book highlights – @habits

My favorite highlights from The Sovereign Individual (again): “Farming made both crime and government paying propositions for the first time.”

I first read — and shared highlights from — Sovereign Individual in 2017. You can see them here.

Recently, as part of my process to review a bunch of old notes and learnings, I re-read all of those old highlights and whittled down further to a few current faves.

It’s still remarkable to me, how prescient and farsighted the authors were about future geopolitical conflict. The book came out in 1997 — before bitcoin, before en masse labor offshoring, before Trump & Jan 6, before the rise of China, before trillion dollar publicly traded tech companies, before multi-trillion dollar government deficits.

Of course they didn’t get everything right, but enough to matter. I believe it’s because they had a rather unique analytical framework: Attempting to understand how violence (both offense and defense) changes at the margins.

SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL HIGHLIGHTS (all verbatim, all mistakes mine):

The lamb and the lion keep a delicate balance, interacting at the margin. If lions were suddenly more swift, they would catch prey that now escape. If lambs suddenly grew wings, lions would starve.
The capacity to utilize and defend against violence is the crucial variable that alters life at the margin.

The Church was the main source for preserving and transmitting technical knowledge and information. The Church sponsored universities and provided the minimal education that medieval society enjoyed. The Church also provided a mechanism for reproducing books and manuscripts,

Farming created stationary capital on an extensive scale, raising the payoff from violence and dramatically increasing the challenge of protecting assets. Farming made both crime and government paying propositions for the first time.

People had minded less giving their money to the Church when there was no other outlet for it. But when they suddenly saw the chance to make one hundred times their capital financing a spice voyage to the East, or get a lesser, but still promising sum of 40 percent per annum financing a battalion for the king, they understandably sought the grace of God where their own interests lay.

Suppose the phone company sent a bill for $50,000 for a call to London, just because you happened to conclude a deal worth $125,000 during a conversation. Neither you nor any other customer in his right mind would pay it. But that is exactly the basis upon which income taxes are assessed in every democratic welfare state.

Most democracies run chronic deficits. This is a fiscal policy characteristic of control by employees. Governments seem notably resistant to reducing the costs of their operations.

A delicate etiquette shrouded straightforward analysis of labor relations during the industrial period. One of its pretenses was the idea that factory jobs, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century, were skilled work. This was untrue. Most factory jobs could have been performed by almost anyone capable of showing up on time. They required little or no training, not even the ability to read or write. As recently as the 1980s, large fractions of the General Motors workforce were either illiterate, innumerate, or both. Until the 1990s, the typical assembly-line worker at GM received only one day of orientation before taking his place on the assembly line. A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.

governments have never established stable monopolies of coercion over the open sea. Think about it. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace, which has no physical existence at all.

Paper money is a distinctly industrial product. It would have been impractical before the printing press to duplicate receipts or certificates that became paper currency.

This new digital form of money is destined to play a pivotal role in cybercommerce. It will consist of encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers. Unique, anonymous, and verifiable, this money will accommodate the largest transactions. It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value. It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multitrillion-dollar wholesale market without borders.

As documented by Professor Roy W. Jastrom in his book The Golden Constant, gold has maintained its purchasing power, with minor fluctuations, for as far back as reliable price records are available, to 1560 in the case of England.

‘If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.” ANDREW S. GROVE, PRESIDENT, INTEL

the true obstacle to development in backward countries has been the one factor of production that could not be easily borrowed or imported from abroad, namely government.

We also suspect that nationstates with a single major metropolis will remain coherent longer than those with several big cities, which imply multiple centers of interest with their various hinterlands.

Every human on earth could be packed into Texas, with each family living in its own detached house with a yard, and still have some of Texas left over.

New survival strategies for persons of lower intelligence will evolve, involving greater concentration on development of leisure skills, sports abilities, and crime, as well as service to the growing numbers of Sovereign Individuals as income inequality within jurisdictions rises.

Shaw and Wong focus on five identification devices used by modern nationstates to mobilize their populations against out-groups. These are: 1. a common language 2. a shared homeland 3. similar phenotypic characteristics 4. a shared religious heritage and 5. the belief of common descent

As Tudge elaborates in describing the “extreme generalness” of human beings: “We are the animal equivalent of the Turing machine: the universal device that can be turned to any task.”

