*For most of human history, literacy was scarce and attention was abundant. People were what we would call “bored” most of the time, outside of work. Today, it’s the opposite - literacy is collapsing, attention is a commodity, and people are completely overloaded.* Kyla Scanlon

*The US has been drifting into a harder equilibrium for years. People have always lived through high housing costs, tight job markets, and Baumol. The difference now is that these pressures are landing on a public already stretched pretty thin cognitively and socially.* Kyla Scanlon

*we are objectively speed running a quid-pro-quo type economy, where the US, which once was a beacon of democracy, is now doing land deals with Russia, requesting that tourists give five years of social media information, threatening the independence of independent agencies, including the Fed, and ignoring anti-trust law in favor for media control.* Kyla Scanlon

*And of course, it’s going to get weirder. AI is going to make non-Baumol sectors hyper-productive. Software development, data analysis, any sort of Computer thing will become abundant and cheap, meaning that the productivity gap between scalable sectors and non-scalable sectors will becoming a gaping hole.* Kyla Scanlon View quoted note →

Kyla Scanlon: John Burn Murdoch pointed out that we are dealing with Baumol’s Cost Disease. The same productivity growth that drives down the cost of tradeable goods causes the cost of in-person services to balloon. Wages in sectors like healthcare and education that require intensive face-to-face labour, and have slow (if any) productivity growth, are forced upwards in order to attract workers who would otherwise opt for high-paying work in more productive sectors. The result is that even if people keep consuming the exact same basket of goods and services, as living standards in their country increase they will find more and more of their spending is going on essential services.

Kyla Scanlon: *We’re trapped in somewhat of a compound crisis - economic deterioration plus cognitive overload creates a recursive trap where each makes the other worse and destroys the resources needed to escape. Economic stress (Baumol’s cost disease, housing, weakening labor market) reduces our ability to think clearly, which makes us more vulnerable to scams and bad decisions and extractive markets, which then furthers the economic stress. Economic stress + information overload erodes institutional trust Loss of trust makes coordination impossible, which leaves problems unsolved. Unresolved problems deepen the crisis. Right now, we’re trying to make sense of an economy inside social and cognitive environments that have shifted faster than the indicators that claim to describe them.*

*Bitcoin is more fragile than people think. ....Bitcoin is software, and software can be changed.* View quoted note →

*When firms borrow to acquire a monetary asset, they turn a stable store of value into a speculative position that must outperform the cost of capital* View quoted note →

Imagine a world where the uber-powerful were not batshit crazy.... *though the paranoia of surveillance control is terminally self-destructive to the system itself, they will not be reasoned out of it* View quoted note →

TIL about.... In current technical usage, “Marmot MLS” usually means the Marmot protocol, which is a secure, decentralized group messaging system built on top of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) standard and integrated with the Nostr ecosystem. �� MLS itself is an IETF standard for end-to-end encrypted group messaging with strong forward secrecy and post-compromise security. �Marmot protocol in briefMarmot uses MLS as the cryptographic core, relying on an existing full MLS implementation (for example OpenMLS in Rust) and then layering Nostr-specific logic and transport on top. ��The project includes a TypeScript-facing library (“marmot-ts”) and a Rust “Marmot Development Kit” (MDK), intended to make it easier for application developers to embed MLS-based secure group messaging in Nostr-style decentralized apps. �� Perplexity