Interesting. Japanese must be quite a challenge. I also studied German + Spanish in school but much of it has evaporated due to neglect so I am trying to recapture some of it. It is absolutely easier once the path has been trodden before.
The whole "terrorism" crime category was always trap.
https://image.nostr.build/28f2ad6093ab903e05277ede779bf262a57d833a6510cd75e312215f72fc1d7d.jpg
Since 9/11/2001 and Homeland Security regulations, it became evident that the threat of terrorism was a method to sell surveillance and restrictions by pulling the strings of fear.
We always had laws against all kinds of crimes before we adopted anti-terror laws. The difference is that terror laws don't require the same legal protections.
In order to reject the abuse of anti-terror laws we must reject "terrorism" as a valid crime category.
Absolutely. I wrote a thread on why KYC/AML regulations are a violation of property rights.
nostr:nevent1qqstv22duqxfw4mlgna2lmdy488s6dmdzjxlr5yuccsfk345kr992scpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsygpr6jfegcf9s4cxcu5s3f0rjp8e29m75zrmqvkahlxjsc3sf37esvpsgqqqqqqsr852h7
Right.
All effective spam prevention comes with tradeoffs.
Web of trust models should make it very hard for spam to pass. If an algorithm assigns weight to our social network nodes, filtering out spam would be relatively easy. The problem is designing a mechanism allowing newcomers into the web of trust that doesn't come with negative tradeoffs.
A cost-to-post is a possibility that can also help fund relays, yet will add an obstacle for new users and may reduce interaction depending on the costs.
We also have to consider that future censorship mechanisms will likely utilize anti-spam functionality as the primary methods of justification. It is therefore important to consider the possible censorship risks in a given anti-spam strategy.
Central planning ideas may sound bizarre (and they are) but they are not random musings without a history.
https://image.nostr.build/25e303f46d204fcf4a42d5543a564a9f0be589ce58f41208e51116fc159377b7.jpghttps://image.nostr.build/1505af767f88cb8b8c36f256186b4fa2116f729a4344c8c1b6b523e6dd45875c.jpg
In Plato's Republic, Socrates proposed that in his idea of a utopian city state, children of the Guardian class should not know who their parents are and they should be brought up collectively. The goal was an attempt at eugenics; to produce the perfect citizens.
Let's dive into Plato's Republic.
"It follows from what we have said, and from our whole previous argument - that our men and women Guardians should be forbidden by law to live together in separate households, and all the women should be common to all the men; similarly, children should be held in common, and no parent should know its child, or child its parent."
// Plato - The Republic, Book 5, part 6, 457.d
"... our Rulers will have to employ a great deal of fiction and deceit for the benefit of their subjects" // 459.d
"We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we're not to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and bring up only the offspring of the best.
And no one but the Rulers must know what is happening, if we are to avoid dissension in our Guardian herd." // 459.e
"And we shall have to devise an ingenious system of drawing lots, so that our inferior Guardians can, at each mating festival, blame the lot and not the Rulers." // 460.a
"These officers will take the children of the better Guardians to a nursery and put them in charge of nurses living in a separate part of the city; the children of the inferior Guardians, and any defective offspring of the others, will be quietly and secretly disposed of." // 460.c
As we can observe from the above reasoning, Plato laid the philosophical groundwork for authoritarian central planning based on eugenics, secrecy and deception, for the assumed "common good". The road to hell is paved with a lot of well-sounding justifications.
While Aristotle opposed this idea of having wives and children in common, he made the observation that *if* this were to be done, and since slavery was the standard at this time, it would be better that the husbandmen class had this arrangement:
"This community of wives and children seems better suited to the husbandmen than to the Guardians, for if they have wives and children in common, they will be bound to one another by weaker ties, as a subject class should be, and they will remain obedient and not rebel."
// Politics, Book 2, Chapter 3, 1262.a.40
It is important to mention here that Aristotle argues several pages against Plato's idea of shared wives, children and also against shared property. This is not a scenario that Aristotle wants to see. He just considers that *if* it were to be done in theory, it would result in a weakened subject class that cannot rebel.
From here it is not hard to see the trailing impact of Plato's ideas on Fabian socialism and the general eugenics movement in the early 20th century.
When we are confronted with ideas of abolishing the family, or the gradual introduction of the State in handling family matters of education, we are tracing the roots of authoritarian central planning back to Plato.
