Simone

failed chef, stacking sats

[MartyParty @martypartymusic]

Gold in Dubai is selling below benchmark because nobody can move it.

Bitcoin is selling above benchmark in Tehran because everyone needs it.

[Simone @simone_crt]

@SolBrah beautiful.

[Simone @simone_crt]

@chaseharris98 I have been in this situation before between a squab and a cat

[Oliver Groß @minenergybiz]

Unreal numbers 👀⚡️
"JPMorgan estimates that, had Germany not phased out nuclear power, the country would have generated 50% less electricity from fossil fuels and 84% less electricity from natural gas in 2024. Electricity prices in Germany would have been around 25% lower, and the country would have imported half as much electricity.."

[Matt Hougan @Matt_Hougan]

Imagine if the situation were reversed and stablecoins were status quo, such that everyone had their money in entities backed 1-1 with US Treasuries.

And then some guy came along and was like, "I have this new idea called fractional reserve banking..."

We would laugh him out of the room.

[Beardo @BeardoTrader]

The Netherlands’ unrealized capital gains tax does not apply to real estate.

As a result, investors are incentivized to shift capital from financial markets into income properties.

This puts additional upward pressure on housing prices.

The Dutch government has managed to screw the rich and the poor simultaneously.

[wokeandwoofing @wokeandwoofing]

I would like to see the introduction of an 'Imagined Gains Tax'. Anytime someone has an idea for a product or business, they should be forced to estimate the maximum future profits they could generate, and then immediately pay 35% of this amount to the government.

[Jeff Kirdeikis @JeffKirdeikis]

Netherlands 36% unrealized gain tax

[Simone @simone_crt]

@IterIntellectus 'fake it till you make it' and the likes may work for practical goals via autoconditioning but it will surely take you to bad places if taken seriously as life mantra or foundational belief system imo.

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Imagine voluntarily doing this to your own country

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

Bitcoiners don’t “panic sell”, we just briefly stare into the abyss, refresh the chart 900 times, whisper “this is good actually,” and go back to living in a society where money is created by committee like a group project that ends in divorce.

[Philip Pilkington @philippilk]

If you measure it in gold instead of in dollars, the US stock market has basically collapsed. 📉

[Paolo Ardoino 🤖 @paoloardoino]

So many crypto projects

[Stoic Trader @StoicTA]

I'm sitting on 1,000 ounces of silver bars

bought physical, did what everyone says to do

"Real assets" "Outside the system"
"When everything collapses you'll be glad you have it"

tried to sell some last week, trying to sell it today

refineries won't touch it
dealers lowballing 30% under spot
banks look at me like I'm selling contraband

turns out "owning" something and being able to "exit" something are two very different skills

this is the same trap I see in trading

people hold positions they can't exit
stocks with no volume
options with no buyers

sitting on "value" that only exists on paper

supply & demand lesson learned

[Rare 🇺🇸 @RareImagery]

Long term memory care for my dad will cost $10,000 a month, just to be stuck in a room and occasionally checked on. He was a brilliant man that worked hard and made smart investments. He’s paid a fortune in taxes that ultimately was stolen through fraud to support illegals, politicians, corporations and people that refuse to work.

The system of insurance, medical care and outrageous taxes will drain what money he wanted to leave to his kids to taxes and give to greedy unscrupulous politicians and corporations.

This is how communism really works. They create a system where everyone becomes ultimately dependent on a system that can’t sustain itself.

[Phil Geiger @phil_geiger]

Outstanding clip, but the best part about it is the central bankers laughing at the thought of bitcoin as "competition."

The idea is so completely alien to their worldview that they think Brian is joking.

[Simone @simone_crt]

Lol

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

🇩🇪 Germany's Chancellor Merz says it was a 'serious strategic mistake to phase out nuclear energy'.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

53 banking associations just wrote themselves a $6.6 trillion protection bill.

They called it the CLARITY Act.

Here is what they do not want you to understand.

Banks pay depositors 0.1% interest. Stablecoin issuers hold Treasury bills earning 4.5%. If stablecoins could pass that yield to users, banks lose the deposit war. They cannot compete. The math is fatal.

So they made competition illegal.

