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Prepper's Pantry

How much should I store?
Let’s start off with this basic question. The answer is…it depends. What it depends on is a number of factors, several of which should hopefully be obvious. Are there special health considerations to consider, i.e. a diabetic or celiac conditions? How many people am I storing for and what are their ages? Age is an especially important point to consider. A growing child will need about as much nourishment as an fairly active man would, if not more. Similarly, older people, especially those less active, need less.


Now, something to consider though is that, depending on the situation your activity levels may not be typical. In addition to that, your storage space needs to be considered. If you have the space to store more, then great, you can. A minimum though would be enough for one calorically dense meal per day, per person. And when I say calorically dense I’m talking somewhere in the area of 1200-1300 calories on the low end. That should be enough that, thro…
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Glimmer of (Gray) Hope

Three club owners have a meeting with the local press in the Norwegian town of Fredrikstad, airing their brewing troubles to an eager journalist. The year is 2009 and two things have collided with each other that changed the behavior of their clientele: The aftershock of the 2008 economic crisis and a change in local alcohol serving hours.



When nightclub-goers still have the need to keep the party going but have less money in their pockets and the clubs can’t stay open as long as they used to, there’s a unique pocket in the market for someone that can offer alternatives. Someone who doesn’t care about state-mandated opening hours and deal in smuggled booze: The illegal nightclubs.

That was the topic of discussion the three club-owners had with the press,[1] those pesky competitors not playing by the rules. It’s almost impossible to compete when you are handcuffed to regulations and everything you sell has an automatic 25% extra costs attached to it straight out of the gate (and that …
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The Economy Needs A Difficulty Adjustment

The world economy is experiencing what one might argue, is a death spiral. Investors are liquidating assets they once deemed valuable, only to be fooled by falsely over-valued stock prices. Such mal-investment was a result of corporate buy-backs, fudging the true valuation of companies, and attracted the attention of deep-pocket investors. Yet, the investors sold their shares, and now the corporations are expecting bailouts from the Federal Reserve. The Fed will once again try to cover up the economic wound with a greenback bandage, and blame the market crisis solely on COVID-19 rather than take responsibility for manipulating market signals.

The game theory and technology of the Bitcoin network is the most beautiful environment for a healthy, prosperous economy. This “cleansing” of inefficient miners is what’s missing in the macro world today. Taking a good, hard look at the self-healing organism that is Bitcoin, reveals how its characteristics mirror that of markets. When left unha…
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Anarchozionism

So now it’s Abaco.

From the earliest days of Ayn Rand’s influence over the Libertarian Movement, frustrated activists have given up on their efforts to reform or revolt against the American State to seek the promised Gulch.


In the early 1960’s, a group composed primarily of engineers and technologists worked on a plan to construct an island nation on a shallow land base of the North Sea. Preform agreed on a tiny, nominal government, a free port status which would thrive on free trade between Britain, Norway, and Denmark. Individuals who had been into education and political action (the LIBERAL INNOVATOR, leafletting the Cow Palace GOP convention) gave up and published PREFORM-INFORM backing the escapees.

Then the British seized the pirate radio stations operating outside their territorial waters. Oil was discovered in the North Sea, and Britain, Denmark, and Norway promptly carved up the sea bed. The Preform crowd either Browned out or went into escapist trips such as becoming nomads…
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Meatspace Pirate Pop-up Ads

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- The Spray Can, The Home Printer and the QR Code - ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
"They got cash, which makes it legal devastation when they do it, and when we do it its vandalism, do it too much and get sent to prison" - Looptroop, Illegal Commercial

 The vulgar billboard commercial and the pre-roll advertisement that you click away as soon as possible when you watch Youtube are marketing tools to catch your interest in and shove a product in front of you someone wants to sell. Those two elements are pretty much what you can boil down the old art of advertisement to, even if marketers like to frame their craft with a more mystical aura[1].  

Which is totally legitimate to do in some cases, there are many wizards in the field that have built some really impressive campaigns that made millions in sales.

The scale we are looking at in this article has a lot less m…
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Technological Agorism Part III: AI & the Agora

There are two types of artificial intelligence: the rules-based, & the neural network-based approach. To illustrate the differences, I'll borrow an example from AI blogger Janelle Shane's book, You Look Like A Thing & I Love You, & pretend we're training an AI to recognize dogs.



Using a rules-based approach, we’d create parameters which the AI would then use to determine whether or not the thing it’s looking at, is in fact a dog. Our rules would include things like “must have four legs” & “must have tail,” etc. When all of our conditions have been satisfied, the AI will recognize a dog.

With a neural network-based approach, we show the AI images of dogs & it learns to recognize patterns. The more pictures of dogs we show it, the more accurate the AI becomes. Nowadays, this is usually the preferred approach & will be the subject of this article.

The interesting thing about the neural-network approach to AI - as we’ve already noted, is its reliance …
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Technological Agorism Part II: Infrastructure Disintermediation

If knowledge is power, then those with data are King.

In this context, it’s easy to understand why Columbia University professor Alexis Wichowski has coined the term “net-state.” As she writes in this Wired article, “Net-states are digital, non-state actors without the violence.”

Ahh, music to the agorist’s ear…




The superpowers of net-states; tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook & similar firms, have become so powerful that they're beginning to out-compete governments in the provision of basic infrastructure, from power grids to telecommunications & public transportation. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that governments, being incapable of efficiently providing the most basic infrastructure, roads - will be poorly equipped to compete in the fast-paced, high-tech, digital age. This high-level disintermediation strikes at the very heart of the state. It deprives them of their bread & butter, so to speak.




Importantly, it also indicates that we’re …
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