joy

positive sum

[joy @Frienr]

Sanity reminder

@EvanWritesOnX 30 August 2025

"When external extraction dries up,

the TPS turns inward.

Citizens of the “core” become the new colony, austerity, deregulation, asset stripping, privatisation.

When you see far-right policies being pushed, that’s just cover for cannibalization.

All far-right narratives (“immigrants stealing jobs,” “welfare is bloated”) justifies austerity and deregulation.

It provides political legitimacy for policies that funnel more resources upward (cuts to welfare, surveillance, security spending, union busting, tax breaks for corporations).

Instead of citizens realizing TPS is exploiting them, they’re told the threat is the outsider (migrants, Muslims, refugees).

Not the least of which, far-right rhetoric stirs fear, division, and scapegoating which weakens solidarity across classes and communities,

ensuring no collective pushback against TPS.

That’s all that is.

[joy @Frienr]

@EvanWritesOnX

[joy @Frienr]

@greenytrades Thanks for the reminder .. just in case you have an idea .. I am wondering how to move my no-longer-worth-anything nft’s into ‘losses’. Is there a burn address ? And how do I record them as losses ?

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

I said that the trade deficit would widen back in April last year.

People calling Trump retarded have absolutely no idea how effectively he achieved the agenda of catapulting the private sector into the emerging multipolar order.

The US is in a very unique position to weaponize America’s already de-industrialized economy as a strategic advantage for its Private Sector.

Because the US is not burdened by citizen responsibility or national interest.

The tariffs were never about onshoring.

Read my post below.

Trump is playing it perfectly.

[joy @Frienr]

@sashakaka445 @ArabTurkZak @Berisha901 @SoggyBiscuitBri @michelle_ogno @RanaLadki @Geopolitics_AoE @NanceAbdallah @Vika09006261 @RomaissaTahar @Tany4Peace @Peace4Reems @ptrhearne I don’t understand Sasha. Why should I stick up for someone who is not struggling ? You don’t know the content of my private conversation with him. Why are you judging me?

[joy @Frienr]

@sashakaka445 @ArabTurkZak @Berisha901 @SoggyBiscuitBri @michelle_ogno @RanaLadki @Geopolitics_AoE @NanceAbdallah @Vika09006261 @RomaissaTahar @Tany4Peace @Peace4Reems @ptrhearne I did. Bye now.

[joy @Frienr]

I respect that we are all adults and can stand up for ourselves. If I see someone struggling I send a dm rather than intervene in a parental or rescuing attitude. Some respond. Some don’t .. like our red pill friend. Early days in the discord were wild. It was fun. But I understand the need for some guidelines .. and the comms can be a great mirror for reflecting on ourseves. Personally I find the group provides a relatively neutral climate for strengthening our mental capacity in the face of the brutality that confronts us every day.

[أمثال عالمية @WorldProv]

ما لا يمكنك إيقافه، رَحّب به ."

- مثل صيني

[joy @Frienr]

@MOSN2134 @EvanWritesOnX in general it doesn't .... sad thought it is ... unless a private sector actor changes the game

[joy @Frienr]

No need to apologize Sasha. I felt momentarily sad on reading of your disappointment and 🤡 diagnosis … very different to my experience … not that of an echo chamber … but rather a grouple of people willing to embrace a macro perspective at the cost of conditioned micro enslavement. Anyway .. just to say that I really enjoyed meeting you and appreciated your contribution to the geopol thread. It is the more emotionally challenging of the 2 .. and I wouldn’t want to be a mod 😵‍💫 .. which clearly is required for that kind of discourse - learning - project. I could see that the direction we took didn’t match your needs and am really happy for you that you have found your niche.

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

AI subscriptions are dead

Claude Fable 5 will only be on the Anthropic subscription until June 22nd. After that, you will need to pay for usage per token

This will be the start of a much larger trend

Frontier models will no longer be included in subs

You’ll pay a fee and it will only get you access to older, much cheaper models

If you want access to that dank AI sour diesel, you’re going to need to pay for every token you use. No more subsidies

And it make sense. The subsidies were just a Ponzi scheme

For those that don’t know, when you pay $200 a month for an AI sub, you get thousands of dollars of tokens

These AI companies actively lose tremendous amounts of money because of these subscriptions. GDPs of most countries every year are lost on your $200 Claude Max sub

The investor money is running dry. IPOs are coming because of this. And with IPOs need to come profitability

