Re: El Salvador. You should read Matt Levine on finance! His writing is a lot like yours. On his newsletter from 11/22/21 he described at length the "Volcano Bond" that El Salvador is floating for this, which pays off considerably less than a regular bond for El Salvador's government. Okay, but the Volcano bond also comes with exposure to Bitcoin... okay but it looks like this Volcano bond is still worse than a proportionate basket of the regular governmental bond and some bitcoin. So who would buy this?
Bitcoin enthusiasts who love hanging out with a president who has a baseball cap on backwards. So this president gets a healthy premium on a bond for his government (which has a terrible credit rating btw) just by playing into this niche culture.
Some entities from a regulatory perspective can't directly own bitcoin, so this bond offers an opportunity at bitcoin exposure. Details from the company facilitating the bond here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvJ1kdtTzXw
> El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time, to only 3.7 homicides per 100,000 people in January 2020
The quote is from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's source for the second number is in Spanish, which I can't read - but as written, this is comparing homicides per year with homicides per month.
Assuming homicides are equally likely in all months (probably not true, but whatever), 3.7 homicides per 100k people in January would correspond to 44.4 homicides per 100k people in all of 2020. Still less than 52, but I but less impressive-looking than the other number.
The source actually says "3.7 homicidios diarios hasta el 19 de Enero, 2020" - 3.7 daily homicides as of 19 January 2020, so I think it's not talking about "per 100,000" at all, even though the older number in the same source is.
((3.7 / 6,830,000) * 100,000) * 365 = roughly 19.77 per 100,000 per year, unless I messed up the math.
"El Salvador has made notable advances in reducing homicides since it earned the undesirable title of deadliest country outside a war zone in 2015 with more than 6,600 murders in a country of almost 6.5 million people. Five years later, the country closed out 2020 with the lowest homicide rate in more than two decades with 1,322 homicides, according to government statistics."
Wikipedia now reads "As a result of his Territorial Control Plan, El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time,[33] to only 36 homicides per 100,000 people in 2019.[34]"
"As a result" sounds like a big call. Looking at El Salvador's historical murder rate, it seems like murders wax and wane depending on how murdery the gangs have been feeling lately.
If the relatively low murder rates can be sustained for another five years then I might believe that government intervention had something to do with it, but for now I think it's more likely that the gangs are just regrouping after the big murder spree of 2015.
First, setting aside the woolly language, their webpage is awful.
Second, if that genuinely is their notion of a temple, it too is horrible; it's the bare concrete look. If they can't spare any of that ten million to slap a coat of paint on, I'm not interested. They say we have lost sight of beauty, but I see no beauty there.
Third, they possibly *could* sound more like a cult, if they really put their minds to it, but come on:
"There, you can interact with Members and complete Tasks for PRAX to increase your chances of admission to our Membership."
Woo-hoo, initiation into a secret society. What is this, the Georgian era (not Regency, the other Georgian era) and its proliferation of Secret Societies, springing up out of the fin-de-siècle occultism? At least Dion Fortune was entertaining, this just sounds vaguely sinister or at least exploitative. I know the tradition is to put aspirants through a hard time, but first demonstrate that you are worthy to be called 'Masters' before telling me to do work for you. This sounds less like Crowley's Ipsissimus and more like those Gor play-acting groups.
Besides, wasn't there a recent post about one of these types of "we're going to re-imagine and re-invent the world" groups which went badly wrong?
In short, give me colour, heraldry, more concrete proposals and that you're not a bunch of twenty-five year old guys calling yourselves "masters", and I'm more open to conviction.
PRAX is a fun experiment we're running. Admission is based on our application, though engagement (which can be partially gauged through the completion of tasks) can help a little bit.
Man, I came to post almost exactly this sort of comment. Even if they are completely Not A Cult, it certainly sounds like a cult and their completely Not A Cult city will be full of people who fall for cults.
Describing your group as members of a spiritually-evolved elect that will outlive a decadent and fallen world on the verge of an imminent eschatological event is not the sort of language associated with, say, a rural small town where everyone knows each other and pitches in. It is the language associated with groups that live in arrangements usually described as "compounds" and are open-minded about social techniques like love bombing and psychological torture. I suspect you know this and this objection is mostly performative.
Given the context of the Honduran vote, the Praxian reference to someone's description of a "Cloud City" almost made me laugh. I mean, I don't think they intended this, but... Canonically, what happened to Cloud City was that the Empire showed up and Darth Vader altered the deal. Which seems like the fundamental problem with creating a city on someone else's turf. (Unless it's a Galt's Gulch situation, I suppose...)
Fair enough, I agree their marketing could be better and its not concrete.
But I think a lack of community and meaning are problems particularly Gen Z feels. To create a strong, meaningful community, there is something to be learned from how that was historically done: religion/cults (https://twitter.com/wes_kao/status/1275825916325908481). Their abstract post seems to be playing in the timeless narrative of good and evil and a fall from grace. A call for idealists willing to aim at something audacious. Honestly, I'm pretty interested in at the least the community that emerges.
Huh? How is crypto related to diet and beauty and spirituality? I don't get it. Some of these things seem so bizarre to me because it seems like they live in a totally different world. In their world, rules enforced by governments are the thing they see stopping them from doing what they want but like for most people being able to pay for housing and medicine and food and having money left over to invest in anything is the thing stopping them.
