I posted a bunch of evidence on Twitter for how 1) grocery stores have razor thin margins, 2) food producer margins are more average but haven't changed in two decades, 3) of course farmers aren't the ones getting rich so 4) no, the food companies are not gouging you on prices.
It's monetary inflation. Grocery stores and food producers are trying to keep up.
Most people agree due to the inherent audience selection, but the tweets kind of went viral and reached a broader political audience, so a bunch of people came in like, "How come they can put chips on sale for 50% sometimes!?!? Checkmate Alden." (it's because they don't understand fixed costs vs cost-of-goods sold) or "How do you know any of the filings are real? What if they're literally all just lying on their audited SEC filings?"
Post-truth, some of people are. The grasping for price controls is the short-time public and political instinct that ultimately makes things worse, every time.
https://m.primal.net/KBvf.pnghttps://m.primal.net/KBvm.pnghttps://m.primal.net/KBvn.png
I’m really bullish on the next six months of Nostr development.
I don’t know if it’ll generate user growth in that time period, but I’m more confident that it’ll improve UX and applications, and thus bring in more capital for the next stage, which can then be used for more user acquisition.
If for some reason you were to find yourself in a knife fight, would you rather have a tanto knife or a bowie knife?
Any knife connoisseurs here?
Serious question though.
Guy Swann has provided an audio version of my long-form article about Nostr.
It reminded me that he was another example of someone I paid for non-tipping things using Nostr as the payment discovery mechanism. Guy performed the audio editing for the individual files of my "Broken Money" youtube video. And I paid him for it not by having to ask for his invoice or anything, but rather just by looking him up on Nostr and paying him.
Venmo-like payment discovery in an open-source and globally-interoperable way is a big deal in the long run.
https://fountain.fm/episode/wgkqiF4AAXgvn4PPowPO
It's hard to overstate how insanely excited I was for the Nintendo 64 when it came out.
I played Super Mario 64 in a Blockbuster Video store, and was totally blown away by moving a character through a completely 3D smooth environment including all sorts of acrobatics that Mario could do.
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My favorite was the original Super Smash, which I continued up through the Wii. One of the few video game series I was seriously good at.
Goldeneye for the 64 was great. Starfox. Mario. Zelda. Mario Kart.
I wouldn't mind a re-do of that decade actually.
I keep pushing back on two types of NPCs:
1) The right-leaning type of NPC that thinks all the inflation occurred because of the Biden Administration. Price inflation comes with a lag from money-printing, which began under Trump and continued under Biden, but materialized under Biden. That's why I was writing about upcoming inflation in 2020 and continued doing so in 2021 and thereafter.
2) The left-leaning type of NPC that thinks "price gouging corporations" are causing the inflation and that price controls are an answer. A casual reading of history would refute this, any easy check on public SEC filings would demonstrate this, etc. So it's like, "no, the grocery store with 1.4% net profit margins is not the cause of your food price woes, madam."
It's not so much that I get annoyed by people not knowing things. There's a million things I don't know. What I do find mildly frustrating is when people are so confidentially sure of a position that they have almost zero knowledge in.
It's hard to overstate how insanely excited I was for the Nintendo 64 when it came out.
I played Super Mario 64 in a Blockbuster Video store, and was totally blown away by moving a character through a completely 3D smooth environment including all sorts of acrobatics that Mario could do.
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I agree with the white pill over black pill aspect. When I write about Nostr I try to do like 80% white pill and 20% black pill, and even the black pill stuff is phrased like, "you can own your identity".
From what I've seen, the Nostr ecosystem goes through some stepwise improvements. Damus was a gamechanger. Primal was a gamechanger.
I think the long-form stuff has a lot of legs to it, and anything related to reviews.
From the knowledge I have of certain companies' pipelines, including ones that you've mentioned, I'm optimistic that we'll have some more stepwise upgrades in the future that can start really tying things together.
I don't disagree, but for context there is very little capital in Nostr.
That came up in a public interview this week. Paul Barron asked me about Nostr on his 450k subscriber altcoin channel, pointed out Nostr's sideways user statistics, and then pointed to Farcaster's greater growth. I pushed back by highlighting that Farcaster raised an order of magnitude more capital ($150 million), and that Nostr is mostly funded from donations and has hardly any VC-funded companies, and even those few only to a limited extent. We've seen this in the crypto space before where they outraise bitcoin-only companies by one or two orders of magnitude but then eventually run out of steam because there's a weaker foundation there.
So, virtually all of the Nostr comms are organic, rather than funded by a marketing budget. It's because individuals are excited about it.
Larger-scale comms, GTM, and operational excellence require capital.