The golden age of paying $200 a month and being able to code on 40 Claude Code instances and getting a usage reset every 5 minutes are about to die

The party couldn’t continue ever. You can’t just leverage the entire global economy for years and expect nothing to break. Now it’s time to pay up

Means a few things:

1. Time to be responsible when it comes to which models you use. You don’t need Fable 5 for GPT 5.5 Xhigh for everything. Build the skill of knowing when to use cheap models

2. Local LLMS/hardware will come even more in demand. I’m currently running GLM on my Mac Studio. It’s great. Is it Fable? No. But it gets the job done for free on simple tasks. Learn about local LLMs

3. This is the beginning of the wealth gap expansion. Those that can afford to spend $10,000 a month on Fable 5 will build incredible products that eat up more and more of the economy. Those that can’t afford Fable 5 will have an insane disadvantage

4. The government will need to step in eventually. There will be too much civil unrest. I hope the answer isn’t free money. That won’t do anything. I hope the answer is education/access to AI resources for ALL. Universal Basic Opportunity

5. You need to seriously reconsider where your money goes every month. If you are complaining about AI prices and in the back of your mind you know your skill set is becoming quickly irrelevant, all while spending money every month on Netflix, Xbox Live, Paramount +, drugs, DoorDash, Uber, and other things that bring nothing positive to your life, you are simply doing it wrong. AI is an investment in yourself. It’s an investment in your relevance to the global economy. You need to make sure you make that investment

The pieces on the board are quickly moving around. The rules are changing. The battlefield is shifting. If you’re not strategizing accordingly, you’re cooked.

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

AI is going to make almost everything cheaper to produce. Whether that makes you richer is a separate question, and the technology has nothing to do with the answer.

A model that does a junior analyst's job for the price of electricity, a robot that runs three shifts and never files overtime: aggregate enough of that and the cost of making things falls toward the cost of the compute and energy behind it.

For two centuries, productivity made ordinary people richer through one channel, and the channel was labor. The factory got more productive, it still needed workers to run it, and that need is what let them bargain a share back as wages. The worker's share was never a gift. It was the price the owner paid for an input he couldn't get any other way.

AI removes the need for the input, and once the system does the work without a human in the loop, the wage that used to flow to him stays with the owner as margin.

This isn't speculative. Labor's share of national income has been falling for roughly four decades while capital's share climbed, driven by earlier automation.

AI doesn't start that trend but it will certainly finish it, by automating the last input the owner still paid a person for. And the surplus pools narrowly, because the inputs are already owned by a short list. Frontier AI needs advanced chips, compute clusters bigger than most national budgets, industrial energy, and proprietary data, and every one of those sits with a handful of firms.

Asking whether capital will wall off the abundance behind regulation is the wrong question. Regulation is rarely a brake on people who can afford lobbyists. It's a moat.

Safety rules and licensing raise the cost of entry for the competitor who would undercut you, and you pull the ladder up behind you and call it safety. Every company that has aggressively pursued AI will equally voice concern and advocate for the industry to slow down in the name of "safety" to create a moat for themselves.

There is a genuine fight inside the ownership class. The firms building AI want to cut as much labor as possible, because every wage eliminated is margin kept.

But the wider economy runs on consumers, and consumers are workers spending wages, so cut labor fast enough and the customer disappears along with the worker, and the cheap abundant output sits unsold for anyone with income to buy it.

That contradiction forces a response, because you can't run an economy of infinite cheap supply with no one solvent enough to absorb it.

The answer being floated around is a universal basic income. Strip the label off and it's a subsistence transfer sized to keep demand alive and the population quiet without touching who owns what, which is just a floor, not the stake the word dividend implies.

A basic income is probably coming, and probably better than destitution, and it is still a dole dressed as a dividend.

Will citizens get richer? In aggregate, yes. National wealth rises and you'll be shown headline numbers that look like broad enrichment, but the median citizen is a different measurement, and the median is where people actually live.

Own the assets and AI is the largest concentration of ownership in the history of capital. Own only your labor and you get cheaper goods bought with a collapsing or state-provided income, holding no claim on the surplus and nothing left to withhold.

There is a second twist the consumption story hides: AI makes produced goods cheaper, the things you use and discard, and does nothing for owned assets, as the surplus recycles into housing, land, and equity. Your daily life gets cheaper to run while a real stake in the system drifts further out of reach every year.

The one place this structure genuinely differs I think, is China, where the state owns its champions instead of being owned by them, which leaves it a redistribution lever the captured Western state does not have.