Below, Katherine Timpf's article from 2015:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/05/professor-if-you-read-your-kids-youre-unfairly-disadvantaging-others-katherine-timpf/
#Plato #Republic #Aristotle #Eugenics #Family #Central #Planning
1. He seems to be critical - not of Nostr - but of the activism of funneling people away from channels that are efficient at reaching an audience in 2024. Why is it so important for some here to adcocate for a Nostr-only position when our reach on Nostr vs the general public is still extremely limited.
2. He is saying that Elon has better funds at his disposal vs Nostr app devs. Jack Dorsey was unable to bring free speech to Twitter because he lacked the funds necessary. Capital matters.
Of course, Twitter/X can still be overtaken by government pressure under Elon, so it makes sense that we have a presence on Nostr.
Instead of a Nostr *only* mentality I prefer a Nostr *also* outlook. Multiple communications channels is the way.
Yep. And the point with communication is to reach an audience.
Nostr will have better reach in a few years. It is easier to attract people to Nostr if we demonstrate confidence. Confidence means that we don't have a need to lash out at other communication channels.
Socialism is a spectrum.
My family are largely social democrats, i.e. socialists. They would either vote for social democrats or the communist party in Sweden (VpK). The communist party changed name to V in the early 1990'ies but kept the ideology and their main principles remain - the government should run everything in society. That's what communism ultimately is about and which explains why it is adjacent to fascism.
Communism is simply principles, which in turn leads to policies and practices.
The principle of equal outcomes *is* a communist principle and it necessitates a totalitarian regime for it to be implemented. It requires all wealth to be redistributed, via taxes, moneyprinting, regulations, subsidies and so on.
There is no way to achieve equal outcomes except through tyranny. We can expect the use of CBDCs and social credit score systems as standard solutions to reach such utopian goals.
Of course, equal outcomes can never truly be achieved, which leaves us with a worsening totalitarianism as it is attempted.
Kamala Harris is on board with the UN Agenda 21 climate and anti-energy policies, so there is every reason to assume that she supports the emergence of a global government under the UN.
That is communism, if we understand the neo-communism from 1978 where Deng Xiaoping absorbed corporatism into the communist framework.
Similarly Sweden adopted some light free market reforms in the 1990'ies, yet remains highly centrally planned, with a general socialist ideology that permeates the political landscape.
We can see socialist policies represented in state-owned media, government schools, restrictions on homeschooling, restrictions on firearms, high progressive taxation, KYC/AML regulations, hate speech laws, gender-bender ideology, mass-immigration policies, apartment queuing systems, redistribution of wealth in all sectors, often as bribes in favor of certain political beliefs.
Socialism, corporatism and neo-communism are hard to separate because they are a part of a central planning structure with expanding government power and erosion of individual liberties and private property rights.
Agreed.
While I think that Bitcoin will survive the potential risks of CTV, I never liked the idea of increasing unknown factors.
Perhaps I am wrong in my opposition to CTV and perhaps CTV might be overall beneficial for Bitcoin. Still, we need to think adversially regarding potential risks that could be used to harm the network.
1. Expanding the scripting capabilities. We can expect pros and cons here and it is hard to foresee what these will be.
2. The possibility of creating closed whitelisting loops.
After thinking the second point through over the last few weeks, I am no longer concerned with this scenario. Yet I will share my general thinking process of why I have changed my mind.
As for point 2, if I were to steelman the pro-CTV position, we could argue that all functions that improve security for decentralized Bitcoin users, also can be used by governments to increase the security of government-owned bitcon.
What secures *our* bitcoin as liberty advicates also secures government owned bitcoin, and vice versa. This is an unavoidable and fair situation that benefit Bitcoin.
A hypthetical worst case scenario:
The US, Canada, EU and Australia joins together to prevent bitcoin withdrawals from all exchanges within their respective jurisdictions.
This would not impact the Bitcoin network and sovereign Bitcoin users, but a lot of customers at exchanges would suffer.
Let's say that in this tyrannical scenario, the users of exchanges are only allowed to withdraw their capital in the form of CBDCs, while the exchanges end up holding the exchange-stored bitcoin.
We could then formulate multiple strategies for this alliance of the US and its partners to keep the mentioned exchange-stored bitcoin from being returned to their rightful owners.
One strategy could be via multi-sigs, which of course already exists. If a multi-sig requires signatures from both the US, Canada and the EU, it could be hard to overturn this decision via changing the laws in a single jurisdiction such as the US or the EU.
Another strategy could be to lock in the exchange-stored bitcoin into an unbreakable whitelisting loop, where the US, Canada, EU and Australia all include each other's addresses in a closed whitelisting loop system. If the government of the US is sued and ordered by the supreme court to give back user's bitcoin, it may not be able to.