By eliminating the beneficial impact of competition in challenging underachievers to conform to productive norms, the welfare state has helped to create legions of dysfunctional, paranoid, and poorly acculturated people, the social equivalent of a powder keg.

A system that routinely submits control over the largest, most deadly enterprises on earth to the winner of popularity contests between charismatic demagogues is bound to suffer for it in the long run.

Like most elites, the cognitive elite tend to be a bit above themselves, are rather arrogant, and think they can set their own standards. They are alienated from society as a result.

In science, three thousand years completely changed what human knowledge is; in morality, we may actually have fallen back. The average psychotherapist probably gives the patient less good moral adviceon how to lead his life than the average Jew would have received from his teacher in the period of Moses.

The morality of the Information Age applauds efficiency, and recognizes the advantage of resources being dedicated to their highest-value uses. In other words, the morality of the Information Age will be the morality of the market.

Because incomes for the very rich will rise faster than for others in advanced economies, an area of growing demand will be services and products that cater to the needs of the very rich.

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke – book highlights

dopamine-nation

I finished this book last month. For me, it was similar to the book Breath and The Power of Habit in that it changed my perspective on the world in some fundamental way, and as a result my behavior has changed for the better (at least, for now ;)

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Dopamine-Nation-Finding-Balance-Indulgence-ebook/dp/B08KPKHVXQ

Here are too many interesting highlights from the book, all copied verbatim:

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one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance.

In short, I became a chain reader of formulaic erotic genre novels. As soon as I finished one e-book, I moved on to the next: reading instead of socializing, reading instead of cooking, reading instead of sleeping, reading instead of paying attention to my husband and my kids. Once, I’m ashamed to admit, I brought my Kindle to work and read between patients.

“After that I start a new ritual,” he said. “Every time I go into hotel room, I place sticky notes all around—on the bathroom mirror, the TV, the remote control—saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ I don’t even last one day.”

Prohibition led to a sharp decrease in the number of Americans consuming and becoming addicted to alcohol. Rates of public drunkenness and alcohol-related liver disease decreased by half during this period in the absence of new remedies to treat addiction.

Our dopamine economy, or what historian David Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism”

Today’s cannabis is five to ten times more potent than the cannabis of the 1960s and is available in cookies, cakes, brownies, gummy bears, blueberries, “pot tarts,” lozenges, oils, aromatics, tinctures, teas . . . the list is endless.

polypharmacy—that is, using multiple drugs simultaneously or in close proximity—has become the norm.

Even acts of kindness toward others are framed as a strategy for personal happiness. Altruism, no longer merely a good in itself, has become a vehicle for our own “well-being.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”

By this accounting, one hit off a meth pipe is equal to ten orgasms.

pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions and work via an opponent-process mechanism.

I tend to imagine this self-regulating system as little gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side. The gremlins represent the work of homeostasis:

the control group, the pathological gamblers showed a marked increase in dopamine levels when they lost money.

The more they lose, the stronger the urge to continue gambling, and the stronger the rush when they win—a phenomenon described as “loss chasing.”

I was also assuaging my grief at never having another baby, something I wanted and my husband did not, creating a tension in our marriage and in our sex life that hadn’t existed before.

“A week would be good, but in my experience, a month is usually the minimum amount of time it takes to reset the brain’s reward pathway.”

I remember standing in the kitchen in 2001 holding my newborn baby in my arms and experiencing an intrusive image of smashing her head against the refrigerator or the kitchen counter and watching it implode like a soft melon.

Cigarette smokers are more likely than matched controls to discount monetary rewards (that is, they value them less if they have to wait longer for them). The more they smoke, and the more nicotine they consume, the more they discount future rewards. These findings hold true for both hypothetical money and real money.

They found that when participants chose immediate rewards, emotion- and reward-processing parts of the brain lit up. When participants delayed their reward, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain involved in planning and abstract thinking—became active. The implication here is that we are all now vulnerable to prefrontal cortical atrophy as our reward pathway has become the dominant driver of our lives.

By contrast, the amount of leisure time in the United States today increased by 5.1 hours per week between 1965 and 2003, an additional 270 leisure hours per year. By 2040, the number of leisure hours in a typical day in the United States is projected to be 7.2 hours, with just 3.8 hours of daily work. The numbers for other high-income countries are similar.

“Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” “Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational computer activities.”

In the spring of 2015, Muhammad committed to abstaining until he passed his qualifying exam, however long it took. For the next year, he abstained from cannabis and worked harder than ever before. His final report was over 100 pages long. “It was,” he told me, “one of the most positive and productive years of my life.”

Mitch was able to use categorical binding to mitigate the risk of relapse to sports betting. There’s something tragic and touching about having to ban yourself.

The well-worn American tradition of dieting—vegetarian, vegan, raw vegan, gluten-free, Atkins, Zone, ketogenic, Paleolithic, grapefruit—is one example of categorical self-binding.

A gluten-free diet, which previously had effectively limited consumption of high-calorie processed foods such as cakes, cookies, crackers, cereal, pastas, and pizzas, now no longer does.

The evolution of the gluten-free diet illustrates how attempts to control consumption are swiftly countered by modern market forces, just one more example of the challenges inherent in our dopamine economy.

Cigarettes became vape pens and ZYN pouches. Heroin became OxyContin. Cannabis became “medical marijuana.” No sooner have we committed to abstinence than our old drug reappears as a nicely packaged, affordable new product saying, Hey! This is okay. I’m good for you now.

She removed all alcohol save one beer, which she left in her refrigerator. She called it her “totemic beer,” which she regarded as the symbol of her choice not to drink, a representation of her will and autonomy. She told herself that she only needed to focus on not drinking that one beer rather than the more daunting task of not drinking any beer from the vast quantity available in the world.

Then he tried opioids for the first time, which was easy to do in Arkansas in 2009, when opioid manufacturers and distributors were pumping millions of opioid pain pills into the state. In that same year, doctors in Arkansas wrote 116 opioid prescriptions per 100 persons living in Arkansas.

Patients with pain who take opioids daily for more than a month are at increased risk not only for opioid addiction but also for worsened pain. As mentioned earlier, this is the process called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, that is, opioids making pain worse with repeated doses.

Worse yet, have psychotropic medications become a means of social control, especially of the poor, unemployed, and disenfranchised? Psychiatric drugs are prescribed more often and in larger amounts to poor people, especially poor children.

“I got into a routine where I immersed myself in ice water for five to ten minutes every morning and again just before bed. I did that every day for the next three years. It was key to my recovery.”

“For the first five to ten seconds, my body is screaming: Stop, you’re killing yourself. It’s that painful.” “I can imagine.” “But I tell myself it’s time limited, and it’s worth it. After the initial shock, my skin goes numb. Right after I get out, I feel high. It’s exactly like a drug . . . like how I remember ecstasy or recreational Vicodin. Incredible. I feel great for hours.”

Using blood samples, the researchers showed that plasma (blood) dopamine concentrations increased 250 percent, and plasma norepinephrine concentrations increased 530 percent as a result of cold-water immersion.

We’ve all experienced some version of pain giving way to pleasure. Perhaps like Socrates, you’ve noticed an improved mood after a period of being ill, or felt a runner’s high after exercise, or took inexplicable pleasure in a scary movie. Just as pain is the price we pay for pleasure, so too is pleasure our reward for pain.

Among Japanese citizens living outside the epicenter of the 1945 nuclear attack, those with low-dose radiation exposure may have shown marginally longer lifespans and decreased rates of cancer compared to un-irradiated individuals.

Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy, and sleep than any pill I can prescribe.

He argued that the efficacy of acupuncture is mediated through pain, with needle insertion as the primary mechanism: “The needling, which can injure the tissue, is a noxious stimulation inducing pain . . . inhibiting great pain with little pain!”

adult hippocampal neurogenesis.” This refers to the discovery some decades ago that contrary to previous teaching, humans can generate new neurons in the brain into middle and late adulthood.

Use of the wheel was not limited to wild mice. There were also shrews, rats, snails, slugs, and frogs, most of whom demonstrated intentional and purposeful engagement with the wheel.

A study of skydivers compared to a control group (rowers) found that repeat skydivers were more likely to experience anhedonia, a lack of joy, in the rest of their lives.

