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Jim Davidson's avatar

A good friend wrote this week about the company store and company housing at a coal mine in Montana. His ancestors were indebted for passage from Ireland in the 1890s and in several instances died of black lung disease within a decade or so of the journey. All of them save one were only ever paid in script (paper coupons issued by the company). Script was only good at the company store and for company housing in the company town. There was no exchange to American coins or bank notes.

Bernard makes the comparison to dollars in America since 1971 with no connexion to gold or silver. You can keep running on the treadmill but you can never get ahead. You can read his Substack at Radio Farside. Glitchy 'stack app doesn't want me to link to persons with @ today but maybe search won't glitch. lol

Anyway, it's a valid comparison. His one exceptional ancestor got a job at the owner's home with occasional silver coins in tips or payments. Eventually left town and bought a cottage somewhere in Gollyfornia. So it's a happy story!

Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell are evil. They hate humanity and enslave mankind with false promises and paper script. Their ambition is a patriarchal digital currency that prevents workers from having any fun and hastens their deaths. Every lamp post on Constitution Avenue (for the irony guys) should be decorated with bureau rats strangling in the entrails of central bankers, but many things which Americans should have done decades ago remain undone.

There is a reckoning. It's coming. God's will be done. Amen.

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Satoshiva's avatar

Thanks for this great post "Thoughts on complex systems, failure cascades, and the international order" by N.S. Lyons. As a software engineer, I can appreciate the insights regarding complex & simple systems.

"... complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures, which spread exponentially as more and more dependencies fail."

"In the best cases simpler systems are not only resilient but actively anti-fragile (they gain from and grow stronger amid disorder)... Simplicity itself can be a serious asset.”

"And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight."

If anybody is interested, this is the main difference b/w Bitcoin & Ethereum/"cryptos". Bitcoin is boringly simple. It's never been hacked since inception & its uptime is 99.95%. Ethereum is growing more & more complex & nobody understands everything anymore.

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