On the other hand, if this were the case, the US could be forced to buy new bitcoin from the market in order to satisfy customer demands. This would make the whole closed whitelisting loop pointless, apart from it being ineffective from a global trade perspective.
It seems to me that my previous concern over closed whitelisting loops is not valid since it cannot function as a strategy for governments to abolish private property rights of bitcoin users.
My conclusion therefore is that closed whitelisting loops cannot become a threat to Bitcoin.
I am still critical of CTV, but less so than before.
Absolutely.
What solved my critique of the risk of whitelisting loops was when I considered that a court may force exchanges to return user-owned bitcoin - even if that means buying new bitcoin from the free market at a higher exchange rate. This makes the strategy of closed whitelisting loops completely toothless.
🙏
It's refreshing to hear normal and nuanced takes. There are so many people that have made it their signum to tell others what to do, which inevitably fails and causes a backlash.
One dimension to consider is that if liberty advocates leave a communications channel then there will be fewer voices there to speak up in favor of freedoms.
Group think never goes away completely. I sometimes think of group momentum as an acceleration that reaches a state of directional inertia. Since acceleration is necessary, some amount of group-think becomes a constant.
Only sovereign individuals, usually introverts, are willing to challenge group misconceptions. But since misconceptions are common within groups there is a bombardment of noise that would take enormous energy to combat, hence independents will pick their battles.
From my experience Myspace bled users because of bugs and problems after some updates.
For example, someone sent you a message and you didn't get a notification, so you didn't know that you had a message to respond to.
The technical failures made Myspace completely useless for communication. I suspected that Myspace was sabotaged but it is possible that it was merely mismanagement and poorly tested updates.
I remember that Myspace added new visual designs and the community was unhappy with the changes, combined with a ton of bugs.
There was a couple of times when I would write to some person I knew on Myspace and it was unclear if they had received the message.
Before the updates, Myspace had worked good enough and after the updates the platform was a disaster so people stopped log in and there was an escalating migration.
Absolutely.
The only problem is that while we consider these concepts with nuances, governments have vested interests in promoting an ideological case for why limited freedom is desirable. And they have in mind a very different set of restraints than we do.
One example of positive restraints are free market commissions. Most of the exceptional art in history was funded via commissions, where the commissioner was a kind of co-creator or producer in more modern terms, hiring artists and musicians for grand scale projects that would take years to finish.
That is the kind of boundary-breaking restraint and incentive structure that push creatives beyond their comfortability horizon.
A restraint that helps us to break boundaries and push through new grounds is possibly not a restraint technically but perhaps more of a voluntary calling, a journey challenging a mountain of our choice. We will forever need mountains to climb.
Code runs the world.
Governments run on policy, determined by ideology.
The UN Agenda 21 was signed by 179 nations in 1992 and is the deeper operative system that persist between old and new governments.
The deep state is the persistent state.
Good morning.
We live in reality and we do not create the world around us - however we make our own contributions to the world with our individual impact. We can absolutely create our own corner in the world.
We have the capacity to achieve full control over our minds, albeit we have to work within the framework of what was given to us at birth.
Appreciate your quality content Logan.
I put together a meditational journey with art I have made combined with the piano music of Jay here on Nostr. No AI of course. Shoutout to nostr:nprofile1qqsf8dgkhjtzdlpskceavdulqc35tu00gvcs0nk350rs62v2rvceskcpzfmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82cspzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuum5dahx2u3wvdhk6qgewaehxw309ac8junpd45kgtnxd9shg6npvchxxmmde4nr8y .
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ptSmpBownz4
Art should come at us as a force of nature, as wind, sun and rain - neutral and non-political.
Abstractions are a creative rest for the mind. Not everything should be explained or stamped with a logo.
⭐️🌟💫
🙏
Jay is amazing and it is an honor to have him here with us on Nostr. I used another of Jays compositions to accompany my wife's art. Shout out to nostr:nprofile1qqs8gfmlmdf7lm2jevwa7ynft85nmnvkl5y0k0kygmuu9vl4xnpadvcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzvuhsycpxuh .
https://youtu.be/aaVlXVVF64o
Completely rational.
Add the bonus of longer summers.
The regulatory state will always be in conflict with productive individuals that value liberties and quality of life.
Yes. And the worst part is that I have seen some Norwegians excuse the law and say that vaccine mandates will never happen.