By 2002, the top-paid 20 percent were twice as likely to work long hours as the lowest-paid 20 percent, and that trend continues. Economists speculate that this change is due to higher rewards for those at the top of the economic food chain.

“If stimulating the prefrontal cortex causes people to be more honest, is it also possible that being more honest stimulates the prefrontal cortex? Might the practice of telling the truth strengthen activity and excitability in the parts of the brain we use for future planning, emotion regulation, and delayed gratification?” I asked.

But if the therapist can help the patient take responsibility if not for the event itself, then for how they react to it in the here and now, that patient is empowered to move forward with their life. I have been deeply impressed with AA philosophy and teachings on this point. One of the preeminent AA mottos, often printed in bold type on its brochures, is, “I am responsible.”

Shame makes us feel bad about ourselves as people, whereas guilt makes us feel bad about our actions while preserving a positive sense of self. Shame is a maladaptive emotion. Guilt is an adaptive emotion. My problem with the shame-guilt dichotomy is that experientially, shame and guilt are identical.

Once I know a patient’s story—the forces that shaped them to create the person I see before me—animosity evaporates in the warmth of empathy. To truly understand someone is to care for them.

In particular, those behaviors that seem excessive, gratuitous, or even irrational in existing religious institutions, such as wearing certain hairstyles or certain clothing, abstaining from various foods or forms of modern technology, or refusing certain medical treatments, are rational when understood as a cost to the individual to reduce free riding within an organization.

AA and other 12 Step groups have been maligned as “cults” or organizations in which people trade their addiction to alcohol and/or drugs to an addiction to the group. These criticisms fail to appreciate that the strictness of the organization, its cultishness, may be the very source of its effectiveness.

But the lived experience of my patients suggests that prosocial shame can have positive, healthy effects by smoothing some of narcissism’s rougher edges, tying us more closely to our supportive social networks, and curbing our addictive tendencies.

I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is.

Highlights from the book Paper Money Collapse: if you want to understand fiat money and credit cycles, read this!

Incredibly clear and incredibly prescient book by Detlev Schlichter. I’m reading it a second time. He saw it coming a decade ago, and his macroeconomic analysis is thus far spot on.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Paper-Money-Collapse-Folly-Elastic/dp/1118877322

Highlights:

Prosperity needs economic and political freedom of individuals. Only they have the information needed for sensible economic decisions. No central planner can obtain this information, however sophisticated his instrument kit may be.

It is no surprise that all recorded currency collapses occurred exclusively in complete paper money systems.

But here the consensus faces a problem. One of the key features of the capitalist economy happens to be that it makes things cheaper over time.

we can already mention the fundamental origins of rising productivity: increased division of labor and the accumulation of productive capital. Technological innovation plays a role, too,

So if the consensus maintains that moderately rising prices are a good thing (a notion we will put to the test as well), it has to face up to the fact that, if left on its own, the free market will produce the opposite over time.

Moderate deflation is the norm in capitalist economies, not the moderate inflation that the consensus claims to be superior.

A political authority will have to guide them in order to achieve this. From this follows that the belief in the benefit of constant moderate inflation requires a further belief in the desirability of monetary policy, of a systematic influencing and directing of key monetary processes by a central authority.

the central bank can stabilize the system by keeping interest rates low or lowering them further, by accelerating the production of money and by producing—in theory—unlimited amounts of new money. This can sustain “aggregate demand,” and keep the banks liquid and the economy from correcting. Furthermore, the mere knowledge that the central bank has these powers and is willing to use them may sustain public confidence in the system, which by itself should further enhance financial stability.

It is precisely the hallmark of an established consensus that it is the basis of debate and hardly ever the topic of debate. This belief system is thus an intellectual tool with which analysts analyze monetary phenomena. The belief system itself is beyond reproach.

Therefore, the idea seems to have taken hold that injections of new money are, as a general rule, a good thing, as they help avoid deflation, encourage banks to lend, and thus aid economic growth in general, and that the only constraining factor to this positive prospect is the risk of inflation.

Instead, the ongoing injections of new money must systematically distort market signals and cause misuse of resources, mispricing of assets, and misallocation of capital. In fact, such a system is unsustainable in the long run. It is bound to generate larger and larger crises and is likely to end in total collapse.

As long as we allow prices to be reasonably flexible, there can never be a shortage of money. If we had a smaller stock of money, prices would be lower—that is all.