I think there's a postmodernist/Marxist case that our distorted views on beauty and spirituality are downstream of our centralized economic and political systems, although I don't think I'd be able to explain it in my own words.
Could you help me understand your first link? It seems to be a description / discussion of Historical Materialism by Engels, and doesn't directly comment on beauty or spirituality. It seems that the theory of history expounded by Engels in the link is entirely consistent with workers becoming more attuned to beauty, less attuned to beauty, or that capital has no effect on workers' perceptions of beauty.
Could you summarise the Marxist case that our economic / political system leads to a distorted view of beauty (if Scott is correct and this is indeed a Marxist position)? I'd really appreciate a summary written by you rather than another link because it took me about half and hour to read the Engels document and it didn't really answer the question as far as I could see - perhaps it answers the question perfectly if you are very steeped in Marxist theory, but it seems I'm not quite at that level.
Oh I see, so the point was more that when Scott says, "Marxists think that our political and economic system has caused XYZ" this is always going to be trivially true, because all changes are downstream of political and economic systems anyway to a Marxist.
Thanks, really appreciate the clarification - think I was looking for the wrong thing when I initially read the link
I have been thinking about this one and I don't know if I have any clear conclusions. Marxbro is right that Marxists tend to argue that cultural concepts are downstream of the material relations of production. I just don't really see how crypto is meant to change the material relations of production. I haven't really seen any proposal to use crypto to empower the working class and change the relation to the means of production, so I'm still at a bit of a loss. (also as an aside, considering any view of beauty or spirituality distorted seems incompatible with postmodernism as I understand it. Postmodernism is all about considering the ensemble of different views with a sense of equal validity rather than privileging one as 'correct', and understanding them as relations between defined people rather than universals)
> The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me
They are hard to pin down.
There is a strong purity vibe throughout their prose which I would associate more with the right-wing. There is also a new-age hippyism that I'd associate with the left-wing. Passages like the one you highlighted remind me of some of the arguments fascists made for third-way economics: soulless cities with faceless citizens. Something along the lines of the market being good at getting things done but bad at deciding what those things will be. If you let the markets choose, it'll pick something bland, soulless, and inhuman to pursue in the name of efficiency.
Praxis really gives me that vibe.
I know associating anything with fascism is seen as condemning it, but I don't mean to do so in this post.
From the language, I'm almost certain Praxis is right-wing. Moreover, I can't imagine any leftists that would opt to use the founding fathers, Israel or a Tesla gigafactory in the manner that they have.
"The world is deranged and decayed"; "tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity"; "All around us, we see civilizational decay" are all said within a few sentences of each other and all read like they belong in an unsavoury pamphlet.
And I can find a bunch of things I can't see righties using: "Cities will be reorganized around shared values, rather than the labor market principles", "self-actualize", the use of "spiritual" instead of "religious".
I don't see it fitting in either side of the spectrum. It has some draw to both sides, but seems like it is really trying hard to be orthogonal to left vs right.
That sounds a lot like some of the right-wing stuff I've read. (Bear in mind that the Right is a lot more diverse than the Left, so you shouldn't expect all right-wingers to see eye to eye.)
In fact, the whole thing sounds an awful lot like it was written by someone who has read a lot of Bronze Age Pervert (or, with five percent probability, someone who _is_ Bronze Age Pervert).
It depends how you define "right" and "left". If you count the alt-right, the neoliberals and the Christian conservatives as "right-wing", there are some rather-massive doctrinal differences between them - and all of them are substantial factions in your present Anglospheric democracy.
On the other hand the three biggest ideologies considered "left-wing" at the moment would probably be social justice, socialism and left-libertarianism. There's definitely a lot of difference between social justice and left-libertarianism, but there's a lot of overlap in terms of membership between socialists (or at least social democrats) and the other two. Also, lots of the left-libertarians have been peeled off the left-wing coalition (becoming alt-lite) by SJ's excesses.
It's definitely not what you might call traditionally right-wing talk, but it does sound like it falls pretty cleanly into what I first heard called "ironpill" beliefs but which I would personally coin Neo-Tribal Reactionary Politics. Point-by-point:
1. NTRP aren't a fan of capitalism, because they have correctly identified the fact that capitalism has no loyalty to their ideology and in fact will slowly commodify their culture, turning it into yet another product in service to Moloch. The largest error they make is usually in assuming that Moloch is loyal to neoliberalism, instead of neoliberalism simply being the current ruling paradigm that is being reduced to a commodity by Moloch.
2. "Self-actualization" is the key concept in NTRP; there is a specific way humans are supposed to live which will give them maximum physical, psychological, and spiritual fulfillment. To most NTRP people, this looks like a blend of a romanticized vision of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and being one of the chaps wearing S&M kit in a Mad Max film. There's a tendency to romanticize brutality towards outgroups as some kind of ennobling life-exalting activity a la Social Darwinism. They also tend to buy into the Strong Men-Good Times-Weak Men-Hard Times cyclic view of history (identifying themselves, or in the more lucid the children they raise in their barbarous utopia, as the "strong men".)
3. NTRP groups tend to be contemptuous towards most forms of organized religion in the West, due to a blend of seeing pagan animistic spirituality as more "authentic" or "connected with the world", seeing pagan beliefs as being infinitely more compatible with blood-and-soil ethnonationalism than any universalist belief, and hating Abrahamic religions for being "slave religion"/Semitic.
