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Showing posts from May, 2020

Weathering With You: An Agorist Perspective

If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w

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 en

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 ga

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 lef