Every injection of new money must lead to changes in relative prices, to changes in resource use, to a redirection of economic activity from some areas to others, and change income and wealth distribution.

As more needs are satisfied (the new tastes) or satisfied more easily (through new technologies), society overall becomes more prosperous. We will see that this is decidedly not the case with the changes that result from money expansion. They do not enhance wealth in aggregate, and they redistribute wealth arbitrarily.

Interest rates, however, are crucial relative prices (to be precise, they are the relationship between similar goods at different points in time)

Ongoing moderate monetary expansion does not stabilize the economy but, slowly and surely, destabilizes it.

Such moderate, secular deflation has many advantages and is the normal corollary of a capitalist economy.

This system is truly unique in that, for the first time in history, the entire world is on a paper standard.

Money has become completely elastic. In its present form, the system came into being only as recently as August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon unilaterally closed the “gold window,”

Reinhard and Rogoff demonstrated that, since 1971, the number and intensity of banking crises around the world has increased.

The paper money system unsurprisingly has fed the powerful trend of “financialization” of the economy, making banks and the entire financial sector disproportionately big and also disturbingly unstable.

There has been one major new—and positive—development in the sphere of money that is potentially revolutionary, that did come as a surprise to me, and that has profound implications for what is discussed in this book: It is the rise of cryptocurrencies, and in particular, of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is inelastic, hard, apolitical, and completely global money. It thus ticks all of the boxes that this book suggests are the true characteristics of good money

The U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) is now on its third round of quantitative easing (QE), started in September 2012, and this time the program is officially open-ended. Under current arrangements, the Fed is on target to produce more than $1 trillion of new base money per calendar year. A policy tool that was deemed highly unconventional when introduced in 2008 to stabilize the banks in the wake of the Lehman collapse has now, five years after the recession officially ended, become a tool for boosting overall economic activity and in particular the rate of employment

And Japan confirmed my expectation that policy makers will not be content for long to produce just enough monetary accommodation to keep things from deteriorating further, but will at some point go “all in” to create a new upswing at almost any cost.

“Living within your means” is now called austerity and has predominantly a negative connotation.

Capitalism is a term that still has negative connotations in many circles, but it is a fact that the only advanced, highly productive, and wealth-generating societies we know, whether from experience or theoretical investigation, are in a broad sense capitalist societies.

Money is not the creation of the state. It is not the result of acts of legislation, and its emergence did not require a society-wide agreement of any sort. Money came into existence because the individuals who wanted to trade found a medium of exchange immediately useful. And the more people began to use the same medium of exchange, the more useful it became to them.

The term intrinsic value is meaningless in economics. All value is subjective, meaning it is the result of acts of valuing by people. Gold and silver have certain physical properties that are intrinsic to them, but how those are valued is always the result of a subjective assessment by the users of gold and silver.

then-chairman Ben Bernanke explained in a newspaper article that with short rates already at zero, a more effective monetary stimulus could now be implemented by depressing long-term rates through large-scale asset purchases: “Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment. And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.”

Over the next few years, the Fed will probably not only repeatedly buy U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, but will ultimately include corporate bonds, auto loans, student loans, and equities into its asset purchase schemes,

Second, consumer price inflation has persistently been positive but subdued, yet many asset markets experienced substantial inflationary pressures, in particular more recently. This includes certain financial assets, real estate in various locations, prime private property, arable land in many countries, fine art, antiques, rare old cars, and so forth.

Reinhart and Rogoff in their IMF working paper suggest that overall debt levels in advanced economies, and in particular sovereign debt levels, are already too high to be meaningfully reducible via growth or public sector spending restraint (“austerity”), and that the likely solution requires a combination of defaults, restructurings, and higher inflation, supported by measures to keep domestic investors captive through capital controls and other restrictions (“financial repression”).

High inflation means volatile inflation and it is always at acute risk of spinning out of control.

All paper money systems in history that did not end with a voluntary return to commodity money have ended in hyperinflation and currency collapse. All these disasters were overseen by state-appointed monetary authorities, and it is fair to assume that none of them were particularly keen on total monetary annihilation. Yet this is what happened.

Britain and the United States have repeatedly linked the pound and the dollar back to gold after extended and inflationary paper money periods.

