Anything that promises "passive income" is ultimately a rent-seeking job.

Painful Truth: We need more normal businesses that integrate Bitcoin than Bitcoin businesses that are creating yet another wallet/exchange/mining facility. The former is what you'd call a traditional business, the latter is a VC funded business, which is largely running on fiat. We don't need more speculative companies that are still trying to find product/market fit that gets them profit. We need more businesses that really provide value.

Saying what you really think is not something most people are used to. If they get there at all, it's toward the end of life. The Overton Window is oppressive and unnatural.

Bad takes always come from mental gymnastics to justify in-group values. That, in turn comes from playing status games ascend the hierarchy of your group. The ability to let go of your need for popularity is a super power.

most people are uncomfortable with politically incorrect truths. that's what we call a security hole.

On Providing Value ——————— How can we tell if transactions "provide value"? The assumption from an Austrian economics standpoint is that any voluntary transaction is value-providing because each party believes the trade will satisfy some subjective need or want. So for example, OnlyFans is a value-providing transaction because both parties do what they do willingly and do so in the belief that they will get value. Yet practically speaking, there's something weird about this. There are lots of voluntary transactions that don't provide value, perhaps significantly subtract value. Gambling, for example or other addictions (drugs, porn, etc) where one party is making a lot of money from the addicted person does not seem value-adding at all. How do we account for this? Is there some hidden fraud in these transactions? Or can we add some other principle by which we can tell if a transaction is value-providing? The first thing to notice about these transactions is that they have high time preference behavior around them. There's at least one party that's being especially impulsive. A lot of mobile games, for example, rely on addictive, impulsive behavior to make money and they have more of the sucker-swindler relationship. The dynamic shares much more with rent-seeking or fraud than, say, someone paying for an Uber ride. Yet the libertarian norm is considering anything voluntary to be value-adding. But is trading of fentanyl by an addict and dealer really a value-providing transaction? Common sense says no, yet subjectively, both parties wanted to do the transaction, so what's the problem? Is subjective evaluation of the benefits of trade enough to determine whether it's value-adding? This is not an idle question. The British got a lot of resources from China by getting them addicted to opium. That would seem at some level nasty and unfair, that people were in some way tricked. In other words, there has to be some expansion of the definition of fraud to align our definition of providing value to practical experience. Does selling drugs to an addict provide value? Subjective value says if it's done voluntarily it is. Can fraud be defined precisely enough that we can align our intuition that such trades don't provide value? This is the gap through which much evil is justified. We seek here to close that gap. What's the character of these problematic trades? First, the person buying doesn't have self-control. There's little personal responsibility and the trade is made under some personal distress. Clearly, such buyers don't have low enough time preference and we could leave it at that, but it's unsatisfactory because these people are hurting themselves. Many such actions like that are clearly detrimental and value-subtracting. Suicide is clearly detrimental, for example, and is essentially a transaction with yourself. And this is where we get a little more intuition about what's value-adding. The obviously bad transactions are done by people committing violence to themselves. Please don't misunderstand where I'm going with this. I'm not using some concept of violence against ourselves as the justification for government tyranny, by saying that they are protecting you from yourself. I'm only saying that we should acknowledge that some people do commit violence to themselves and that this is not a good thing or a value-adding thing. Should we be preventing people from committing violence to themselves? That's a much harder question, because doing so may infringe on their human rights. But you can condemn the people selling this stuff as if it's something good. They are committing fraud in how they present their goods and/or services. Indeed, that's what's been happening. The people with the profit motive are getting angry, because they don't like other people interfering with their sales with moral condemnation which is really bad publicity. But this is the normal consequence of bad behavior. You get condemnation by third parties. That doesn't mean third parties should now suddenly be trusted, but we need more information in the market, not less. Now, some behavior that is condemned by one group may not be considered bad by another. This is where we get some subjectiveness to morality. And this is where we also get a lot of righteous indignation. But there is another dimension, particularly of violence to yourself that need explaining. Not everything voluntary provides value.

I've eliminated the recommended list from my YouTube and the "For You" tab from Twitter using some browser extensions. I'm finding that it's emptying my digital house of junk food.

Taylor Swift is what every woman wants to be. Rich, successful, young looking with a high status boyfriend. A healthy society would pity her lack of husband and children, condemn her failing to mature and be repulsed by her addiction to fame.

The world would be healthier with no VCs

Rare sats and ordinals in general are an attack on Bitcoin's liquidity.