Whether China uses it for broad provision or party-elite concentration is open.

The AI machine can produce enough for everyone. The question was always whether the people who own it have any reason to share past the minimum that keeps the rest of us buying and obedient.

[Cʀᴜᴍʙs @shadilayvision]

@MemeWaveApp All his current libraries are discoverable, searchable and reviewable on bsvradar

https://t.co/aNSkirGVjI

[joy @Frienr]

If grok is wiw .. re 1979 history ‘The Shah did depart Iran on January 16 for exile amid unrest, leaving the military without firm leadership; however, U.S. General Huyser’s mission explicitly aimed to dissuade Iranian generals from staging a coup to preserve the monarchy, blending truth in the reply with the main post’s point on American influence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​‘

[joy @Frienr]

@mrsajidansari @EvanWritesOnX Respectfully it is wise to study and understand the depth that is being explained

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

Araghchi is the new Shah, with a far weaker hand.

Iran's foreign minister is now the man Washington negotiates with, working to bring Iran back toward the "international community" after fifty years outside it.

The last Iranian to hold that role was the Shah.

He was the anchor of American strategy in the Gulf. The US sold him its best weapons, Iranian oil sold at the center of the world market, and Iran policed the region so Washington did not have to.

That is what real bargaining power looks like.

But by the 1970s the Shah had grown independent. He pushed oil prices higher, built an ambitious nuclear program, opened to the Soviet Union, kept quiet ties with Israel, advocated for Palestinian statehood, and settled his old border dispute with Iraq.

He wanted the region calm and run on his own terms, and a peaceful, independent Iran at peace with its neighbors turned out to be worth less to Washington than a hostile one would be.

Carter did not lose Iran by accident. US diplomatic cables declassified decades later, show Khomeini opening a secret channel to the Carter administration from his exile outside Paris in January 1979, reassuring the Americans that Iranian oil would keep flowing and that he held no hostility toward them.

He asked Washington to tell the Iranian army to stand down rather than rally behind the Shah's last prime minister, and Washington did roughly that. Carter sent General Huyser to Tehran, and the practical effect of his mission was to keep the Iranian generals from the coup that might have saved the monarchy.

The one force capable of stopping the revolution was talked down by the Shah's own patron, while that patron was being privately assured the new order would protect American interests.

The reason a hostile Iran was worth more becomes clear the moment you look at what American foreign policy represented at that time. A peaceful, independent Iran gave Washington very little to do in the Gulf.

A revolutionary, threatening Iran justified everything that followed: the Carter Doctrine of 1980, a permanent regional military command, the arming of Iraq against Iran through the 1980s, the absolute weaponization of Israel, decades of weapons sales to nervous Gulf monarchies, and bases that never left.

The claim that Iran was always weeks away from a bomb, renewed by administration after administration for thirty years without ever resolving, was never meant to resolve. It was the standing license for the presence, the arms sales, and the wars.

Iran paid for the role of permanent enemy with the very strength the Shah had once enjoyed. The currency that was stable and convertible under the Shah now trades past 1.1 million to the dollar.

Oil that once sold at the heart of the global market now moves at about 1.1 million barrels a day, almost all of it to China, at a discount that exists because no one else will openly buy it. The regional network of Shia militias has dismantled across the region, and the 'nuclear program' that absorbed thirty years of sanctions has been declared bombed.

So Araghchi sits down to do the Shah's job with none of the Shah's assets. What he has that the Shah lacked is roots at home, which is why Iran survives invasion instead of collapsing in a season the way the monarchy did, and durability is not the same as bargaining power.

Washington spent fifty years turning Iran into the weaker party at this table, starting the day it decided the Shah was worth more gone than kept.

[joy @Frienr]

Reflecting on bitcoin with CsW

‘The confusion surrounding zero-confirmation transactions frequently arises because critics conflate validation with authority.

They assume that because many nodes can verify a transaction, all such nodes possess equivalent influence over its eventual inclusion. This assumption does not follow.

Validation determines whether a transaction complies with the rules.

Block production determines whether it becomes part of the ledger.’

@CsTominaga 👆🏽

[joy @Frienr]

@EvanWritesOnX For the first since following you ( several months now ) x algo has decided to allow your posts into my notifications 😂 .. so finally I don’t have to search for your profile 😎

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

Trump isn’t confused.

He’s telling retail that the bubble will not pop.