Thus, it would require a gold price of $14,230 per ounce to back the monetary base of the U.S. financial system fully with the government’s gold.

The fact that gold has been trading substantially below levels that seem consistent with sufficient gold backing probably indicates that the market does not consider a full remonetization of gold likely, and that the market also remains still fairly sanguine about any imminent inflation risks for the dollar.

The idea seems to get further support from the fact that China, Russia, and South Africa are among the five largest gold producers in the world, China indeed being the single largest. Additionally, China and India are the biggest importers of the precious metal. However, the official gold reserves in these countries are still relatively small.

it is clear that one of the key advantages of a gold standard remains that it provides a stable framework for global cooperation on free markets. A globalized world needs a global currency, not a group of more or less freely floating paper currencies, some of them dominant, that are being “managed” according to various domestic political objectives.

If there was only one thing we could change about our monetary system now, it should be to completely privatize money and credit, to take the state out of money and the economy completely. How could this be done?

Whatever the legal case might be, there can be no question that practical and operational control over the U.S. Fed rests with the state. The U.S. Fed was installed by an act of Congress, its main policy parameters are set by politicians, and its senior staff is selected and appointed by politicians and remains answerable to them.

Most people only consider their bank deposits safe because they believe the state would not allow Bank XYZ to default, not because they have any confidence that Bank XYZ is run prudently.

The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government and of the greatest errors of administration. —Adam Smith

Good money, as we have demonstrated at length, should be hard, global, inelastic, and apolitical money. This is precisely what Bitcoin promises to be.

But, in turn, these banknotes are not backed by anything of particular value either (their paper or cotton content is hardly what gives them value). Fiat money banknotes are irredeemable. Fiat money constitutes no claim on anything.

Money is the most fungible good in the economy. In principle, its physical properties are unimportant, although it could reasonably be suggested that nonmateriality is even an advantage. It aids fungibility in an increasingly digitalized world.

The motto here should be “In cryptography and markets we trust.”

That bitcoins are exhibiting very distinct features of moneyness right now, nobody can deny.

The only thing that money can do for me is give me purchasing power. How can I know what that purchasing power is? I certainly need some point of reference and that must be the purchasing power that was observable very recently in previous exchanges.

They developed a complex and sophisticated technology, a cryptographic vehicle that allows the secure transfer of distinct digital units—the “bitcoins”—in a peer-to-peer network. Bitcoins are goods in their own rights. As I stated before, they can be thought of as cryptographic commodities.

But those who wanted to join the Bitcoin network but did not want to mine bitcoins themselves had to purchase bitcoins from miners, either by paying for them with established fiat currencies or by offering goods or services in exchange, and it is very likely that the miners used the costs of mining as a first reference point for their asking price. Enough people were evidently attracted to this project for reasonably stable exchange relationships between bitcoins and fiat monies to emerge,

The historical track record is not encouraging. We have seen that throughout history, when the ruling state paper money system was in disarray, authorities frequently banned the use of gold and silver or tried to disrupt the markets for these metals.

Mistrust of markets seems more common than skepticism toward state power. When new crises occur, the initial impulse will probably be to ask for yet more state action.

Ludwig von Mises put it: It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights.

Some excerpts from the excellent interstellar scifi Children of Men

Absolutely brilliant book and the first one I’ve read in many moons that I would prefer over Netflix as part of my evening wind down.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky-ebook/dp/B07DN8BQMD

A few highlights below to give a flavor of the writing and story:

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For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create …

Conversely, the Spitters are well aware of the danger that Portia’s kind poses. The two species have clashed over untold generations, each time with more understanding of the enemy. Now both recognize that the other is something less than kin but something more than prey.

He saw Guyen, looking more alert than anyone else there, and guessed the mission commander had ordered himself to be woken early, so that he could assert his bright, brisk dominance over this room full of zombies.

For so long, scholars had taught that the further the ice receded, the better for the world, and yet nobody had guessed what poisons and sicknesses had been caught up in that ice, like insects in amber, the encroaching cold protecting the shivering biosphere from the last excesses of Empire.