Yet the law explicitly allows for mandated vaccinations and unlimited restrictions of the unvaccinated, as determined by the municipality per a carte blanche.
Well said Logan.
I agree about the potentials for cultural innovation and revitalization on a Bitcoin standard. It's one of the most inspiring dimensions of hard money - when we no longer need to think about money and inflation and can focus on more important matters of culture.
I was curious some time ago to explore how much of our savings are lost due to inflation.
As I went ahead and wrote a short program, I found that at 2% yearly inflation and zero taxes, we experience a ~35% loss of purchasing power on our accumulated savings over a 45 year career.
Since we are aware that the CPI figures are politically cherrypicked and don't measure the actual cost of living, a ~7% yearly inflation will better matche the expansion of the money supply (M2) and the value increase of the stock market.
At 7% yearly inflation and zero taxes, we lose ~71% of purchasing power on savings over a 45 year career.
Add taxes and we lose more than 80% of our purchasing power on savings during a normal career.
Below are four different examples of cumulative inflation visualized on a year-by-year basis.
By showing the data I hope to visualize the problems of inflation with some additional clarity. When we have ~3% left of our savings from 45 years ago, we enter mindboggling territory of theft.
https://image.nostr.build/5d5a6d70d01d34df73297e4ae75196ce39a3f3a64560a1939ea7ea2f69880df2.jpghttps://image.nostr.build/1d81d64c1986bf407a521e0dcf9e088618a4df59df263292936efbad331c7c9a.jpghttps://image.nostr.build/0902852ae0f7e4977115bda795a64bc9075962e7c7701cd20596d6e9c9594972.jpghttps://image.nostr.build/29e105b5087f3106e6d507f77721cd326a57276beadf7529ce815821cf1f7207.jpg
#Inflation
This is the way.
Bitcoin will open up a world where people have the option to retire early or move on to chase their passions at 30-50, instead of waiting indefinitely.
This will free up vacant spots for the young generation and young adults will find matching jobs more easily, allowing them to start family building at a younger age.
Next piece in the puzzle is developing cheap and abundant energy, which could happen within 10-70 years, with new physics such as QI by Mike McCulloch.
My savings would have melted away if it wasn't for Bitcoin.
Also, no way I'm crossing borders with painfully hidden gold watches.😄
When humanity develop cheap and abundant energy, gold will be fabricated at low cost while Bitcoin chugs along more decentralized than ever.
Right, I remember a man was sentenced to jail for mentioning the visual appearance of a politician.
The Thought Police busy with work.
Die Gedankenpolizei
Agreed. Then there is the problem of a single private key. If that key is compromised, we are no longer in control over our identity. This is particularly problematic for companies that need to share their private key with several people.
If Nostr were to have two private keys, one of them a master key with admin capabilities for the identity, the protocol would need a new architecture.
As a result, whenever a Nostr spin-off architecture solves this problem, every company, corporation and security-minded user will migrate to the protocol with higher security. That's just how things work.
That's a great NIP solution.
The main issue I see is in cases where the root key is already compromised. It also requires a fully secure handling of the root key.
If we implement NIP-26 and then create new root keys from scratch, we could safely move from our old Nostr identities to new ones.
On twitter I have to compress ideas into a cryptic format, cut away some nuances and sometimes accept an approximate result that I'm not fully happy with, just because I can't cram in the full meaning into the character limit.
On Nostr I need to restrain myself artificially and brevity becomes a really flexible term.😄
When I joined Nostr it was said that we shouldn't expect notes to last longer than 6 months, due to relays needing to free up space regularly.
I like the idea of notes surviving for 10+ years but I'm not sure how realistic that is.
Sure, but storage is costly.
We don't know yet how long we can expect Nostr notes to last. I have some Nostr notes that are 1.5 years but for all I know they could be deleted tomorrow.
Absolutely. But for relays relaying a ton of users I have to expect that my notes may not persist indefinitely.
Yes, for users that worry about theit notes being deleted, running their own relay is a solution.
I responded to claims that notes are persistent. They might be, we don't know that yet.
Great to have you here Logan. It is uplifting to see more focus on literature and art.
I reposted an earlier text I wrote on Aristotle, art and poetry.
nostr:nevent1qqs26a9ues66t9j4ngh3x7epvya6reqyhe8d2n5wyqe74rduhnkx7pcpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygpr6jfegcf9s4cxcu5s3f0rjp8e29m75zrmqvkahlxjsc3sf37esvpsgqqqqqqs0rftxm
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