Week 44

Why are some people adamantly became opposed to Bitcoin lately?

Wealth concerns

When something like B$ threatening to replace entire currencies and is rising in price so much, many might wonder "let's say I switch to B$ one day, what would my current wealth be worth in this new thing? I didn't go in at 100, didn't go in at 500, nor 1000. Will I have to go in at 1 mil? My wealth will be worth nothing!!" This is a legitimate concern. But I am guessing B$ price at the time will offer "proportionate wealth" because most people will go in at that moment.

When and why to go in? That decision will be similar to the decision to sign up on Facebook: because most of your friends are there.

Question

If I lose my bank card, I could to the bank, they recognize me from ID, give me another card. But if I lose my B$ password I lose everything. The bank provides me a service.

There is a similar service - it's called Dropbox

I could put my password file on any file service, Google Drive, Dropbox. Pass forgotten? Go to the file service and look it up. If DB, GD pass itself is forgotten there are mechanisms to get that back - cell phone, Q&A, etc.

Question

A gentlemen named Craig Wright claimed he was the inventor of Bitcoin. Is he right?

It is likely

There was some contraversy around this, CW could not reproduce some keys to prove he was Satoshi, but maybe he lost them (Dropbox!). He came across sort of forgetful / mad-scientist throughout this ordeal, and one looks at Satoshi's writings, he is a very deliberate, careful person - but ppl can be different at work related issues, and somewhat different on minutea... Plus I profile CW as High Horse - in the positive HH is dealing with some very highly unorthodox ideas, and Bitcoin certainly qualifies in that regard. Then there is his use of some words hinting at certain English education, like "colour" and dude is Australian. Someone who knows the guy well says he likes Japanese culture - hence the fake name. On and on.

Question

In previous blog post u talked about nationalism. What other problems await nationalism in these post-modern times?

Leaders from the fringes

This is a huge potential problem. Say all you want about the "establishment" but they know one thing well - how to adjust the nationalist message, laughing at its shortcomings in private, ignoring its warts and calibrating its outside face. But the guy from the fringe is different: he received "the teaching" through something akin to the reverse / bizarro telephone game, by the time the message got to him its connection to the originators became weaker and weaker but the literal content became stronger. The fringer took this teaching seriously, he drank the Kool-Aid. He drank that shit something fierce too, bottoms up, after it was done he was still shaking that shit for that last drop, mouth wide open.. Yeah.. he drank it all.

He drank the Kool-Aid, and then when by some dumb luck he is power he is not able to tune the message in it, defeating its purpose completely. The fringer offends, ignores interest groups, is insensitive, and unknowingly sows the seeds of chaos. Take Modi in India for instance - an outsider, and his belief Hindu nationalism is crass and offensive I hear. The things previous leaders would ignore this guy takes too seriously. Why? Because he drank the Kool-Aid.

The second way the nation-state can be harmed by the outsider is when outsider feels himself illegitimate. If nations are defined culturally, and leaders need to be the embodiment of that culture, what if the outsider feels himself unfit of the current culture? Then the outsider can try to create a new culture so he can be the embodiment of that. But there is a problem, nation-states can have only one culture, the ppl attached to the old one will not change, so now there are two national cultures competing. This won't work, especially in these post-modern times where information flows in all directions not just top-down, so there will be unnecessary conflict. But that conflict can even lead to civil war and the eventual break-up of the nation-state.

Like I said before, the solution is turning the volume down at the highest levels, paying lip service to the current canon but mostly ignoring it, and completely ignoring the parts that are not relevant.

Question

What are some examples for this tuning for US?

The Mexican migration

Mexicans moving in the border regions near Mexico in US and not assimilating is a legitimate concern. "One culture" is still relevant here. A gov can take steps to discourage that kind of unskilled migration. But do you have to go around cursing out Mexicans at the highest levels of government? No. Do you have to kick out people who are already integrated in the society?

The former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called on Americans to pass universal health coverage at a speech in New York City on Tuesday, marking a dramatic intervention of world leaders into the US healthcare debate.