Addendum to the third point: I feel like the statement implies this pretty naturally, but there's a significant overlap between NTRP types and ethnonationalists/Neo-Nazis (the latter falling into the Black Sun/Esoteric Hitlerism/"far-right spiritualist crackpot" sphere.)
That sub is too small and too dead to be an example of anything. Prospera beliefs seem to be BAPsphere (not to be confused with BAP himself, but very similar).
I would agree with abc that any group that small, even in a fringe ideology like NTRP, isn't going to be representative. As he's alluded to, reading the writings of the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert is probably the best summary of the foundational beliefs of NTRP.
This is all very poetic and intriguing, but the bottom line is, what are these guys actually going to *do* ? At some point you've got to stop writing purple prose, and start laying actual bricks. What's their plan for doing that ? And don't tell me that their plan is to actualize human nature through self-expression and internal liberation or whatnot; tell me how many bricks they're ordering and what their sewage system will look like.
correction: search and replace megawatt with kilowatt.
Several Caribbean countries compete hard to attract rich immigrants and investors with their citizenship by investment programs. I've looked deeply into citizenship by investment in Dominica, which would cost $130k to get me a Dominica passport within 6 months to sorta replace my US passport if I renounced US citizenship for tax/political reasons. That would give the right to spend up to 6 months a year in Schengen, plus visa free access to most of the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia. Wikipedia has a convenient map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Dominica_citizens
I think Bukele is genuinely just really enthusiastic about bitcoin and that's the main reason why he's doing this. It's rare for politicians anywhere to do rigorous cost-benefit analyses about policies they like so I won't grade him too harshly relative to other politicians.
But it's not just a boondoggle based on his personal cheerleading for bitcoin. The potentials are way bigger than just a couple of crypto exchanges. It's about attracting crypto-rich retirees, tourists, and businessmen from all over the world. Total crypto marketcap is 2.4 trillion. If the average crypto owner spends 5% of his crypto wealth per year, that's a $120 billion/year pie to fight over. That's a couple orders of magnitude bigger than just FTX and Binance. If Bukele can get hodlers to spend an extra couple billion a year in El Salvador, by building his brand on social media with stunts like this, that's huge. El Salvador's entire GDP is only 24 billion. He doesn't even need to actually build the city. The two billion will be taxed several times as it passes through various hands down the supply chain, and additional economic growth from investments could increase the tax base.
OTOH his proposed construction cost is 300k bitcoins, which is about $15 billion, or two thirds of El Salvador's GDP. Spending two thirds of GDP building a model city seems way too ambitious, if they actually do it. I am not confident it will increase tax revenue enough to cover the interest on $15 billion of debt.
He seems not crazy at all in this interview with the Council of the Americas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPs_eif3Z8Y It sounds like he puts a very high priority on free trade and attracting foreign investment to develop El Salvador. His style of speaking sort of reminds me of Elon Musk (another good option for the dictator book club after he becomes God-Emperor of Mars).
Definitely. I've looked deep into crypto mining. Very cheap electricity prices (e.g., hydroelectric in Chelan county Washington) would be around 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Here in Las Vegas, electricity is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Yes. Residential electricity in the US tends to run between 5 and 50 cents per kWh, and there's really no way (99% confidence) "industrial" electricity in other places is 3 orders of magnitude lower. For example, new solar installations tend to target 10 or so cents per kWh. 4 cents / megawatt hour would mean you could rent the entire output of a good-sized nuclear powerplant (typically in the 500 MW - 1GW range) for less than minimum wage.
Yeah, that cannot be right. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/ has data on wholesale electricity trades at various grid interconnect points, and the weighted average (by volume) for this year is $58.46/MW-h (not coincidentally, roughly 1000 times more). There are weird moment wen the price is zero (or even negative), due to crazy grid imbalances. But not significant volume at such prices (those trades have to be more "I will pay you to take power so my plant does not blow up before I can throttle it down"). Pennies per MW-h is not plausible.
Also, worth mentioning. Bukele seems to act quite quickly with his bitcoin plan. They made BTC legal tender after 3 months of announcing it, then started to build a hospital with gains from BTC (already almost finished!) 1 month after announcing it. ( https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1457919970000658442 )
Seems like a decent plan. Rationalists did something similar on a smaller scale when their online community decided to buy houses on the same street in Berkeley. Unfortunately they haven't become a semi-independent microstate, YET.
Why is everyone so keen on starting a new city? Why not focus on the more achievable goal of starting a new village, and think about how to grow it into a town, and _then_ think about how to grow it into a city?
Maybe people see the success of "overnight cities" like Dubai or Shenzhen and want to aim for that from the get go.
I'm as much into "MVP and then iterate" as the next guy, but if a core part of the plan is to kick off a positive feedback explosion of citizens, investment, and business then there's at least a case for thinking about city scale infrastructure from the start
Is Dubai a success in any way except as a demonstation of oil princes' ability to build something (anything) tangible using their excess trillions? Everything I've seen seems to suggest that it's something between a sad joke and a crime against humanity.
Ha, I couldn't say I'm not familiar with Dubai beyond often hearing it in the list of "cities built very fast" 😅. I could believe it's not a very nice place to live, indeed I could see that happening with many experimental cities. Hopfully citzens voting with their feet will mean that's not a show stopping issue for the whole enterprise
It's a major economic hub, seems to have a locally (and globally) high standard of living and a lot of people really like it. That seems to be a definition of successful city to me?
