*A serious administration cannot plan to solve that problem after the shooting starts. It has to be solved while the cost is still manageable.* View quoted note β†’
*If counternarcotics is a cover story, the next question is why the administration would need one. The most likely answer is that the real concern is harder to talk about publicly. A serious vulnerability close to home, one that requires this kind of posture to address, is not something you advertise. Saying it openly makes homeland defense look porous. It invites a public reaction that could narrow options and force escalation on a political timetable rather than a strategic one. It also tells adversaries exactly what you’re worried about and how much leverage they have.* View quoted note β†’
*Every once in a while, a new technology emerges that breaks the existing equilibrium. Machine guns collapsed the logic of massed infantry. U-boats shattered the assumption that surface fleets controlled the seas. Autonomous underwater vehicles belong in that category. Our entire globalized trading system rests on a basic assumption that goods can move freely across the world’s oceans. For decades, U.S. naval dominance secured the shipping lanes on which increasingly stretched supply chains depend. We offshored critical parts of our industrial base and spread key inputs across the globe, assuming they would always remain accessible. UUVs threaten to shatter that assumption. They are cheap, nearly impossible to detect, and a handful of them can shut down entire shipping lanes. They can sever undersea cables, isolating countries both digitally and physically. And there is almost nothing we can currently do to neutralize the threat at scale.* View quoted note β†’
*When we build an ecosystem where people can truly buy with Bitcoin... Nostr becomes more than a protocol-it becomes a working system* View quoted note β†’
*We are watching the engineering of a system where liberty is irrelevant compared to system efficiency* View quoted note β†’
Stacker News
Banks and Strategy... Because That's What Strategy Is (Bloomberg, Matt Levine) \ stacker news ~econ
FIRST STORY: Banks are (not) where the money is Hashtag banking illiquidity In the not-too-distant past, there were businesses that needed money to...
*Reality is complicated. Adoption is uneven. People are people. Politics are politics. Incentives are incentives.* View quoted note β†’
*A lot of content creators aren’t documenting reality. They’re documenting what the algorithm and their paycheck rewards.* View quoted note β†’
*harmless hobby networks don’t threaten power. Systems only get uncomfortable when they: coordinate at scale onboard normies create economic gravity. Governments don’t need Nostr to fail. They just need it to stay irrelevant* View quoted note β†’
*one of the ways in which we can define the existence of a state is its ability to create a legal tender for use within β€Šits jurisdiction, and that it can defend the value of that legal tender by charging tax in it, which taxes are paid* Economics is not about money
Funding the Future
Economics is not about money
Most people think that economics is about money, that government spending is constrained by tax, and that public services must always come second t...