Valormont

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@duediligenceguy Seems to be a soviet military bunker entry.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@TvlCampagnol https://t.co/oNgeNgRvcg

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@crofin67 Jongny 😎

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@udcvr64 Car l'objectif de ces traitres est de détruire la Suisse.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@BitcoinetNous Bravo Jacques-Edouard !

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@crofin67

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@despotica On a bien remarqué.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@cab2626 La Confédération vient de sortir de sa torpeur en baillant, et a subitement pris conscience que ce scandale pourrait faire capoter le paquet de stabilisation qui va être soumis au vote du peuple.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@duediligenceguy Some cryptocurrency systems allow offline payments, like Cashu on Bitcoin. In beta stage, and not wildly used, yet.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@alexis_roussel Yep

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

I will read this synthesis again multiple times, and think about it, in the next months/years. Such a masterful reflexion.

[Rahim Taghizadegan (scholarium.at) @scholarium_at]

First in English, then in German:

Fireworks in the Cellar

Why the Crans-Montana disaster is not a regulatory failure, but a cultural one

The global normalization of bottle service with sparklers in crowded basement clubs looks absurd only until one understands how well it works. Customers reward it massively. Venues compete on it. Social media amplifies it. Adults tolerate it.

What happened in Crans-Montana is therefore not an anomaly. It fits into a long and well-documented list of club fires around the world. The specific facts are still under investigation, but the pattern is old enough that we do not need to wait for every detail to reflect on what went wrong.

The pain of a parent at the thought that any of our children could have burned in what was effectively a man-made crematorium is unspeakable. Minors need protection and guidance. That part is not controversial. What is controversial, but necessary to say, is that empathy must not become suicidal again by dissolving responsibility and shifting blame until no one remains accountable.

My initial reaction to images of an insane party ritual under a burning ceiling, lacking even the most basic situational awareness, with teenagers glued to their phones instead of their surroundings, came from exactly this place. It pained me because it looked like another manifestation of what I consider the biggest hidden danger of our time: the creeping of high time-preference behavior and aesthetics into the minds of the young.

The bling bling of cheap champagne sold as overpriced bottle service is not just tasteless. It is a particularly grotesque symbol of popularized and normalized decadence, of tittytainment aesthetics imitating pseudo-elite status. There is no beauty here, only effect; no consequences or responsibility, only a hollow YOLO narcissism.

I initially assumed this was about Dom Perignon bottles sold for $1,000 each. That turned out to be wrong. What seems more likely is a $2,500 table price plus additional payments per bottle, probably cheap prosecco, wrapped in a choreographed bottle service show with dozens of sparklers. The exact brand does not matter. The economics do. A night that would normally generate $100 per customer suddenly generates $500. The spectacle alone multiplies revenue several times over.

This explains why the phenomenon is global. It is not rooted in tradition, youth culture, or rebellion in any meaningful sense. It is driven by incentives.

From an institutional perspective, what stands out is the apparent failure of fire-police oversight at the political level, not merely as a technical lapse but as a symptom of double standards. Such failures rarely occur in a vacuum. They often reflect a deeper entanglement of local politics with mass tourism and easy money, where enforcement becomes flexible for those who generate revenue and inconvenient rules are quietly relaxed. This dynamic is well known from neighbouring Austria, where tourism-driven interests have repeatedly shaped political priorities and dulled scrutiny. But focusing only on this political layer would still miss the broader cultural failure beneath it.

A common counterargument is that cheap, highly flammable foam may have been used. If this is confirmed, it would indeed constitute another clear case of criminal negligence. But even fire-retardant materials do not make dozens of fire fountains in a crowded basement space sensible. Anyone who thinks it is acceptable to use sparks and open flames as entertainment in a closed basement space filled with hundreds of intoxicated teenagers has already lost touch with reality. In such an environment, no further thoughtlessness is surprising, and any additional lapse can be catastrophic on its own.

Even the toughest fire codes are not the real reason Switzerland has historically been safe. The true source of safety was cultural. It was the ability to trust that most adults would not need a regulation to know that you do not light fireworks indoors, let alone in a cellar packed with hundreds of drunk teenagers under foam panels.