There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem that the MVP route tries to address. How many citizens are currently living in a model city? It feels relatively untested. Urban growth is so incremental (usually) that it seems unlikely you'll get an overnight success story.
It's a terrible plan, in the sense that it has no chance of achieving the stated goal of a physical city. The reasons people would agree to "laws" for a virtual city are completely different from those for a physical city, and the people who would live (and more importantly, work) in such a city are necessarily different from the crypto-libertarians who would be attracted to this idea.
The whole "community" and "civility" thing really feels like it's not building a city, it's building a discussion forum. I thought that calling a discussion forum a "virtual city" died out years ago once people decided Second Life was not the next big thing. Or when people decided Geocities was not the next big thing.
Hey Scott, I'm Dryden from Praxis. You made a number of basic mistakes in your description of us. One glaring example: Peter Thiel is not an investor (the investors in our seed round are extremely visible -- pinned on our Twitter account). If you're interested in making edits to improve the accuracy of your post, feel free to reach out.
Charitably? They want to resolve this without it becoming fodder for the commentariat's entertainment. Uncharitably? Harder to control the narrative in a public space.
If Oroville is mostly trying to resist California laws, instead of federal laws, then there are some precedents: the Free and Independent State of Scott (Tennessee) and the Republic of Winston (Alabama). These counties succeeded from their states during the Civil War because they wanted to remain with the Union. I'm not sure that this is a good precedence: both saw violence as a result (although the war might have come through there anyway).
Along with being symbolic, Oroville might be trying to trigger some lawsuits, with the hope that the courts will strike down some or all of the covid restrictions.
I'm skeptical of your description of the Zelaya situation in Honduras, because the Supreme Court *did* let the current right-wing president amend the constitution to run for a second term only six years after the coup against Zelaya for trying the same thing. So the Supreme Court is not really acting in good faith here; it seems right to be suspicious of it.
Failing to understand socialist theory according to you, is very different from not being aware of the specific instantiations of corruption in a south american country
Implying that Scott should have interviewed south american socialists as research for this post is an unreasonable expectation.
I'm not horribly surprised that the model city in Honduras has run into problems with regard to the political state of the country, and I'm not hugely sympathetic to them either, given that they picked Honduras for the very reason that they could wangle the political situation to their benefit (dangle the lure of sacks of gold in front of the government's eyes).
I imagine if they haven't gone too far to call it a day, the best thing might be to back out and wait for the wind to change again. If they are already too committed to down tools and leave, then coming to an arrangement (handing over sacks of gold to the new regime) will be the way to survive.
claim: the founder dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer, then worked for an activist hedge fund and a master plan community developer.
claim: morality is the OS of a civilization and our civilization evidently isn't working because of the high incidence of obesity, mental illness, ennui, and bad remakes of movies.
claim: the solution is to build a community around shared values, but that sort of thing was suppressed after WWII to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Since WWII the memetic powers that be have been trying to maximize trade and interconnectedness between countries to reduce the risk of war, which is totally understandable, but the side effect is that you lose distinctive cultures built around shared values.
claim: building a community online first allows you to get the people and funding first and make it almost a fait accompli before you negotiate with governments for real world territory, so you get better leverage in those negotiations.
In the second episode they interview Sol Brah, who is a 100k-follower bodybuilder on twitter who posts 50 times a day.
I give this a way higher chance of success than Black Hammer.
Looked into Sol Brah out of curiosity. Notable information about Sol Brah:
-He's an anti-vaxxer (as in, anti-all-vaccines)
- He's a monarchist
-He worships the sun (hence the name) and believes that the human body derives spiritual power from it
-He believes all disease is caused by malnutrition.
- He believes in psychic powers (not sure if he believes he PERSONALLY has them but signs point to yes).
- He believes Bluetooth radiation is a physical and spiritual poison.
-He claims to have elaborate lucid dreams of spiritual significance when he consumes protein powder.
- He believes that shampoo is "chemical slop that causes hair loss".
These are all things he has posted in the past week. He also really likes calling everything he hates "soy", which, combined with all the above tells me he probably falls into the "ironpill"/Neo-Tribal Reactionary camp.
The fact he's who Praxis picked as their first guest doesn't exactly help in their attempts to dispel the idea that they're a cult or cult-adjacent organization.
Here we go, from Chesterton's "Father Brown" story 'The Eye of Apollo':
"What on earth is that?" asked Father Brown, and stood still. "Oh, a new religion," said Flambeau, laughing; "one of those new religions that forgive your sins by saying you never had any. Rather like Christian Science, I should think. The fact is that a fellow calling himself Kalon (I don't know what his name is, except that it can't be that) has taken the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters underneath me, and this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the New Priest of Apollo, and he worships the sun."
"Let him look out," said Father Brown. "The sun was the cruellest of all the gods. But what does that monstrous eye mean?"