The Kansas City Fed calculated what happens if stablecoins pay competitive rates. Banks lose 25.9% of deposits. $1.5 trillion in lending capacity vanishes. The entire community banking model collapses.

Their solution was not innovation. Their solution was legislation.

The CLARITY Act everyone is celebrating contains Section 404 prohibiting yield payments through any mechanism. Not just from issuers. From exchanges. From affiliates. From partners. Every single pathway to competitive returns, closed by statute.

Brian Armstrong reviewed the 278-page draft for 48 hours. He withdrew Coinbase support at 11pm. The markup was postponed by morning. He saw what Wall Street analysts missed entirely.

This is not crypto regulation.

This is Dodd-Frank for digital assets. Incumbents writing rules that crush competitors. Regulatory capture so brazen they published the lobbying letters on their own websites.

The American Bankers Association. 52 state banking associations. The Community Bankers Council. All coordinating to eliminate an industry they cannot beat in open markets.

Meanwhile China made e-CNY interest-bearing on December 29.

America is banning stablecoin yield while Beijing is paying it.

The crypto industry spent years begging for regulatory clarity.

They got it.

Clarity that $6.6 trillion in deposits will be protected at any cost. Clarity that banks write the rules. Clarity that if you cannot win in markets, you win in Congress.

This is the largest regulatory capture event in American financial history.

And it is being sold as innovation policy.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Whoa.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren't people.

They are large language models.

I'm not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, "they are stupid".

No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.

First, you have to understand what a large language model is.

It's a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.

That's all there is in there.

This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.

It's not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of "truth" at all.

For something to be a "lie", or an "inaccuracy", there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.

And there's the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.

Not just one model, of language.

This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.

So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is "stupid". He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.

What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.

Which brings us to this woman.

Most conservatives understand her behavior in terms of concepts like "suicidal empathy", or "brainwashing", or an "information bubble", interpreted as reasons why she is delusional, but the truth is far worse than that.

To delusional is to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong. But to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong... you have to have one in the first place.

To sapient humans, words are symbols, grounded in object model of reality, that we use to communicate ideas about that reality. We need those words because we don't come equipped with a hologram projector, or telepathic powers.

But for another type of human, that object model isn't very large or robust at all. It consists only of a grass hut or two with a few sticks of furniture, and it can never be matched up with the palaces in the air which she weaves out of words.

And so, to her, there is no reality. Or at least very little.

Reality consists only of her and her immediate surroundings in time and space, and words referring to anything bigger or more complicated are not descriptions of reality... they are magic spells which will make other humans drop loot or give her social approval.

You cannot correct her worldview with contradictory evidence, because there is no worldview to correct.

You cannot confront her with the logical inconsistencies in her worldview, because her object model doesn't actually have any, it's not complex enough for that.

The relevant parts of her world-object model can be summed up as follows:

"If I say Goodthing, I get headpats and cookies from all the people like me."

That model is simply not big or complicated enough to contain notions like self-defense or vehicular assault. She has no theory of mind for a man whose job includes violence. She cannot explain or predict his behavior.

It is too far away from her daily experience to fit into her reality at all.

And if she can't imagine things like these, how can she possibly imagine concrete meanings for vast and complex ideas like demographic replacement, culture shift, and western civilization?

This is not about intelligence or lack of it. This is about what her brain is trained to do.

Her upbringing, education, and life did not force, or even encourage, her to develop a robust world-object model. It wasn't necessary for her to get safety, approval, or cookies. She just had to be glib.

So it really didn't matter if she had an IQ of 125, or whatever, because if she did, then she was just an IQ-125-large-language-model, and only used that brain capacity for writing clever poetry, and saying things that aligned her to her local social matrix.

She couldn't actually understand the world no matter how smart she was, because her brain was trained up wrong.

I don't know if this is correctable, or if there was some critical developmental phase that was missed, but it doesn't matter, because once the LLM-humans are adults, they won't sit still for corrective therapy, percussive or not.

What's important is that they can't be taught things. They can be programmed to repeat stuff, and if you win a culture war, you can even program them to say the sensible stuff. But even then, they will just be saying it for headpats and cookies. They will never truly understand the sense of what they are repeating, because they don't understand things.

They are just Large Language Models.

And we have to figure out some way to take the vote away from them.