BitAcadie @BitAcadie@bitacadie.com

WHO Now Says COVID Vaccines Not Recommended For Healthy Kids & Teens

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/who-now-says-covid-vaccines-not-recommended-healthy-kids-teens

👇 🧐

Massive anti-Macron protests happening in France right now are not receiving the wall-to-wall headline news coverage in Western media that they deserve despite their size and significance. Hypocrisy at its finest.
"France is now covered with protests because Macron said there's no money to allow workers to retire at 62"

"In January, Macron directed major increases in military aid to Ukraine because 'the president wished to amplify this military aid.'"

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/sahouraxo/status/1639330527831367680#m

The Economics of Privacy with Max Hillebrand

https://bitcointv.com/videos/watch/29ac4a3c-abef-4bf3-9c2d-9fea8c642260

what a fuckin banger. AFROMAN STILL GOT IT!!! https://youtu.be/oponIfu5L3Y

There is so much bad news out there right now, its easy to just give up and bury our heads in the sand.
There is no way we can fight the fascist State which is emerging by ourselves. But small groups of like-minded people can out-maneuver them. And we need to get started so we stop looking at the impossibility of the problem, and start looking at what CAN be done.
Ways of communicating outside of this Beast system which is coming online will be increasingly important.

In thinking through this stuff, I keep coming back to little projects like this...

https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/

The Software Freedom Conservancy calls out @JohnDeere for failure to comply with the #GPL and preventing farmers from repairing their own equipment in:
#JohnDeere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/mar/16/john-deere-gpl-violations/ #RightToRepair

After the stunning victory in the elections in the Netherlands this week, some are warning that the BBB’s seats may not be sufficient to stop the Dutch government’s land grab.

Both Michael Yon and Eva Vlaardingerbroek have tweeted that a coalition between left-wing political parties, who have held their seats, means that they are able to outvote the BBB and pass all the laws needed to begin the theft of farmers’ land.

https://expose-news.com/2023/03/18/netherlands-land-grab-dutch-farmers-are-not-safe-yet/

Honestly, it doesn't need to be a yellow coin, and one of my favorite stories is a cautionary tale in this regard:

Once, aluminium was considered the most valuable precious metal. It was so valuable that Napoleon III had a set of aluminium dinnerware he showed off as an example of his wealth and power. It was so valuable that the tip of the Washington monument is capped with a 6 pound tip made out of aluminium, the largest piece of aluminium used at that time in history.

The thing is, it turns out that aluminium isn't some insanely rare metal, it's one of the most common metals on earth. Eventually, processes were developed to turn plentiful aluminium ores into the metal, and the price plummetted. Today, we make everything from disposable drink cans to vehicles with it. If you gave someone a 6 pound tip of aluminium, it wouldn't represent as much value as 2200 man-hours of labor, you can pick up that much in a manufactured item for less than a day's labor at minimum wage.

In such a way, gold and silver could become useless as monetary metals as well. If we were to perfect asteroid mining, for example, and we were able to economically exponentially increase the availability of the metals, then the rarity of gold would no longer be a limiting factor.

The benefits of using rare metals as money are twofold:

1. It keeps governments honest in terms of creating money. If the government wanted a dollar in 1900, then they needed to dig up approximately 1.5g of pure gold. Same with silver, you need the silver to have the silver. This isn't perfectly effective, since governments created "debasement" where they start with the base metal and add other cheaper metals until the currency is useless anyway.

2. It ensures there's a value floor on the currency. If you need a certain amount of a valuable metal to create a coin, then that coin will always be worth at least as much as the metal used to produce the coin. In fact, many countries considered their silver coins to be basically interchangeable at certain points in history since an ounce of fine silver is as good as any other ounce of fine silver. We've actually got a problem here today where our money has been so badly debased that even the crude facimiles are worth more in terms of their metals than the currency itself is worth, leading to us eliminating the penny because the copper coated zinc made no fiscal sense to issue, and I'm certain that within my lifetime other coins will also disappear.

Of course, despite what some people think, it isn't a perfect solution either.

1. It locks useful resources up in vaults and wallets, and that's bad because precious metals actually have good uses. When aluminium became widely available, it became used for many things it wasn't before, and gold and silver would likely be the same if it was equally available.

2. It also gives disproportionate power to miners. If I buy a computer from Dell, what business does a guy who owns a gold mine have getting in on that by selling the economy an ounce of gold that I'll solely use to tabulate the fact that I paid for the computer?

3. Fractional reserve banking sort of breaks the benefits of hard currencies, since you can have an economy that should have X dollars that instead has X+Y dollars where Y is dictated entirely by the banks. The danger of a bank run is built into the fact that fractional reserve banking is basically a scam where you tell two people they each have the same dollar.

4. Honesty just isn't very fun sometimes. Leverage and money printing are a two sided coin -- on one hand, the bad sides are that the value of people's hard work is degraded by the government's inflation tax, and the bust of the cycle means a lot of people get really badly hurt because they get in over their heads and take a lot of other people with them. On the other hand, the good sides are that inflation means debt is always shrinking at a certain rate, and there's always an incentive to make more money, and while the bust hurts, the boom feels great and sometimes something wonderful results from the risks people take during the boom such as our entire modern world.

Economics isn't simple because it isn't a hard science, it's a social science with hard constraints in the real world. If you have 1kg of bread you can't magic a second kg of bread into existence, but every single person can have a different opinion as to the value of that 1kg of bread and the aggregate of all those opinions matters, especially when people can choose to use their own resources to make more bread, or they can choose to consume their resources so there won't be any more bread, and a thousand other little things.

Right now, major publishers are suing #InternetArchive to try and make them delete 4 million digital books they own.

They’re all sitting in a warehouse in Richmond, CA right now.

But because the Archive is loaning digital scans instead of paper, publishers are attacking.

The Internet Archive is a library, full stop. They are one of the largest libraries in the world, preserving our history in many forms that are accessible the world over, for free, to anyone.

Who can disrespect that?

Big Media and Big Tech, of course.

We think that libraries should do what they’ve always done. Own, loan, and preserve books. But big media shareholders are seeing dollar signs, and eager to let big tech turn library cards into credit cards.

And they’re smearing the Internet Archive to do it.

This project really exemplifies how Mastodon has failed to achieve the one thing it wanted to accomplish: https://github.com/eigenmagic/fediblockhole

A tool for keeping a Mastodon instance blocklist synchronised with remote lists.

The broad design goal for FediBlockHole is to support pulling in a list of blocklists from a set of trusted sources, merge them into a combined blocklist, and then push that merged list to a set of managed instances.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: WHITELIST FEDERATION. MASTODON WANTS WHITELIST FEDERATION. WHITELIST FEDERATION.

All of this work is being done to create and synchronize block lists… but they want to block more than 50% of the network!

The solution is to build tooling around WHITELIST FEDERATION! Make your instance crawl for new servers, notify the admin, and have them manually review each new instance. If the right solution hit them in the face they wouldn’t recognize it!