Interesting Stuff
- agrees with Sabine Hossenfelder that most of scientific research is bad science, or even not science at all. The diatribe by Sabine is worth a watch because she’s a well-respected physicist who’s in the unique position of not needing grant money because she’s done a good job explaining physics on YouTube. This tracks with the general failed model of fiat/socialist/government-funded science. When you pay people to write papers, they write papers, whether they say something or not.
- does a savage takedown of the “No Kings” protests in Washington, with equal parts humor, history and analysis. The humor part is in observing that many of the protestors were aging Boomers. The history part is in what democracy meant for most of history (mob rule) and how this protest ironically proved their point. But the most insightful part was the analysis about the framing of the whole thing as essentially matriarchal. That is, the protest felt cringy and impotent because the protesters claimed to be the moral arbiters who had a right to tell you what to do. In other words, it was a Karen protest writ large.
Honesty About China - There’s a lot of buts when it comes to China’s progress. China has progressed a lot… But they’re authoritarian. But they’re bad on human rights. But they have lots of pollution. This is an article that attempts to look at China’s progress without all the buts. The article is written mostly from a left perspective, taking climate change as gospel for example, as you might expect from a US academic. But it points out that there’s a lot of Girardian mimetic escalation going on between China and the US. China has imitated the US’s free markets and the US government has taken more control of industries like chip manufacturing.
- and review another book about how child unfriendly society has gotten. As with their other reviews, they talk about what’s unsaid in the book, in this case Birth Control. As they show, the causes for lower fertility include much of what’s said in the book, but the most obvious answer is that birth control separates sex from child bearing. In particular, having a child is a daunting decision, which in the past wasn’t really a decision at all! The many ways to back out of the decision, from various birth control to outright abortion, they argue is the real reason.
J6 Motive - One of the oddest things about the January 6th incident is the presence of Feds who were telling people to storm the Capitol. It’s such a strange thing for Feds to be doing, but the fact that people like Raymond Epps, who was telling everyone to get into the Capitol building, haven’t been arrested have led many observers to conclude that indeed, he was a Fed. But the question remained, what possible motive did a Fed have to get people to storm the Capitol? This is your conspiratorial answer. Because they wanted to prevent a Supreme Court review of the electors.
What I'm up to
Guy Swann Show - I was on Guy’s show to talk about the OP_RETURN argument. We spoke about the dev culture being left coded, how I’m very much pro-ossification and what Bitcoin should be as money first and even money only. We also did a bit of a post-mortem on Taproot, the shortcomings of Core software and some level of humility that we should be seeing with Core that we haven’t seen. It was 2 hours of discussion, and one of my favorites in this debate.
Lugano Debate - This is a link to the live broadcast, which was 10 hours long, so skip to 7:23 or so to get to it. I made the case that nodes use filters already, so getting rid of them would be bad for many different reasons. First, it would be bad because it makes your node vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Second, it would be bad because it will enable cheaper spam transactions. Third, it would be bad because it reduces the social cost for miners mining non-monetary transactions. I was disappointed that Peter didn’t really take the debate too seriously, but you can’t control what your opponents in a debate will be doing.
Bitcoin Historico - I will be in San Salvador on November 12-13. There are general Bitcoin conferences, altcoin conferences, technical conferences, financial conferences and even ones focused on moral and spiritual aspects (like Thank God for Bitcoin). But this one is focused on the long-term societal change, and the speakers will be talking about that. I’ll have a talk on noblesse oblige, particularly the moral failure of fiat elites and the moral obligation of Bitcoiners in the world to come.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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