Techno-Utopian

Engineer, Husband, Father of four red-heads. Free speech absolutist. ✝️#Bitcoin

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work.

He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in.

Two years later, it was over. 🧵

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

Nobody warns you. That's the sick part.

Nobody sits you down and says, hey, if you spend one weekend actually reading about money, you will lose the ability to enjoy anything for the rest of your life.

Your brother-in-law just mentions it at a barbecue. That's how it starts. Some guy holding a hot dog says "you should look into Bitcoin" and you laugh at him.

You laugh AT him.

You make the tulip joke. You feel superior for eleven more days.

Then it's 2:47 in the morning and you're on your fourth Saylor podcast and your wife thinks you're having an affair.

And in a way, you are.

You're cheating on your entire worldview.

ou came in to debunk it. That's the trap. Everyone comes in to debunk it. You wanted to find the flaw, dunk on your brother-in-law, and go back to your Vanguard target date fund like a respectable adult.

Instead you found out what happened in 1971 and now you can't make eye contact with your 401k.

Because here's what actually happens.

Bitcoin is cool and all, but you REALLY learn about the dollar. Bitcoin is fine, Bitcoin is twenty-one million and a schedule, you understand it in an afternoon. The dollar takes months, because every time you think you've hit the bottom of that thing there's a trapdoor.

The Fed just... prints it? And they gave how much to the banks in 2008? And the banks did WHAT with it?

And the guy who ran that got a MEDAL? You're up at 4am reading about the Cantillon effect like it's your kid's toxicology report.

Then comes the phase where you're insufferable.

Everyone goes through it, nobody admits it. You ruin Thanksgiving. You genuinely ruin it. Your aunt says turkey prices are crazy this year and you see your opening like a lion seeing a wounded gazelle.

Forty-five minutes later you're drawing the M2 money supply on a napkin and your mother is crying and your uncle is saying "it's not backed by anything" for the ninth time while his pension is backed by the promises of a government that's thirty-seven trillion in debt.

He's worried about YOUR risk profile.

He has unit bias so bad he'd rather own a whole Shiba Inu coin than a fraction of the hardest asset ever created, because his brain, poisoned by seventy years of fiat, thinks "whole thing cheap" beats "piece of thing good."

And the prices. God, the prices. You can't turn it off.

You're in the grocery store repricing eggs in sats. The eggs are getting cheaper in sats. Everything is getting cheaper in sats except your will to explain that to anyone.

You look at a house and you don't see a house, you see the number of Bitcoin it costs, and that number falling forever, and you realize the housing crisis is a measuring stick crisis, and you say this out loud at a dinner party, once, and now you're not invited to dinner parties.

Then the anger burns off and something worse arrives.

Clarity. You realize nobody is coming to fix this.

The people in charge KNOW. That's the part that breaks you. They're not stupid, they're incentivized.

The debt can't be paid, only inflated, and every serious person in a suit on television knows it, and their plan is to be dead before the invoice arrives.

So you buy. Coinbase, first time, hands shaking like you're doing something illegal, and the fee annoys you, and that annoyance is the last normal financial emotion you will ever feel.

You set up the DCA. You learn what a hardware wallet is. You write twelve words on steel like a doomsday prepper, because that's what you are now, except your bunker is math.

And then the loneliness. Nobody tells you about the loneliness. You've seen it. You can't unsee it.

And you're surrounded by people you love who are working forty years to fill a bathtub with the drain open, and when you point at the drain they get mad at YOU.

So you stop pointing. You just stack quietly, in the dark, waiting for the day one of them comes to you, at a barbecue, holding a hot dog, and says the words.

"Hey... you were into Bitcoin, right?"

And you smile. Because it's their turn in the barrel.

Welcome. Nobody warned me either.

[Jon Caldara @JonCaldara]

There are few things more satisfying to watch than socialists getting mugged by reality.