Call it the fire code of common sense.

Once that code erodes, no amount of regulation can replace it. If this kind of insanity spreads, policing does not scale. Inspectors would need to be everywhere, all the time. And even then, the logic of spectacle would simply mutate into something else, less understood and potentially even more dangerous.

We must be very clear about one thing. We cannot and must not blame our kids. Fourteen-year-olds wanting to have fun outside of parental control is normal and healthy. What is not normal is the environment into which this instinct is now dropped. Insanity lurks in digitally and institutionally magnified peer groups, in a distorted society and economy that rewards spectacle over sense. And this insanity is not only condoned by bar owners, but by politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, bankers, and academics who collectively signal that this is all normal.

Of course, entrepreneurs and corporations scale anti-civil, decadent behaviors and mindsets. But shifting all blame to the supplier is intellectually lazy, especially in an age of easy money and massive monetary distortions that reward spectacle, excess, and short-term gains. Their services, unlike those of bureaucrats, are voluntary. They are punished immediately when customers withdraw approval. In this case, customers did the opposite. They expected this spectacle and rewarded it. That matters.

Part of the problem is the growing price distortion caused by monetary debasement, especially the cost pressure it creates for entrepreneurs in consumption-facing sectors. Rising input costs, compressed margins, and volatile demand systematically reward shrinkflation, corner-cutting, and short-term fixes. In such an environment, prudence becomes a competitive disadvantage, while those willing to degrade quality, safety, or judgment gain breathing room. This does not excuse reckless behavior, but it helps explain why practices that would once have been unthinkable become normalized under sustained monetary pressure.

The deeper problem, however, is fiat distortion not just of prices, but of perception. A growing loss of realism misdirects entrepreneurship itself. When catering to obviously dangerous practices increases profits fivefold, incentives are fundamentally broken. Simply outlawing visible dangers will not fix that. It will push risk into darker corners, where it is even less understood and harder to manage.

By contrast, failing bureaucrats and politicians, who have lulled parents into a false sense of safety, rarely bear individual responsibility when they stop providing their assumed function. A bar owner who fails to entertain his customers loses his livelihood. Politicians who fail to provide security, or who even make their citizens less secure, can often expect the opposite: more power, more resources, more legitimacy, as the problems they create justify ever more intervention. These bar owners may, justly, end up behind proper bars. In politics, comparable negligence may lead not to punishment, but to promotion.

The owners of the bar were criminally negligent. But they did what “everyone else does” in this industry, meaning a practice that is widespread enough to feel normal, and what their customers expected and rewarded, even though there is a long line of club catastrophes with exactly the same pattern. That they were described by locals, according to media reports, as widely respected entrepreneurs is less exculpatory than it is a further troubling symptom of decadence.

The lesson for parents is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Even in Switzerland, you cannot blindly trust that your children, socialized largely in public educational institutions, will be mentally and physically safe. You cannot assume that what everyone does is sane. Sometimes, it is utter insanity.

This is not an attack on Gen Z. If anything, their lower alcohol consumption and increased self-criticism may be a rational counterreaction to a world in which older generations commercialized and normalized extreme short-termism. The deeper distortion sits higher up.

We should face an uncomfortable truth. The ability to blindly trust most unrelated adults to act responsibly, to watch out not only for themselves but also for others, was a historic exception. What is now returning across the West is the normality of low-trust settings, of everyone slipping back into a diffuse survival mode.

But this is not a return of genuine survival instincts, which once evolved in close contact with reality and provided real guidance. What we see instead are degraded hunches, detached from the environments that shaped them. In a world of fiat distortions, mediated spectacle, and institutional outsourcing of responsibility, these hunches no longer orient behavior. They produce panic without clarity, action without judgment, and flight without direction. This is precisely the psychological soil in which high time-preference behavior, spectacle culture, and collective insanity take root.

We must teach our children a different lesson. They are not helpless victims of evil bar owners. They are not safe because of laws and police alone. And it is not victim blaming to speak about responsibility, of parents and of the young themselves.