...The man who called himself Kalon was a magnificent creature, worthy, in a physical sense, to be the pontiff of Apollo. He was nearly as tall even as Flambeau, and very much better looking, with a golden beard, strong blue eyes, and a mane flung back like a lion's. In structure he was the blonde beast of Nietzsche, but all this animal beauty was heightened, brightened and softened by genuine intellect and spirituality. If he looked like one of the great Saxon kings, he looked like one of the kings that were also saints. ...When all was said, a man in the presence of this quack did feel in the presence of a great man. Even in the loose jacket-suit of linen that he wore as a workshop dress in his office he was a fascinating and formidable figure; and when robed in the white vestments and crowned with the golden circlet, in which he daily saluted the sun, he really looked so splendid that the laughter of the street people sometimes died suddenly on their lips. For three times in the day the new sun-worshipper went out on his little balcony, in the face of all Westminster, to say some litany to his shining lord: once at daybreak, once at sunset, and once at the shock of noon. And it was while the shock of noon still shook faintly from the towers of Parliament and parish church that Father Brown, the friend of Flambeau, first looked up and saw the white priest of Apollo.
But Father Brown, whether from a professional interest in ritual or a strong individual interest in tomfoolery, stopped and stared up at the balcony of the sun-worshipper, just as he might have stopped and stared up at a Punch and Judy. Kalon the Prophet was already erect, with argent garments and uplifted hands, and the sound of his strangely penetrating voice could be heard all the way down the busy street uttering his solar litany. He was already in the middle of it; his eyes were fixed upon the flaming disc. It is doubtful if he saw anything or anyone on this earth; it is substantially certain that he did not see a stunted, round-faced priest who, in the crowd below, looked up at him with blinking eyes. That was perhaps the most startling difference between even these two far-divided men. Father Brown could not look at anything without blinking; but the priest of Apollo could look on the blaze at noon without a quiver of the eyelid.
"O sun," cried the prophet, "O star that art too great to be allowed among the stars! O fountain that flowest quietly in that secret spot that is called space. White Father of all white unwearied things, white flames and white flowers and white peaks. Father, who art more innocent than all thy most innocent and quiet children; primal purity, into the peace of which--"
...It came with this precious prophet, or whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."
Ironically (or perhaps perfectly appropriately), Sol Brah ALSO believes that you should spend lots of time staring directly at the sun, and that things like "skin cancer" and "retinal damage" were made up by "THEM" to cut humanity off from the divine life-giving energy of the sun.
Well, either somebody is copying somebody, or This Is Not A Coincidence Because Nothing Is Ever A Coincidence.
From "The Eye of Apollo":
"As I understand it, it is a theory of theirs," answered Flambeau, "that a man can endure anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say that if a man were really healthy he could stare at the sun."
"If a man were really healthy," said Father Brown, "he would not bother to stare at it."
"Well, that's all I can tell you about the new religion," went on Flambeau carelessly. "It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases."
...Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids of an ethical tirade about the "sickly medical notions" and the morbid admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.
Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.
"That is so different," said Pauline Stacey, loftily. "Batteries and motors and all those things are marks of the force of man--yes, Mr Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and splendid--that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the doctors sell--why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I was free-born, Mr Flambeau! People only think they need these things because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the sun, and so they can't do it without blinking. But why among the stars should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose."
..."The truth is one word, and a short one," said Father Brown. "Pauline Stacey was blind."
"Blind!" repeated Flambeau, and rose slowly to his whole huge stature.
"She was subject to it by blood," Brown proceeded. "Her sister would have started eyeglasses if Pauline would have let her; but it was her special philosophy or fad that one must not encourage such diseases by yielding to them. She would not admit the cloud; or she tried to dispel it by will. So her eyes got worse and worse with straining; but the worst strain was to come. It came with this precious prophet, or whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."
It also shares a name with a nearby dam that nearly collapsed in 2017. The dam incident received substantial news coverage for about three weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam
ACX and DSL favorite YouTube channel "Practical Engineering" has a nifty video on the spillway failure, for those who might be interested. Grady does a good job explaining it.
I'm not too versed on the history of Zionism, but wasn't the creation of Israel not simply because of Judaism but the larger alienation of not only religious Jews, but Jews as an ethnicity as well? Some founders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky were said to be "divorced from Jewish faith and tradition", and he was one of the significant right-wing Zionists too, the left-wing Zionists were famously materialist and formed socialist agrarian communes such as the Kibbutz and the slightly less socialist Moshavs, so in a lot of cases the foundation of Israel isn't very much about religious Judaism (which, is maybe just being too picky about word choice, if you said "Jewish community" I would agree absolutely), and more so just community/autonomy/identity. Really, Judaism at the time was and to a lesser extent is today somewhat hostile to Israel: orthodox Jews were from what I know quite opposed to its conception, as the Torah and their local Jewish practice is the only homeland they need and they should focus on piety and the Halakha... plus I don't think the majority of Jews were very enthusiastic about migrating to an inhospitable desert in an Islamic empire with a violent military tradition. In the modern day Haredi Jews sometimes participate in anti-Zionist stuff since they pertain to the belief that only the Messiah can create the state of Israel (although obviously now like to pick up more common arguments about military violence and anti-Arab discrimination, since, y'know, that's what the hip anti-Zionists do these days). In some ways it's reasonable to consider the creation of Israel a reaction to Judaism, or at the least the negation of Jewish traditions which considered Zionism unacceptable.
That's a bit of a tangent though, I still do think it's quite incorrect to compare charter cities to the creation of Israel. Even if it was conceptualised as dominantly secular and materialist, thinking it was just something new that popped up is silly and I hope no one spoils to them that Jews have always lived in the Old Yishuv and didn't just get super ideologically driven when people wanted to found a new country based on similar principles of governance like charter cities have.