The bootstrapping phase has been super strong and organic from developers' own hardcore time capital, and we have the initial seeds of monetary capital in the space, largely thanks to Jack and then also the HRF and some from bitcoin-focused VCs.
So I expect that we'll see some of those pivots once this current bootstrapping phase bears more fruit in the coming months with the development stuff they've built, with more opportunities to raise capital and have Nostr-focused companies with like, an actual marketing budget.
I don't think we should be complacent, but rather I think we're progressing to the next step in a good position, from which we must then build upon.
I've solidly become one of those people whose music tastes got locked in during their teens and twenties.
So for me that's like 1990s and 2000s rock, or newer bands of the same genre.
Does anyone ever deviate from that trend?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERZA81acxD4
Sometimes people ask me, “what if American bans bitcoin like they did for gold?”
1) That’s why it’s useful to engage politically. To prevent that draconian tail risk. And it’s working. Prevent any sort of anti-Bitcoin supermajority.
2) America had a supermajority in Congress when they did that for gold. They could override every check on power. That’s uncommon. We became highly collectivist for a period of time.
3) America literally put Japanese Americans in camps back then. But not German Americans. Because we were outright racist. And this was all pre civil rights for Black Americans too. Terrible.
4) This was all pre-internet. Centralized media. Few memes. The slow speed of communication was relevant.
The meme-work makes the dream work.
And then ironically when America banned gold, it was too expensive to enforce at scale. They didn’t go door to door. Many families just hodled for decades until it became legal again. Few people were ever prosecuted because that’s embarrassing and expensive for the government. It was threat over action. It was like banning marijuana.
Yes. Since I write about bitcoin regularly, I get a lot of emails from readers asking certain questions about bitcoin, with risks of a ban being among the most common ones.
Who said that? It can be banned, but the ban is costly to enforce and thus just drives it into the black market. And so any bitcoin user would much prefer to live in a jurisdiction that is not authoritarian enough to ban the use of a decentralized spreadsheet.
Yes. More broadly, when a country feels the need to restrict bitcoin, it’s because their money system has a problem and it’s basically an advertisement for bitcoin.
I have some contacts in Russia that work as asset managers and financial analysts. So after the war broke out they were emailing me like, “Well, uh, that’s awkward. But anyway here are some details of what’s happening internally in Russia in terms of the financial system using CNY more and USD less, and other financial changes. Hopefully these are helpful.”
So I was like “thanks guys, let’s stay in touch. Stay safe!”
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One of the things I almost never see mentioned in the various climate debates is the observation that Earth is historically on the cooler side and is rising from that very low base.
The planet has historically gone through multiple cycles of not having polar ice caps and then having them again, etc. Over millions of years. There's been a really long-term feedback loop there.
I'm not a climate scientist by any stretch, but I just find that general omission in public discussions around it to be interesting.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-beenhttps://m.primal.net/JzVV.png
This is why things like pesticides, microplastics, and those kinds of things keep me up at night more than CO2 emissions from hydrocarbons. Extinction-level stuff starting from the base. There’s way more CO2 in the soil, plants and animals, and oceans than the atmosphere. Maximizing those things can be way more powerful than minimizing CO2 emissions.
So all I can really do is draw from existing scientific literature, and my conclusion is that I’m a preservationist in many ways (protect forests, waters, etc) rather than someone who is particularly concerned about hydrocarbons.
I don’t disagree, but two points:
1) Being a preservationist is about way more than CO2. The pesticides, chemical, microplastics, and actual pollution have a lot of negative effects. Reducing biodiversity is bad in multiple ways.
2) It’s reasonable to question the rate of change of CO2. I think it’s overblown, but I’m not totally dismissive of the idea that if we go from say 200 to 1200 in a short period of time that it could be a problem. And to the extent that it might be a problem, I think preservation is better than reducing emissions.
I told Grok to make a picture of a train that won't stop, driven by Uncle Sam. The hat as the smokestack was a nice touch.
https://m.primal.net/JzUO.jpg
Trump came out better than Elon in this discussion, imho.
Minimal gaffes from Trump. He strategically took the moderate approach here. Elon fished for outlier opinions and controversies but Trump used Akido on them and dominated the discussion. One might like or dislike Trump's positions but in this particular appearance the gaffes were minimal and the positions were purposely moderated and careful.
This was basically the opposite of the Elon and Jordon Peterson interview. In that interview, Elon clearly entertained Jordan and outmaneuvered him. Elon barely wanted to be there. Jordon looked silly.
In this interview with Trump, Elon basically cucked himself for Trump. He knows where his business bread is buttered: Xi, Modi, Erdogan, and whichever US president has momentum.
