Bitcoin Tech Talk #483
Interesting Stuff
Over-Abstraction - There are people that do physical labor. The ones that physically build things and provide services. And then there are people that do the abstract work of what to build, where to provide services and how such things should be regulated. This article is about the latter class and how it has become more and more disconnected from the former class. The result has been an over-abstraction of the actual work, which has led to, among other things, optimizing a specific metric instead of the actual good. The correction mechanism of market feedback unfortunately doesn’t work because of fiat money fueled doubling down.
Therapy Replacing Parenting - Freya India writes about how therapy has replaced parenting for a lot of young people. The article touches on the reasoning, which is that expertise of therapy has become the “proper” way to receive love, affection and training for various social situations rather than from parents. This is an extension of the credentialism that pervades fiat systems, and clearly crosses a boundary that really shouldn’t be crossed. What’s frightening is that this substitution of therapy for parenting is celebrated by therapy culture, and a lot of traditional parenting denigrated. Yet, it’s the norm for a lot of young people, many who start in therapy in high school.
Needless Supplementation - Scott Locklin writes about various food fortifications which were implemented decades ago. Specifically, stuff like “fortified rice” and folic acid, which have a lot of evidence of harm rather than the benefits they touted from decades ago. Yet the regulations remain in play and unfortunately, these supplementations stick around. As we saw with the food pyramid, revoking old dogma is a very heavy lift and unfortunately bad decisions remain far longer than they should. In a way we have the stupidity of centralization when creating policy, but the decentralized difficulty of reversal, the worst of both worlds. And of course, this is how fiat systems end up as rent-seekers around each policy make such revocation very difficult.
Regulation E - Bits About Money has this informative article about the little known consumer protection legislation from the 70’s, Reg E. The regulation was part of the transition to digital payments that Congress anticipated which makes the banks liable for consumer fraud, making them eager to either solve the fraud or at least pass the buck. In the case of credit cards, they’ve passed the buck to actual businesses who more or less have to eat the chargebacks, but the intriguing case of Zelle shows that banks are screwing over consumers instead. There’s also a bit about cryptocurrency, which points out that any bank providing services around crypto will become liable. Does this mean altcoins will be reversing more transactions?
Climate Climbdown - Matt Ridley writes about the decreasing relevance of the Climate Change lobby, as companies like JP Morgan shut down the Net Zero Alliance. Donations are drying up, and predictions from 30 years ago are off by orders of magnitude, which has led to its slow death. He speculates that AI is both a convenient excuse to call off all the doomsday predictions as AI needs a lot of energy, and something that a lot of these organizations may pivot to next in the form of AI safety scares. I suspect the panic isn’t quite over yet as these large bureaucracies and accompanying infrastructure in education and media are unlikely to suddenly go away.
What I'm up to
Financial Fox - I talked on this podcast about Venezuela, the possible beginning of the Age of Empires and how a neutral currency is something that will be required in such a world. We also talked about government fraud and the need for a better system.
Bitcoin News Alerts - I was on this show as part of the Max and Stacy Invitational, where we talked about the helicopter ride to El Zonte I did with Max and Wiz, and the first time I met Max and Stacy.
Conversation with Max - This was why I was at the Max and Stacy Invitational. Fast forward to 1:55:00 to get to the talk I did with Max Keiser. We talked about treasury companies and whether it’s good for Bitcoiners, how David Bailey is doing similar things to Barry Silbert, about what low time preference Bitcoin conferences look like and the charitable industrial complex. There were some discussions of socialism, property rights and the entitlement of downwardly mobile young liberals. It was intended to be about 20 minutes, but we talked for about 45. Hope you enjoy it.
Nostr Note of the Week