FWIW, to Jews in USSR, Israel was a refuge. Few of them were religious, but when you're essentially hunted for sport in your home town, it was nice to imagine that, one day, you could escape to a land where *you* are the major ethnic group, for once. When Communist control slipped, there was a massive wave of Jewish emigration.
Ditto this. I know some Jews who emigrated to Israel after the breakdown of the USSR but mostly they did because they saw better prospects in Israel than in post-Soviet country and maybe also because they wanted to live in closer community with other Jews. But in most cases they didn't run away from the USSR out of fear of their lives.
"Essentially hunted for sport" sounds like a colorful description of the Pogroms of the later Czarist era, much more than anything I'm aware of during the Soviet era outside of stuff the Nazis did in occupied Soviet territory during WW2. Although I could see the Pogroms making a deep enough cultural impression on the survivors that the differently-shaped Soviet-era persecutions might be interpreted as more of the same.
I'm not quite sure what to think of the USSR issue, because yeah on one hand you have the discriminations of Jews by people very paranoid and distrustful of them after the Doctors' Plot, but the USSR also created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast within their own territory and briefly sold arms to Israel through Czechoslovakia in 1948 (as well as being the first state to recognise it). I get that for a few years there is a top-down campaign trying to uncover imaginary paranoid plots by alleging Zionist Jews have infiltrated the academia, but this was mostly from the brief period between the arms deals and Stalin's death which was rabidly antisemetic and even then I'm hesitant to believe in turn the general population of the USSR became xenophobic, and furthermore, xenophobic beyond the years of '48-53. I certainly lack the experiences of a Jew in the USSR but to me this is kinda a "humans aren't that evil, right?", especially after fighting a war against the people who perpetuated the Holocaust and liberating many camps.
Antisemitism was definitely common in the USSR, both in the populace and the government (inofficial-but-official quotas for accepting Jews to university is an example of the latter). I think that the brief support of Israel was because so many Zionists were into socialism and the USSR might have thought Israel will be a communist country. Later the Arab-Israeli conflict became completely aligned with the Cold War with the USSR firmly on the Arab side, supplying them with weapons and training.
+1, Zionism was a form of nationalism inspired by other nationalist movements in Europe and spurred on by the prevalence of antisemitism, *not* a religious thing (religious Zionism did exist but accounted for a minority of the momentum)
Hey, I was eating bugs before it was cool (or uncool, or whatever). Paprika-fried crickets were quite good; and my friend also let me try some Korean street-food style bugs that tasted pretty interesting. I wouldn't mind having some again, but they're super hard to find.
At reed college, every year, they have bug eating day where students bring bugs and other students bid on how little they will eat them for. My brother's best friend ate a 1.5" cockroach for $0.32. (They also have naked water slide day on the grass slope in front of the college.)
"Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo."
I'm pretty sure this is just a typo, but I prefer to think that the Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza is going to contain a smaller Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza.
Before laughing too loud about present-day attempts at creating model Bitcoin-cities in Latin American countries, remember that there were many attempts to create micro "model cities" and "model societies" within the US between 1800 and 1900. All of them fizzled out. Either because they never got off the ground in the first place, or because they destroyed themselves from within, or because the central (federal) US government could not really tolerate that parts of its territory was not fully under its control.
I expect the same to happen in Honduras and anywhere else that "model cities" might threaten to become successful.
Great article as usual. Do you know the blog 1729 by Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase? He shares some super disruptive ideas about starting new cities and new states, starting with an online community first, land second so you get leverage to negociate.
"It is now possible to start a community, a business or even a currency from your laptop. The next step is to make it possible to create new cities and countries, rather than just inherit them."
Balaji is great, and he follows Scott as im sure Scott knows of him. However, Balaji is referring to digital cities, more like a metaverse, while Scott is talking about actual cities. At some point, utilities and food matter, even if the rest of your life is spent online.
"Digitally connect physical communities. Finally, network the
nodes into a new kind of state: a network state, a digital archipelago with pieces of territory distributed around the world, ranging from single-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size." That's not a physical city.
I am very skeptical of "online community first" as a strategy. The idea that you'll get "leverage" by pointing to 10,000 random people as willing to join your jurisdiction seems very disconnected from the actual issues experienced by those trying to build physical cities. Growing quickly, attracting lots of foreigners, being perceived as an insular community showing up out of nowhere, these are all things that motivate opposition at least as much as support. The only real draw for governments to sign on is attracting investment, for tax revenue and job creation, and that's not denominated in headcount, and not made up of internet randos.
Plus your 10,000 online members are going to be mostly all-talk-no-action, because they haven't gone through the "actually willing to relocate" filter yet. Think Free State Project (only 1/4 of signers have actually moved, despite an explicit commitment to relocate), but even worse as the FSP was about moving states within the US, rather than moving to a different country.
Meanwhile the people willing to relocate are very limited by the lack of real projects out there. There's lots of scams or will-never-happen projects though, so the ability to show results (even something simple like Próspera's Beta Building) is crucial if you want to attract those people.