The Sundance Film Festival is invading my hometown of Boulder early next year. Sundance drew 85,000 attendees last year in Park City, Utah. Boulder’s hotel room inventory is about 2,900. #copolitics

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when Hollywood’s anti-capitalist elite collide with basic supply and demand, we’re about to find out.

When things don’t go as planned, the planner-class doubles down on its religion: more planning. When restrictions, rules, permits and fees don’t produce the desired outcome, more restrictions, rules, permits and fees are needed.

Sundance is an event for and by well-heeled, artsy, socialist elites. So, Boulder is perfect. Colorado progressives can role-play a modern-day Gertrude Stein offering finger sandwiches at a salon of the country’s professional virtue signalers.

But where will the elite stay?

No room at the inn
I’m guessing Robert DeNiro’s concern for the downtrodden won’t tempt him to bunk at the homeless shelter. Jane Fonda won’t crash with the Women Studies majors in some CU dorm room.

Looking online, I see rooms at the Hotel Boulderado during the film festival list for $10,357 a night, then drop to $279 a night after Sundance.

Fortunately, Hollywood’s A-list can always retreat to Boulder’s luxury accommodations: the Comfort Inn at the very edge of town, with a few beds at over $800 a night. Better hurry. George Clooney and entourage are rumored to be eyeing them.

This is not a problem if attendees who preach the forced sharing of wealth are willing to share a hotel room with 28 other people (yes, that math is correct).

Keep in mind, many hotel rooms have two beds, so that’s fewer than 15 people per bed. You could get that number down even more if lesser celebrities sleep on the floor.

The most enjoyable line from a recent Gazette story: “Boulder’s hotels, meanwhile, have committed to making 70% of their room inventory available during the festival at affordable rates, according to Visit Boulder…. The organization is promoting a ‘host with heart’ approach and has published a guide with suggested prices for property owners.”

Is there anything more precious than the NPR gentry ignoring reality and arbitrarily “suggesting” prices between private parties?

There is something delightfully progressive about believing supply and demand can be defeated with positive thinking and a price guide.

‘Hosts with hearts’
Anyway, the most they suggest the owner of a four-bedroom house rent it for is $15,000 for 11 nights. Making all the homes I found on Airbnb renting for up to $175,000 for 11 nights, well, not exactly “hosts with hearts.”

Might surprise you, but you just can’t rent out your home or even a room on sites like Airbnb in leftist cities without government paperwork. You need a stranger’s permission to have people you choose stay in your own damn house.

Invite your friend to stay for the week? Perfectly legal.

Let him hand you $100 to help cover groceries and utilities? Government paperwork.

Have him buy you dinner every night or give you a Picasso? Back to no problem.

It’s said the city has issued about 600 short-term rental licenses. Not nearly enough for the Sundance rush.

What’s the solution? A new and different permitting scheme, of course.

Enter the fresh-and-improved Festival Lodging Rental License for your place, but only when the city authorizes a “Special Festival Event.” To be a “host with a heart,” the city’s privileged must officially sanction the party your guest might attend.

In the endless meetings of planners poring over spreadsheets and debating how to accommodate Hollywood, did anyone raise a hand and ask, “Maybe we should just end the rental-license requirements and let people do what they want with their homes?”

Mugged by reality
The poetry of all this is when Tinseltown’s “capitalism is evil” crowd comes together to fawn all over each other, it will be in a town that’s overflowing in black-market housing.

When 85,000 festivalgoers arrive looking for 2,900 hotel rooms and some 1,000 legal home rentals, the market will do what markets always do: find a way.

The irony is delicious. A festival filled with people who spend their lives warning us about the evils of capitalism may only function because of an underground economy.

Nothing says “capitalism is evil” quite like desperately searching Craigslist for a place to sleep.

[Chris Nelson 🏝️🇺🇸 @ReOpenChris]

🚨DeSantis responds to hysterical woman with horror stories she heard if the property tax amendment passes.