Ban called on the US to stop “powerful interests” from prioritizing “profit over care” as part of a global delegation pushing the US to adopt a publicly financed health system similar to those in other wealthy countries.

The US spends more on healthcare than any nation in the world, yet 28 million Americans still lack care.

“In the US, all too often only rich people get access to expensive life-saving treatments,” said Ban. “This is unjust and threatens everybody’s health when working- and middle-class people with communicable diseases cannot afford treatment for their infections.”

“Even routine preventive care is often prohibitively expensive,” said Ban. “As America is demonstrating, you simply cannot reach universal health coverage if your health system is dominated by private financing and ultimately functions to prioritize profit over care.”

My man Ban ki.. 

Hit the nail right on the head. The profit motive in health insurance is a non-starter. That is why, after that over-engineered piece of shit Obamacare, the results are patchy at best. I am going to pull and push this lever, adjust this incentive to caaarefully nudge_companies_ to behave this, that way - won't work.

Why are politicians trying so hard to pursue these capitalist (half-assed or otherwise) solutions? Because of the post-prophet conandrum. Let me explain what that is: If the religion is the free-market philosophy then it had to have a prophet. Who was he? The last prophet was Ronald Reagan. He rightfully analyzed the problem US economy was in at the time, and came up with the solution. But his followers, not being as smart as he (believe me he was very smart, he only played stupid on TV), cannot go around or draw line in the sand and say "the market stops here no further". The prophet knows all, sees all, knows how he arrived at the solution, from moral perspective, social perspective, all perspectives. The followers not seeing all those angles need to pick and latch on to stuff. Like they pick one word, "supply-side", now everything has to be supply-side. Deregulate, free-marketize, rinse repeat, for everything. This is fine where it is called for, but in all aspects of life? Even the best theoretical physics models cannot explain all phenomena. But the followers do this because they cannot do the adjustment the prophet could have made. 

It would be well-advised that ppl start reading the book the prophet has written, grok it all, do the adjustment. Or the book needs get rewritten.

Question

But there've been Democratic presidents after Reagan

They are all his clones

They all lived in the universe that He has created.

Let's look at the names, after Reagan it was Bush I, his VP. Then the Southern Ronald Reagan (Clinton), then Bush II, the VP's son, then a random brother pre-selected for PR, ended up being a middle-manager, well, in fact, post Reagan all presidents were middle-managers.

Oh but Clinton was hard-core, socially aware Democrat. No he wasn't. On 1992 campaign trail he hit the right notes “I'm a Democrat by instinct, heritage, and conviction. My granddaddy thought he was going to Roosevelt when he died.”. The crowd gets into a trance, and start clapping insanely, while lost in reverie though they'd miss the unmistakable "but" at the end of that sentence (Stephanapolous, All Too Human).

So nowadays when I see the ex-Prez line-up sometimes, Carter always stands out for me.. There is a different vibe to him.. Maybe I am reading into the historical reasons too much, but he is the only one unencumbered with what happened after him, he is literally from a different era. All the rest did something else.  

Question

Where does nationalism stop? Should it end? 

I am for painless transition

As Gellner said, nationalism is

"essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves"

This is the root of modernity. The problem is we are not living in modern times - so here is the song and dance political leaders (yes there are leaders, and they need to do stuff, don't turn to us and say we are in charge, do your fucking job) have to pursue. Pay partial lip service to the items above, but never push the single culture narrative too much (but don't give up on it completely either), being especially careful at the aspects of this "one" culture that are offensive the huge numbers of people. This, of course, is for holders of high office, everyone else can say whatever flack they want. What I am trying to say is, the national narratives are distasteful, so you turn the volume down, selectively, highlighting truth as much as possible.

I guess the problem above could be named "the modernity conandrum".

At the same time society is prepared for the next thing which is distributed, less connected, less centralized with the largest possible safety net as possible, bringing modernity to its ultimate conclusion. The rest, noone can know.