kevineruby / Kevin Ruby is on Nostr

Deep in love. Bikes, grappling, guitar and Bitcoin. Working in an institution during the Fourth Turning.

Last Notes

2024-10-04 19:57:46

I’m looking forward to this election cycle being over, but maybe it’ll just never end

2024-08-27 16:52:02

- reply

Not 100% sure but I think the Brave browser does

2024-08-25 03:12:32

There's this country where the sitting president has been deemed too senile to run in the next election, so his party replaced him as candidate with his vice president. They're still keeping him around as president until then though.
This new replacement candidate didn't have to campaign against any challengers or debate anyone or anything; the party just decided she was the nominee. She also hasn't had any unscripted appearances since inheriting the nomination.
Meanwhile, the primary challenger, himself a former president, survived an assassination attempt six weeks ago. There isn't much detail about what exactly happened there. He's also been arrested and convicted of felonies by the current administration but continued his campaign.
A fairly popular third candidate just dropped out of the race to support him, presumably in exchange for a position of significant power should this challenger win. This candidate had both his father and uncle, who was also president once, assassinated decades ago.
This is the craziest American election in well over a century.

2024-08-22 23:12:50

Reading the introductory part of the The Fourth Turning and some thoughts come to mind:
Seasonality, the number four and circles are all primevally associated with the feminine. Linearity, triangles, the number three and dominion over nature, on the other hand, are traditionally aligned with masculinity. On paper, these things are mutually exclusive.
In every day life, though, they elide. I think it's a good thing that we've got raw milk broskis paying a lot of attention to Circadian cycles of daylight alongside their testosterone levels. Some of them are sourcing their meat locally from regenerative farms and at least tangentially concerning themselves with the happiness of cows and whatnot. Insofar as they balance stereotypically♂and ♀qualities, this subculture could have some common ground with the more progressive concept of "nonbinary," if only the cultural conversation were less shrill and threatening to everyone.

2024-08-22 00:44:28

I was biking across downtown today and was passed by a guy on an e-bike. I didn't pedal any harder for being passed (though I've done that before!). I did, however, keep catching up to him at stoplights, even after he'd hit a green light or two and seriously increased the distance between us.
He kept stopping at red lights, even when there were no cars crossing against him. Whenever I came to a red light, I looked and made sure no one was going to hit me and pedaled through the intersection anyway. Not sprinting pace, just a gear for cruising across town.
There was nothing in his way but these red lights and he had significantly more horsepower than me, but we went about a mile in the same amount of time. Some real tortoise and hare stuff, and maybe a lesson in there somewhere.

2024-08-21 21:16:41

- reply

Agreed! You don't need a majority, just an alternative.

2024-08-19 18:57:44

Did "fiat" and "deep state" enter the popular vernacular around the same time? Hard to tell from google trends.
I was thinking about how the loss of faith in institutions during a fourth turning doesn't usually get applied to shadowy intelligence institutions. Most people who talk about them at any length seem pretty convinced of their continued efficacy, despite the same people usually having zero faith in things like the education system or government in general.
But maybe just having the term out there is a signal that the edifice is crumbling. Similar to how we used to just call fiat "money." Now it's just one type of money.
Even if it's not the same year or two, these two terms definitely entered the mass consciousness in the same decade, which is pretty interesting.

2024-08-19 01:51:06

Man even being a little bit sick is pretty dis-motivating.

2024-08-16 02:34:00

- reply

"Few memes" is interesting phrasing. I'm fascinated by prehistoric memes - anything in particular you're referring to?

2024-08-15 15:51:31

- reply

Let’s keep it circulating

2024-08-13 18:28:41

- reply

Well said. We’ve got batteries too, and the same things deplete ours as do the batteries on devices. Videos, screen constantly on, etc. Only difference being that we plug into the dirt

2024-08-04 19:12:51

- reply

I see a turkey about to land on an unsuspecting, celebrating ghoul while two iguanas stare into each others eyes.

2024-08-03 00:19:44

Interesting how Chamath's "primary law of capitalism," in which companies compete out excess return, doesn't apply to money, even if people expect it to do so. When a money succeeds because it's the most accepted and desired store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, its competitors don't get to eat away at the edges of its success, at least not for the long run. In fact, the opposite is true: it eats its competitors.
Digital currencies are interesting because some of them function like companies and some effectively ARE companies, so people instinctively come think of them in terms of Chamath's law. (I have no idea if he came up with this, but I've heard him talk about it on All-In enough to just call it that.) People confuse buying ETH or SOL instead of BTC as some kind of parallel to AMD or Groq or Apple absorbing some of Nvidia's margins over the long haul, which is likely to happen. But it's not.
What's unlikely to happen is anything outcompeting BTC on the money front. Instead, any pretense ETH had to being money is just getting obliterated by BTC with each passing day, each passing catalyst in either direction price-wise. There's no competition to the point that ETH has a chronic narrative problem, SOL is just acknowledged as gambling on memes and everything else is, well, everything else.