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I'll join in too, Uncle Pls, wait 🤘🥳

This is a good book (available on audio) about some of the key players of the industrial era. Rockerfella, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan etc. absolute wild times.

Goodreads

The Railroad Robber Barons: The Lives of the Magnates W…

The Gilded Age and the dawn of the 20th century are oft…

This one is about the oil industry which started in the late 1900’s and has a section on JD Rockefeller and Standard Oil. (I’ve not finished this one yet)

Goodreads

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

The Prize recounts the panoramic history of oil -- and …

Long-term thinking is non-negotiable, and it begins with primary sources. Not interpretations. Not influencers. Not narrative wrappers designed to sell comfort. Bitcoin is no different. You don’t understand it by scrolling through. You know it by reading the whitepaper, studying monetary history, reviewing code, following on-chain reality, and tracing incentives over decades. Every monetary system that failed left a paper trail. Every durable system left first-principle constraints. Bitcoin is documented in plain sight: the whitepaper, the code, the difficulty adjustment, the issuance schedule, the ledger itself. If you haven’t read the source material, you don’t have an opinion you have marketing exposure. Bitcoin doesn’t reward cleverness, speed, or social consensus. It rewards discipline, delayed gratification, and the ability to think in decades while others think in election cycles. Fiat breeds short-term optimization and moral hazard. Bitcoin selects for rigor. It strips away weak thinking, weak incentives, and weak hands with mathematical indifference. Fiat thinking optimizes for the quarter. Bitcoin thinking optimizes for generations. Those who study first inherit silently. Those who outsource understanding arrive later at a higher price and call it inevitability. Those who do the work early inherit the future. Everyone else pays a premium later. ₿⚡🧡 💭 I tried my best, Uncle @UNCLE ROCKSTAR 🫂❤️‍🔥

If James J. Hill was truly the business genius history paints him as, then leaving that money on the table wasn’t a moral victory. It was strategic malpractice. Imagine a "Hill Plus": a version of him who possessed the same obsession with low gradients and high-quality steel, intended to hold the asset for decades, but also took the government checks for every mile laid. That version of the company would have had the same operational efficiency as the Great Northern, but with a balance sheet fortified by federal cash. He would have crushed his "puritan twin" into the dust. The failure of the subsidized lines wasn't that they received money; it was that they allowed the subsidy to become their primary business model. It is entirely possible to accept a per-mile grant and still build a straight, durable line. The grant simply creates an incentive to build winding trash - it doesn't compel it. A disciplined operator recognizes that the subsidy is merely cheap capital, a tool to lower the cost basis of a long-term asset. By arguing that the subsidy caused the failure, we are essentially arguing that these businessmen lacked the agency to resist a bad incentive. It implies that free money is a kind of mind control that inevitably forces you to build a bridge that collapses in five years. It doesn't. It just exposes who is building a railroad and who is running a grift. Hill succeeded because he wanted to run a railroad, but he made his life infinitely harder than it needed to be by refusing the capital that could have made his efficiency even deadlier.

The long-form culture on Nostr is what sets it apart. Appreciate you incentivizing thoughtful discourse instead of just engagement farming. There’s a massive difference between a trader’s mindset and a leader’s vision. Who is the first leader on your 'historical board of directors' for the night? 🧐🏗️ @UNCLE ROCKSTAR LFG 🦾 uncle 🫂💜