Says politicians will say anything to keep the gravy train going.

“You are gonna hear those horror stories from every local government in the state. They're doing that to try to get people to not vote for this. They have a self interest in keeping the gravy train going if you can't see that I don't know how I can help you.”

[Harry Payne @HeadOfTVDept]

"My child was born in the Shire. It's a Hobbit."

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

The *author* of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard, literally explained during the debates that it would obviously not apply to illegal aliens or foreigners not allegiant to the United States…

It was for the children of former slaves.

[River @River]

@Nostre_damus We've all seen this movie before.

[Techno-Utopian @jwillardcurtis]

@wesbury it certainly won't without brave men supporting and promoting it in the face of corrupt governmental resistance. Dare to believe Brian!

[Benjamin Weingarten @bhweingarten]

Justice Thomas tells the truth about central banking in the U.S. It really isn't compatible with our republican system of government -- it's a progressive, German import.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

This is a classic meme.

But it's not the entire picture:

1) Most of the grift and graft happens at the NGO level with overpaid liberal midwits outsourcing to outsourcers, just so they can go to Davos and present themselves at cocktail parties.
2) None of these people have moved the needle in decades.
3) It's patently dishonest to blame Elon for the deaths of people in Liberia or anywhere else as a result of demanding accountability for how we spend the tax dollars of hardworking Americans.
4) If the solution is so simple, MacKenzie Scott, Laurene Powell Jobs (friend of Ghislaine Maxwell), or Nancy Walton (owner of a $300 million mega yacht) could snap their fingers and solve the problem.

This entire anti-Elon, media driven narrative is so obtuse and contrived. Anyone who buys into this is intellectually captured.

Foreign aid creates dependency and props up failure. Real progress comes from property rights, rule of law, trade, entrepreneurship, and stable governance, not blank checks.

Stop repeating the same failed experiment and expecting different results.

[Magills @magills_]

I measure all of my discretionary spending in terms of how many people get AIDS. For example, yesterday I bought 3 people getting AIDS worth of fireworks at Menards.

[Jonathan Newman @NewmanJ_R]

into my veins

Thomas, dissenting:

As the Court tells it, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has for the past century served to provide the American people with “‘stable prices,’” “‘maximum employment,’” no “ruinous financial panics,” and a banking system free from “‘suspicion.’” The Court credits this century of supposed success to the Board’s “independence” from the President, and, in turn, the voters— the “‘common people’” who play the antagonist in the Court’s account of the 19th century.

Many do not share the Court’s rosy appraisal of the past century.

[Willis Eschenbach @WEschenbach]

Thanks, Prof. Unfortunately for you, the "Hockey Stick" graph of Michael Mann and the various "Hockalikes" were falsified years ago.

The original Hockey Stick was falsified by the endless work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. You can read all about it at Steve's blog. Here's the link.

https://t.co/pIIFbWDHm4

The graph you posted appears to be one of the Hockalikes, PAGES 2000. It suffered from the same problems the Mann study had, plus a hilarious upside-down use of one of the proxy datasets. Information about that one is here.

https://t.co/vIQj5b3KBi

Mann tried reanimate his dead horse in 2008 with a paper called "“Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia”. I deconstructed that paper in my post below. I used cluster analysis, it's an interesting bit of research.

https://t.co/ZHJbaPkpWk

One of the many flaws in Mann's paper is that the method used actively mines for hockeystick results, and it will generate them out of red noise. See my paper showing how the PAGES2000 graph you present above uses that method. It will happily churn out hockeysticks out of any red noise you give it.

https://t.co/DPgoWR9BfJ

Frankly, I'm shocked that you are not aware of this quarter-century of the repeated falsification of the hockey stick/PAGES2k methods and data …

Best regards,

w.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Calling this Mengelian experiment “evil” is an understatement.

The gender ideology cult funnels children into puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgeries, while weaponizing schools and child services against any parent who resists.