But meanwhile, for those who say I am biased against Elon, I'm on *his* side for the EU and UK activity against Twitter. Elon is absolutely right there. The only proper American response there is to fuck off. And his memes have been great against Thierry Breton and others. UK and EU should get rekt on that front. I'm pro-Elon there, which is not common outside of SpaceX which is great.
But the proliferation of Nostr would beat all of that latter part regarding communication. It's good to push back and meme against Thierry Breton. Tell him to get rekt. It's even better to make Thierry Breton irrelevant by making it so that he can't send his Karen-like letters to anyone, since Nostr has no CEO, as we swarm around him and invite Britons and Europeans to join us.
Anyway, good evening.
I wrote long-form articles anticipating inflation before it happened based on the lagged outcome from the fiscal/monetary impulse, and then called for a period of disinflation from around the top (but still with structural inflationary pressures thereafter, which I continue to monitor).
Regarding macro, I got some things right or wrong, and sometimes had to pivot as new information or analysis compiled as we all have to do, but inflation is the key thing my analysis absolutely nailed. It's part of what 10'x my audience.
And a key reason for that was because I was non-partisan and non-biased in my analysis. During the Trump administration I began calling for inflation with a lag, and then during the early Biden administration I continued to call for it as it materialized, until the conditions for it began to ease.
A rapid growth in money supply is a leading indicator for a rapid growth in aggregate prices, and that started under Trump and continued under Biden. I was Monetarist and Austrian in my analysis, not Democratic or Republican.
Walker is largely correct, because Monetarists and Austrians are largely correct. Politics aside.
The reason I say that "nothing stops this train" is because 80-90% of the deficits are election-independent. If they were mostly election-dependent, then the train would be stoppable, and I wouldn't make the memes.
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Trump is on the Spaces with Elon.
One thing I've noticed for a while is that amid all of the Secret Service failings and inside-job theories or concerns, Trump hasn't really been promoting those failings and theories at all. And this interview confirmed it- he's actively pushing back on them.
Elon tried for like 15 minutes to coax out some thoughts from Trump regarding Secret Service incompetence or corruption and yet Trump just kept defending the Secret Service for doing their work and saying that yeah they should explore why someone got on the roof, but that it's chaotic and he's thankful for the counter-snipers, that he's thankful for those that physically shield him, etc. He's literally more defending of them than me as a witness that was like, "wtf happened here?"
Trump presumably travels with mostly the same SS team and gets to know them. He's hesitant to personally criticize them in a way that many of his followers have.
I found that interesting because he routinely throws lawyers and other insiders out that defended him once they stop being useful. But things are different when you have a team physically shielding you. Like fellow soldiers in war. So far he won't touch them at all.
https://m.primal.net/JxpQ.jpg
I like how this St Louis Fed post blames people for banks’ failings.
Flip it around. Banks irresponsibly created way more claims for gold than they had gold, kept defaulting, and lost trust. So the government made gold illegal to own for like 40 years.
There was no “shortage” of gold in the Great Depression. There was an excessive amount of fraudulent promises for gold, made by commercial banks and central banks.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2017/november/why-us-no-longer-follows-gold-standardhttps://m.primal.net/JxGW.jpg
Those are not contradictory. You can stack and spend. But realistically I think broad-scale medium of exchange usage will take off way down the line when more people hold bitcoin as a store of value and when the tax treatment improves. In the meantime there are Bitcoin hubs and Nostr where it circulates more.
Fedwire processed over a quadrillion dollars worth of settlement volume last year, at an average pace of about 6 transactions per second.
Technically about 9 transactions per second on business days, and then closed during weekends and holidays.
https://m.primal.net/JxBf.jpg
I watched Godzilla Minus One.
And actually I thought it was really good. There was real plot there for a change. It deals with topics of PTSD, guilt, forgiveness, family, and finding meaning and humanity in a war-torn country. Kind of like how the original 1954 version had a lot of themes.
And superficially, this is by far the coolest Godzilla’s breath weapon has ever been. It’s like a nuke going off every time.
The movie had a budget for under $15 million despite some expensive actors, and managed to do a whole1940s setting and lots of special effects. Some of the CGI was weaker than Hollywood but the breath weapon was better than any Hollywood treatments of the franchise.
It’s my default terminology because it’s used a lot in Dungeons and Dragons. They call it a “heat ray” in this movie I think but it’s no heat ray- it’s a literal nuclear blast.
Since the prior two recessions in the US were so big and unusual (2008 and 2020), a lot of people have become accustomed to thinking that something massive for the economy is always around the corner.
Now, since the fiat system does trend toward being less and less stable over time, there’s a very real possibility that we will keep getting larger crises.
But sometimes there can be periods of just stagnation. Not everything is explosive, economically speaking. And public sector debt bubbles tend to unfold very differently than private debt bubbles.
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