Fabian explains that there were once several warring colonies here, but one has become dominant. Instead of driving its lesser neighbours to extinction, the ruling colony has incorporated them into its own survival strategy, permitting their continuance in return for making them into extensions of itself, utilizing food that they gather and technologies they have developed. It is this world’s first superstate.

It is, however, quite true that packs of females—especially younger ones, perhaps newly formed peer groups seeking to strengthen their bonds—will descend to the lower reaches of the city and engage in hunting males. The practice is covertly overlooked—girls will be girls, after all—but overtly frowned upon.

She is also a recluse, wanting little more than to get on with her experiments—a common trait for those driven to build on their inherited Understandings—

Of course the Messenger is waiting for their reply. This was heresy such a short time ago, but Portia has since looked within herself. Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire?

The male creeps out, to be pinned by their collective gaze. Fabian has given this moment some thought, based on his earlier failure with Portia. He will not ask for too much. He will show, rather than tell. He will woo them, but as a female does, with success, rather than as a male, with flattery.

“Traitors,” Guyen repeated, as if savouring the word. “In the end, they got what they deserved.” The transition from earnest, martyred leader to raving psychopath had simply happened without any discernible boundary being crossed.

It was too much. It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.

“Fuck,” she said expressively, and then repeated it a few more times, as if taking strength from the word.

The giants must live their lives amongst these rigid, unvarying right angles, entombed between these massive, solid walls. Nothing makes any attempt to mimic nature. Instead, everything is held in the iron hand of that dominating alien aesthetic.

Highlights from J.G. Ballard’s wicked gripping novel High-Rise: “Of course, as he realized now, no one ever changed, and for all his abundant self-confidence he needed to be looked after just as much as ever.”

Lord of the Flies, but instead of stranded kids on a deserted island, it’s bourgeois adults in a luxury high-rise condo.

His writing is just *word nerds’ kiss*. Some highlights, sans spoilers:

—

Laing’s fondness for pre-lunch cocktails, his nude sunbathing on the balcony, and his generally raffish air obviously unnerved her.

The internal time of the high-rise, like an artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms, generated by a combination of alcohol and insomnia.

His relationship with Charlotte Melville was hard to gauge—his powerful sexual aggression was overlaid by a tremendous restlessness. No wonder his wife, a pale young woman with a postgraduate degree who reviewed children’s books for the literary weeklies, seemed permanently exhausted.

It was difficult to imagine any kind of domestic reality, as if the Steeles were a pair of secret agents unconvincingly trying to establish a marital role.

Unlike the majority of parties in the high-rise, at which well-bred guests stood about exchanging professional small-talk before excusing themselves, this one had real buoyancy, an atmosphere of true excitement. Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party.

…because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes.

But even before they sat down together on her bed Laing knew that, almost as an illustration of the paradoxical logic of the high-rise, their relationship would end rather than begin with this first sexual act. In a real sense this would separate them from each other rather than bring them together.

Her hair immaculately coiffured, Mrs Steele hovered about him with the delighted smile of a novice madam entertaining her first client. She even complimented Laing on his choice of music, which she could hear through the poorly insulated walls.

Of course, as he realized now, no one ever changed, and for all his abundant self-confidence he needed to be looked after just as much as ever.

Thinking of those distant heights, Wilder took his shower, turning the cold tap on full and letting the icy jet roar across his chest and loins. Where Helen had begun to falter, he felt more determined, like a climber who has at long last reached the foot of the mountain he has prepared all his life to scale.

This central two-thirds of the apartment building formed its middle class, made up of self-centred but basically docile members of the professions—the doctors and lawyers, accountants and tax specialists who worked, not for themselves, but for medical institutes and large corporations. Puritan and self-disciplined, they had all the cohesion of those eager to settle for second best.

Some kind of wayward sexuality was at work. For a grotesque moment he was tempted to expose himself to her.

Laing laughed aloud, amused by Alice’s notion that somehow he had been unaffected by events in the high-rise—the typical assumption of a martyred older sister forced during her childhood to look after a much younger brother.

At least, however, his affairs had prepared the ground for his ascent of the high-rise, those literal handholds which would carry him on his climb to the roof over the supine bodies of the women he had known.

In a sense he depended on the uncertainties of his relationship with the dentist, following his murderous swings like a condemned prisoner in love with a moody jailer.

She had accepted him as she would any marauding hunter. First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him.