merely "defending" themselves, over and over again.

This is the heart of it, I think.

There's a right-wing Substack I subscribe to because I hate the fucker, hate him, I hate-read his newsletter, and yet in the course of reading it I am instructed by the framing, I see how he has assembled pieces {D,E,F} and combined them with pieces {P,Q,R} to make a certain kind of story. And the story holds together! It is, when one adopts the frame, and the evidence he has assembled, and follows his narrative flow, attending to this and not that, perfectly rational. (I don't read any left-wing Substackers because I'm already familiar with their version of the same.)

It's easy to see how if you have a burning need for X to be the story, that you can walk away confirmed that X is, in fact, the story, for pretty much any X. Pick a fucking position and if you're not a total imbecile you can chart a defensible argument for it, and go on TV or on Twitter, or start your own newsletter, and find your legions, getting more and more right the whole time, more right and more convinced of your rightness.

This isn't to say that everyone is as bad as everyone, or that all arguments are equally true and thus equally worthless. I don't believe that. But man, it's instructive. I have a much better sense of how a person could make an ideological journey, filled with reasonable-seeming logic and plausible facts along the way, and emerge a Nazi at the end of it.

Nobody sees himself turning into the villain.

There seems to be no way to have an income between now and the start of retirement. Did I miss it?

App looks very elegant, also.

Good point, and terrible to imagine. If it's already this gestapo-like, imagine the escalation of it.

I suppose that's true, it's just a question of where you calibrate yourself, what you assume the control group and the "appropriate" ambient level of violence to be.

For instance, you could start w/ Trump assassination attempt and then play it forward steadily (MN congresspeople; Charlie Kirk; these protestors); and I suppose you could start before that, and that it would get even fuller depending on what you chose to include.

Like Dalio said in the article, it's not clear, in the moment, when things start and when they end. Which is obvious in retrospect, but I somehow had never considered it before.

I hope so too.

Crossing fingers that we're both wrong.

Great to finally put a face / voice to the character! Nice oral account of SN history.

I often think about how insane it is that we use automobiles.

Mine is sex and drugs -- the ability of people to get sex and drugs, even with the full power of civilization arrayed against them, beggars belief. They will pursue both in the face of death and dismemberment.

This seems like a dangerous thing to hope for, but maybe it's the only chance Bitcoin has: we need an incredibly hostile regulatory environment or no one will ever really want to use it.

One thing that sounds like cope, and that I think both is and is not, is when people say go talk to someone in $COUNTRY who was able to buy a goat / escape political persecution thanks to btc, you privileged asshole!

• Why it's cope: the absolute value of how much this has actually mattered in practice is de minimus; the amount of value that has flowed through btc for this reason is certainly de minimus.
• Why it's not cope: the more rich nations trend toward dystopian shitholes, the more this use case will manifest to people who have non-trivial wealth to attempt to preserve, or to transact, and btc will be the best avail option.

Every industrialized country seems to be hurtling in that direction, so I guess that's a bitcoiner silver lining.

If people really wanted to use it, they'd manage to figure out the tech.

This is extraordinarily true. The ability of people to do shit when they really really want to do it is extraordinary. The fact that the road to btc adoption has been so gloriously paved, and still it's basically not being used by anyone except for speculation, is telling.

Also, I am enjoying the meta of the last 24 hrs of conversation spanning assorted threads and topics, where we have this tangle of belief, "if people really want to X then they can", etc. Big ideas that keep popping up.

It's a deeper question than it seems.

Much of btc adoption was based on the belief that it might one day be a MoE, even if it was in no way true in the moment, and barely moving toward being true.

The credible belief was everything, it pulled value from the future to the present just as undeveloped land does - some visionary imagines that it could credibly be highly sought after because of various reasons, and the belief in the future desire for it recursively pulls desire for it to the present. Very Keynesian Beauty Contest.

Hard to say what anyone believes now. Saylor can somehow gin up investment dollars still, so that's something.

Fascinating! Thanks for this. It would seem like a very hazy line between public / private, and who crosses over, and why. Like, what counts as a public statement could be argued over. Posting on Twitter, for instance? Hmm.

I would also need to believe that the opportunity cost of being a lightning protocol developer, so not being able to do other things as much as I may want to do them, isn't too high.

FWIW, I find that the way Saylor talks about focus, and the place of focus in success, to be one of the most compelling of his various liturgical pieces. Like, there's something very deep and powerful in it. I don't have a good targeted reference to an example, sadly, but a broader example is the latest WBD ep he did w/ Danny.