The Cass Review exposed the weak evidence. It forced the UK to ban routine puberty blockers and shut down Tavistock.
Sweden, Finland, and others restricted these interventions over risks of infertility, bone loss, and permanent harm.

Meanwhile in California, parents are told it’s “a dead daughter or a live son” situation while comorbidities are ignored.
And many schools in America run secret “gender support plans,” changing names and pronouns while deceiving parents.

Worst of all, CPS escalates the attack. In Montana, the Kolstads lost custody of their 14 year old daughter after refusing to affirm her male identity or consent to a gender clinic transfer.
In California, families have been investigated and had children removed simply for resisting medical steps, branded as emotional abuse.

Under the slogan of “care and affirmation,” they impose ideological enforcement through medicine and the state.
They destroy children and they destroy families.

Parents have the right and the duty to protect their kids.
And everyone involved in harming these children must be punished. Severely.

[Lawrence Lepard, "fix the money, fix the world" @LawrenceLepard]

Bitcoin is a REVOLUTION.

It is much more than number go up. It is an invention which can free humankind from the long sad history of monetary debasement, which empowers few and taxes everyone else. In a fiat system the wrong people win. We all pay for it. It is unjust and unfair. Throughout all of human history we never had a monetary standard that did not dilute over time. Now we do. Those of us who are partisans and are fighting for it understand the stakes. Freedom, fairness, prosperity, less war, etc.

Unsound money is the issue of our age. Currently few see it, but this will change. This Fourth Turning is well on its way and the monetary issue will be resolved.

As I observe the current Bitcoin landscape and the attacks on its leaders i am reminded of the opening of Thomas Paine's second writing, The American Crisis. Written in December 1776 after Washington had gotten his ass kicked on Long Island and retreated from Brooklyn and through New Jersey, Paine wrote:

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in the crisis, shrink from the service of their country: but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have the consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem to lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value."

Sound money has to win. Sound money will win. History will be kind to sound money partisans. This is about a lot more than number go up. Don't forget why we are in this fight. Spread the word. The system they run is evil. We know the antidote. Time is on our side.

[Cory 🦢 Real Bitcoin @ Swan.com @CorySwan]

"Sound money has to win. Sound money will win. History will be kind to sound money partisans. This is about a lot more than number go up. Don't forget why we are in this fight. Spread the word. The system they run is evil. We know the antidote. Time is on our side."

[Gizmo Memes @GizmoMemes]

Nick Shirley finding fraud 🤣

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

The Democratic establishment deserves a slow clap here.

Really. Bravo.

They spent years building the perfect little political terrarium: NGOs, activist salaries, university grievance factories, donor cash, media protection, blue-city patronage, “equity” rackets, and taxpayer-funded do-gooder laundromats all humming along under the sacred banner of “Our Democracy.”

Then they looked at the radicals crawling around inside and said, “Surely these people will remain manageable.”

Absolutely brilliant, guys.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries now look like substitute teachers trying to take attendance during a prison riot. The donors are sweating through their custom suits. The consultants are pretending this is just a “messaging challenge.” The media is polishing the same old turd and calling it “youth energy.”

No, champ. This is not youth energy.

This is the bill.

You told them America was evil.
You told them capitalism was theft.
You told them police were the enemy.
You told them borders were immoral.
You told them every institution had to be “decolonized,” “reimagined,” or burned down and rebuilt by people with sociology degrees and untreated rage.

Now they believe you.

And worse, they want promotions.

That is the humiliation. The party bosses thought they were renting radicals by the hour. Turns out the radicals thought they were being trained to run the place.

Democrats built the hive, fed the hive, defended the hive, and called anyone who noticed a conspiracy theorist.

Now the hive has the keys.

Enjoy the buzzing.
(article below)

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Turns out the Woke mind virus was the Communism bootloader all along.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/yvJOwOS4xE