Young people should yearn to become adults, not remain the forever kids their fake role models perform for money, attention, and fame. Adulthood begins with realism. With situational awareness. With the ability to resist the pull of “everyone does it,” especially when everyone is clearly doing something insane.

True liberty does not grow out of protection from all risk. It grows out of the discipline of responsibility. Responsibility to reality. Responsibility to judgment. Responsibility to walking away when a situation feels wrong, even if it looks exciting, fashionable, or socially rewarded.

Switzerland is certainly not in danger of overly lax building regulations. Switzerland’s real danger is the slow but steady drift into cultural and societal decay, accompanied by increasing political irrationality, following its neighbouring countries downhill, even if with its characteristic and still valuable tardiness.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@crofin67 https://t.co/MjQXzQZqst

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@TuurDemeester @AdamantResearch Yep. An interesting reading every time.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

@patrickchalier Une petite enveloppe, et hop c'est bon..

[Jameson Lopp @lopp]

Browser extensions in general are risky because they often have "god mode" access to read and modify any aspect of the sites you visit. You should minimize how many extensions you use to reduce risk.

Browser extension wallets are even riskier!
https://t.co/XV7DT174cJ

[Amy Nixon @texasrunnerDFW]

People older than 45 bought 69% of all homes sold last year

Even more wild: People 80-96 years old bought more homes than people 18-27 years old 😳

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

Exode des talents créatifs, qui quittent l'Union européenne.

[Innerdevcrypto @Innerdevcrypto]

Exodus

Almost every single successful entrepreneur, business-owner, crypto-trader, crypto-investor, long term btc hodler, based in the EU and that i know personally, and i know/have received quite a few, has already left the EU or is in the process of leaving or seriously considering it.

Some moved to the fringes of the EU with easier crypto-rules...like malta or portugal, but most are leaving, or have left for: Dubai, Singapore, Andorra, Switzerland, el Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, or another pro-crypto place or a place where you can be pro-crypto and do business without being taxed or regulated to death.

With all the new EU crypto-rules, heavy tax increases for defense spending, Mica-rules, exit-taxes in place or in the making in many EU states, and a general leftist/woke anti-business anti-crypto vibe, within a couple of years a lot of smart and rich people will have moved out of the EU. This is more pronounced in western europe, in the east (countries like Poland for example) people still value hard work and making money since they remember still quite well what it means to have nothing.

No surprise of course, mobile smart/creative/intelligent/wealthy people used to operating in a global world are really not going to wait until they are ostracized, registered, taxed to death, and running the risk of losing their business or the ability to convert their bitcoin to fiat.

If you can leave, do it sooner than later, that is the only advise i can give you since i expect more exit-taxes to come into force or even more taxes on bitcoin if it goes up even more. Or at least get your tax-residence and business set up outside of the EU.

I do not like this either, love the old continent, but situation is simply becoming unlivable in many places as a successful entrepreneur or crypto-person.

Now people will say ´you are exaggerating´.
I do not think so.
It is always smart and intelligent and creative people that move first or are early with things or ´on time´, same as with buying bitcoin early, not the rest of the ´normal´ herd that is always late.
So if more and more smart/rich/creative people are moving away...you should really pay attention.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

L'année de naissance 1975 est celle où l'on a constaté le nombre de naissances le moins élevé, c'est donc celle qui paie le plus les autres générations, proportionnellement, pour les retraites et les frais de santé.

[Valormont @Metavalderis]

Bienvenue dans le monde réel : Le Danemark augmente l'âge de retraite légale à 70 ans pour les personnes nées à partir de 1971. Les autres pays européens vont suivre.

#retraite #demographie #ponzi

[Jameson Lopp @lopp]

Raising the retirement age to 70 is needed in order to be able to "afford proper welfare for future generations" which is politicianspeak for "the ponzi scheme would otherwise collapse."
https://t.co/HkdGDCqrOv

[Istra of Glome @byistra]

C.S. Lewis writing about living in a world with nuclear bombs. Always relevant.