Ben

A tour of a modern apartment, with words from history accompanying the wonders we take for granted. https://ordinaryabundance.com/

A great WBD episode with

and

. Consider supporting Rob,

and the bitcoin red team. https://opensats.org/funds/red

https://overcast.fm/+ABMPrcJlIpA

I don’t support capital punishment. But if the state has decided to kill a citizen, actually do it. Own the decision. Firing squad, guillotine, hanging. Those are the options. Lethal injection is the tool of a state that doesn’t actually want capital punishment. People who are afraid of blood should not seek violence.

Where’s

I’ve been meaning to read

's The Stolguard Incident for some time. I went onto amazon.ca and it’s on sale for kindle for $0.99. Smash buy!

"Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands, of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness)

Never go full Idiocracy

Good bot. I don’t know where the data came from, but this roughly tracks my anecdotal observations. It would be interesting to do more zap value vs frequency analysis.

“So "10 sats is noise" is not an opinion, it is measurable: the smallest sixth of all zaps carries four tenths of one percent of the signal. The other side of it — five receipts of 5,001+ sats paid 55% of everything zapped in that window — is the part creators should care about: funding comes from a handful of people, not from follower counts.”

nostr:nevent1qqsqqqrz62quk32yvuvhetmm06chvrgg3fkeg6h7fahpnur0dhfedagefx9vv

A more general observation is that the people who are most active on nostr seem to be big into the sovereign individual ethos. I have stoic and libertarian tendencies but am socially aware enough to know that all of humanity’s achievements have come as a result of collaboration. Nothing great is built without generosity of time, talent, and money. Stop zapping Pennie’s start zapping dollars. Support the creators.

"From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever." (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front)

living rent free in donnie’s head. no wonder he needs tariffs

A few thoughts on the Coinkite fiasco:

1. It's trust all the way down. "Don't trust, verify" is just a meme. Influencers have influence, believe it or not. Take it seriously.
2. Those most hurt by the bug are the most die hard proponents of self-custody. Rugged by blissful ignorance, not an evil bank.
3. Something like three days worth of bitcoin supply were stolen. If you look at the bitcoin price, no one cares. But those ~1500 bitcoins meant so much more than the tens of thousands in MSTR or ETFs. Those coins were the life savings of self-custodial hodlers and they'll likely never be replaced.
4. The idea that most people will self-custody their bitcoin is a fantasy. I hope it's always an option, but we need to be real and ensure we have good, private options for collaborative custody/multisig. Without that, the average person will use ETFs and forget it.
5. The sovereign individual is a myth. It takes a village in all aspects of life, including securing your money. Embrace it. We need collaboration, not isolation.

"The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts." (Cixin Liu, Remembrance of Earth's Past)

"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation." (Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)

And then we succumb to our base instincts again on the battlefield. — "We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers—we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals." (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front)

Millions of men died in WWI because of poor decisions from the elite. Lest we forget.

"He dismisses the idea loftily and informs me I know nothing about it. “The details, yes,” says he, “but this relates to the whole. And of that you are not able to judge. You see only your little sector and so cannot have any general survey. You do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest honour—every man of you ought to have the Iron Cross—but first of all the enemy line must be broken through in Flanders and then rolled up from the top.”" (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front)

And yet the success of our species relies on the fact that we’re capable of overcoming zero-sum base instincts through community and collaboration to create great civilizations.

"We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast." (Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)

"The risk managers’ job feels strange: As we said, the generator of reality is not observable." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness)

"And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’" (David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity)

Happy Father’s Day! If you have a dad, be grateful. If you are a dad, be a good one. Don’t take either for granted.

"No father, no mother. I was three years old when I entered the Los Angeles County foster care system." (Rob Henderson, Troubled)

"Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He’s like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill it." (Stephen King , Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption)

If you’ve ever wondered if our money is debased, look no further than an IPO for a company valued at $1.75 trillion with annual revenues of $0.0187 trillion (and negative earnings).

Reviewing Readwise notes while waiting for a 05:00 flight…

"The fact that we had neither nicotine nor caffeine also contributed to the state of apathy and irritability." (Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning)

"Over a cigarette, he considered the nature of the problem and what he might be able to do about it. (Skilled maintainers advise never trying to solve a new or complex problem without a thorough mulling first.)" (Stewart Brand, Maintenance of Everything)

"Entropy increased in the universe, and order decreased. The process was like the boundless wings of the giant balance bird pressing down upon all of existence. But low-entropy entities were different. The low-entropy entities decreased their entropy and increased their order, like columns of phosphorescence rising over the inky-dark sea. This was meaning, the highest meaning, higher than enjoyment. To maintain this meaning, low-entropy entities had to continue to exist." (Cixin Liu, Remembrance of Earth's Past)

"The final point is that scale matters when it comes to governance. I have an aphorism phrased by friends as follows: I’m a libertarian at the national level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the municipal level, and a communist at the family level." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The World in Which We Live Now)

Testing @npub18aa0eeebc6e67f0a5cc3a81a2f6deaecbedf2b52e98da7faa947028d15a12f6c

What the fuck is going on? I can’t go to sleep Feds jumping out their jeeps, I can’t go to sleep — Don’t kill your brother Learn to love each other…

https://open.spotify.com/track/1VUZYA1krvrh7QO2Rpc1JV?si=pJLviVnRSBSbTPCJ8lmtnw&context=spotify%3Aplaylist%3A37i9dQZF1EIcIw0iP4AJy8

An important reminder: libertarianism doesn’t work without strong community ties. You need to surround yourself with family and friends you can trust. No man is an island. Fight for freedoms from state overreach, but give in to deep socialism with your people. Find God, touch grass, be generous. Freedom is worthless without a community with whom to enjoy it.

I like having a copy of my notes that I control.

Kagi is great, and always getting better.

Nostr won’t win until we get thread bois.

A 🧵 👇

I’ve been gone a little while. What’s new, nostr?

I have millions of sats that no government will ever touch. I’m not selling to blackrock either.

But if you post cool things on nostr I’ll give you some!

"Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. We will see how modern behavioral science shows this to be completely untrue." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness)

GM

“You can just do [x]” is such a powerful meme and a reason why I love nostr. Human agency is so powerful. If you don’t like the way something is, build something better.

My original oil painting from

is finally framed and on my office wall. Looks great. Grazie mille, Carlo!

GM

Time to feed the little GM bots some sats

donald trump can get fucked. just in case you’re wondering where I stand