I always thought that the world is big. That there are many countries to choose from if you ask yourself “Where to live?” The truth is: the world is actually very small. When you have certain criteria, the # of countries that qualify collapses from hundreds to only a handful of options. For example: if you believe in home-schooling, no legally required childhood vaccination, and you do like sunshine, only 7 countries will match this specific criteria. Of these, some are shitholes, which leaves you with 5 options. If you don’t want to live completely detached from society (in the jungle or on a remote island) then you have 3 options left. If you want to own property, there are 2 left: Portugal and Panama. If you don’t like the EU, Panama is the only option with its own downsides – or perhaps the best option is to get a medical exemption to make the USA your perhaps best option. Have you ever defined what principles are truly important to you – and then matched where in the world these criteria are fulfilled? You will be surprised.

There is this book from Cal Newport called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” It basically says focus on what value you can offer and which rare and valuable skills you can acquire. I carefully predict that in order to be “so good they can’t ignore you” in the future, all you need to do is ignore using ChatGPT and any other LLM and just do intellectually challenging work every day. In 3–6 years you’ll be one of the sought out, employable, and highly-paid individuals simply because you are cognitively sovereign. Yet, in order to survive the next 3–6 years without falling behind competitively against those who do use ChatGPT et al., you must avoid all computer and knowledge work. In other words: have a career that allows you to provide value (and make money) without using a computer. Besides obvious blue-collar jobs (which are themselves antifragile if specialized), this is particularly sales and deal related work: sales, M&A, broker, leader/founder/owner. By pursuing such AI-resilient jobs, while spending early mornings, late evenings, or weekends writing essays, doing manual research, solving difficult math or physics problems, or simply by reading real books, you’ll be so good they can’t ignore you. It will require much less effort than ever before, not because less effort is required for mastery, but merely because you are now part of the control group against a massive population that will experience cognitive-atrophy and thereby become dependent on AI and thereby unoriginal, homogenous, and uncreative.

What's wrong with Europe. Sabine Hossenfelder puts it into words.

Ok, that's it. My X account received a "label" for whatever ridiculous reason. I'll now be Nostr + Wordpress first. Screw this centralized shit.

One of the many things we experience is the simultaneous reaching for more alongside the subconscious knowing that the little we have is all we truly need. We seek noise, though silence holds the answer. We look to the future, we look to the past, yet we forget the now. We live here. We live now. The illusion of the future and the weight of the past hold us captive. It is like a pendulum, swinging from what was to what ought to be. From what made us happy to what might make us unhappy. We cling instead of letting go. We try to force the future into submission, forgetting all the while that the future emerges with effortless grace in the here, in the now. Let us flow. Not blindly. With visionary intention. Instead of waiting for tomorrow, let us be today who we wish to be tomorrow. It is what is born today that shapes the morrow.

The funny thing is that she's correct in a certain sense. The internet should be decentralization maxxed and not rely on a few choke points like Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenDNS, Let's Encrypt... We need much more P2P routing, Web3, decentralized identifiers, etc. No single point of failures should exist so we can end big tech AND big government's influence.