I’ve sailed with Finbar, Supreme Commander of the Conch Republic Navy. His stories are incredible enough that someone made a documentary about him. What I picked up about the Key West/Conch Republic situation was actually a little disheartening. Key West followed Florida/USA law, but was being treated like a separate country. The government had roadblocks and searches on vehicles traveling on the highway from key west to Florida, and it hurt key west tourism, but also made key west feel like they weren’t fully American. They jokingly made up a sovereign nation, but it sure seems like a lot of people from that generation are Key West people first, Floridian/American second. It made me realize how little influence individuals have, and how big you have to get before your concerns are addressed at all.
As Honduras sadly shows: we absolutely need to get our own sovereign state to build Utopia. Luckily there is one up for grabs: Nevis! (She says: What?! I said: Nevis!) - As in "St. Kitts and Nevis". Tiny, but sovereign (The Queen is head - but as Barbados showed last week, she can be cancelled.). The best: It is TWO islands. Nevis is the smaller - just 7k registered voters. With the constitutional right to secede from the federation (yep, smallest federation ever), if they want! And they want: Last referendum was just 573 votes short of a 2/3 majority! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Nevis_independence_referendum
They sell their passports, of course (works visa-free for 140 countries). Since 1984. https://www.ciu.gov.kn/ Right now they have an end-of-year sale: 150,000 US-$ for a family of four (my 2 adult kids from first marriage are eligible. So only 569 votes left to go!) And they do have their own regional airport.
And they still seem to have those ol' British sodomite-laws. So save your rainbow-shirts for later. First we take Montenegro, err, Nevis, then we take ... off. Peter, please,10 Million will let us secede! Another 100 and we dominate politics there for good. (Both less, if done smartly). I volunteer for first secretary of defense. (Better check those Kitties - a force of around 0.24 k. Till we take them over -their airport is better.)
Else: Svalbard aka Spitzbergen. If you prefer the cold. As Alex Tabarrok tweeted out (to B. Caplan, I guess) : There you have your "open-borders"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty
"Svalbard is part of Norway: However, Norway's power over Svalbard is restricted by the limitations listed below:
• Taxation: This allows taxes to be collected, but only enough to support Svalbard and the Svalbard government. This results in lower taxes than mainland Norway and the exclusion of any taxes on Svalbard supporting Norway directly.
• Non-discrimination: All citizens and all companies of every nation under the treaty are allowed to become residents and to have access to Svalbard including the right to fish, hunt or undertake any kind of maritime, industrial, mining or trade activity. The residents of Svalbard must follow Norwegian law, though Norwegian authority cannot discriminate against or favor any residents of any given nationality."
The problem with all these new cities is that there are no new frontiers to establish new ways of life. It's a boundary problem. 300 years ago, if you wanted to start a new society, you would just pick up stakes and head west with a bunch of like-minded people, claim a bit of unclaimed territory, and start doing your thing. Today, that's impossible because there *is* no unclaimed territory. That means the best way to establish a new society is through conquest.
This may sound sinister, but "conquest" doesn't have to be violent. It can be be done through political means as well. For example, look how effectively Donald Trump conquered the Republican Party. In the context of setting up a new society, conquest could mean something like the following.
1) Start a religion.
2) Have the followers of your religion all move to one town.
3) Vote their fellow believers into positions of power.
4) Establish a prosperous community that neighboring societies are jealous of.
5) Use your community's success to evangelize your religious beliefs, promising other communities that they can be as successful as you if they just share your values and follow your example.
6) Once you have enough followers in those neighboring communities, vote members of your religion into positions of power.
7) Rinse and repeat.
It doesn't even have to be a religion per se - in this example, "religion" is just shorthand for "an ethical ideology which is very memetically sticky and replicates fast"... which, OK, I guess "religion" would probably be the best word for, even though that word tends to frighten people.
Yes, absolutely. The ability to communicate securely over untrusted networks is essential not only for any kind of e-commerce, but also to thwart the big brother fantasies of three letter agencies, so it is very much a political technology. Key points in the political crypto history would be Zimmermann exporting the source of PGP in print to circumvent US export restrictions, or Facebooks WhatsApp adopting end-to-end encryption in response to the Snowden revelations.
Oh, you are talking about cryptocurrencies, aren't you? I concede the political dimension in of cryptocurrency /transactions/ (such as wikileaks being funded via bitcoin since the financial blockade), but the fact that OnlyFans was ready to give in to pressure from the banking sector instead of saying "if you ban us from using credit cards, our users will just pay with cryptocurrencies" speaks volumes about the lack of practical impact of cryptocurrency transactions.
The main media focus is always on cryptocurrencies as an investment. In some way, the ability to do transactions is necessary and required for investments, but practically, I find it much less interesting. Questions of legitimacy aside, rich people have been hiding their wealth from the state since practically forever. Now they have yet another tool to do that, fueling the cryptocurrency bubble. News at 11.
Re: El Salvador. You should read Matt Levine on finance! His writing is a lot like yours. On his newsletter from 11/22/21 he described at length the "Volcano Bond" that El Salvador is floating for this, which pays off considerably less than a regular bond for El Salvador's government. Okay, but the Volcano bond also comes with exposure to Bitcoin... okay but it looks like this Volcano bond is still worse than a proportionate basket of the regular governmental bond and some bitcoin. So who would buy this?
Bitcoin enthusiasts who love hanging out with a president who has a baseball cap on backwards. So this president gets a healthy premium on a bond for his government (which has a terrible credit rating btw) just by playing into this niche culture.
Sounds like a smart guy to me.
I second this recommendation -- Matt Levine is hilarious, trenchant, and informative. Not unlike Scott.
I'm pretty sure he's quoted / linked Scott in Money Stuff before, too.
And vice-versa, Scott has quotes Money Stuff at least once.
The newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-22/be-careful-with-volcano-bonds
Some entities from a regulatory perspective can't directly own bitcoin, so this bond offers an opportunity at bitcoin exposure. Details from the company facilitating the bond here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvJ1kdtTzXw
> El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time, to only 3.7 homicides per 100,000 people in January 2020
The quote is from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's source for the second number is in Spanish, which I can't read - but as written, this is comparing homicides per year with homicides per month.
Assuming homicides are equally likely in all months (probably not true, but whatever), 3.7 homicides per 100k people in January would correspond to 44.4 homicides per 100k people in all of 2020. Still less than 52, but I but less impressive-looking than the other number.
That's a good catch, but I would have expected them to annualize the homicide rate.
Here's a graph that shows a 5x decrease in homicides, which is less than 10x but more than 20% - https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/
The source actually says "3.7 homicidios diarios hasta el 19 de Enero, 2020" - 3.7 daily homicides as of 19 January 2020, so I think it's not talking about "per 100,000" at all, even though the older number in the same source is.
((3.7 / 6,830,000) * 100,000) * 365 = roughly 19.77 per 100,000 per year, unless I messed up the math.
Maybe this helps?
"El Salvador has made notable advances in reducing homicides since it earned the undesirable title of deadliest country outside a war zone in 2015 with more than 6,600 murders in a country of almost 6.5 million people. Five years later, the country closed out 2020 with the lowest homicide rate in more than two decades with 1,322 homicides, according to government statistics."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/03/el-salvador-homicide-historic-low-2020-gangs-migration/
Wikipedia now reads "As a result of his Territorial Control Plan, El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time,[33] to only 36 homicides per 100,000 people in 2019.[34]"
The quote was still there when I looked at it! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that some ACX readers are Wikipedia editors.
"As a result" sounds like a big call. Looking at El Salvador's historical murder rate, it seems like murders wax and wane depending on how murdery the gangs have been feeling lately.
If the relatively low murder rates can be sustained for another five years then I might believe that government intervention had something to do with it, but for now I think it's more likely that the gangs are just regrouping after the big murder spree of 2015.
Is it possible this is a COVID and or lockdown situation?
I need more information on this remarkable stat before anointing him.
In January 2020 few people imagined that COVID was going to be such a big deal outside of China.
Praxis is rubbing me up all the wrong ways.
First, setting aside the woolly language, their webpage is awful.
Second, if that genuinely is their notion of a temple, it too is horrible; it's the bare concrete look. If they can't spare any of that ten million to slap a coat of paint on, I'm not interested. They say we have lost sight of beauty, but I see no beauty there.
Third, they possibly *could* sound more like a cult, if they really put their minds to it, but come on:
"There, you can interact with Members and complete Tasks for PRAX to increase your chances of admission to our Membership."
Woo-hoo, initiation into a secret society. What is this, the Georgian era (not Regency, the other Georgian era) and its proliferation of Secret Societies, springing up out of the fin-de-siècle occultism? At least Dion Fortune was entertaining, this just sounds vaguely sinister or at least exploitative. I know the tradition is to put aspirants through a hard time, but first demonstrate that you are worthy to be called 'Masters' before telling me to do work for you. This sounds less like Crowley's Ipsissimus and more like those Gor play-acting groups.
Besides, wasn't there a recent post about one of these types of "we're going to re-imagine and re-invent the world" groups which went badly wrong?
In short, give me colour, heraldry, more concrete proposals and that you're not a bunch of twenty-five year old guys calling yourselves "masters", and I'm more open to conviction.
Just to be clear, the "masters" thing is taken from a sarcastic post making fun of them, not from their own words.
Ah, right. So somebody else had the same reaction as I did to the "do tasks to prove you are worthy of membership".
There's a right way to do that, since initiation rituals are universal, but Praxis aren't hitting it.
PRAX is a fun experiment we're running. Admission is based on our application, though engagement (which can be partially gauged through the completion of tasks) can help a little bit.
Man, I came to post almost exactly this sort of comment. Even if they are completely Not A Cult, it certainly sounds like a cult and their completely Not A Cult city will be full of people who fall for cults.
We live in a world so atomized that the reaction to any decently tight community is noooo it's a cult noooo
Tight communities usually arise organically, from groups of people that gradually get closer together over a period of years. Those can be great.
Tight communities that actively try to recruit people to join their tight communities do come across as a little cult-ish though.
Describing your group as members of a spiritually-evolved elect that will outlive a decadent and fallen world on the verge of an imminent eschatological event is not the sort of language associated with, say, a rural small town where everyone knows each other and pitches in. It is the language associated with groups that live in arrangements usually described as "compounds" and are open-minded about social techniques like love bombing and psychological torture. I suspect you know this and this objection is mostly performative.
AFAIK there isn't even a community there to call right. People are reacting to the language being used here.
Right=tight
The Cult Defender has logged on!
Given the context of the Honduran vote, the Praxian reference to someone's description of a "Cloud City" almost made me laugh. I mean, I don't think they intended this, but... Canonically, what happened to Cloud City was that the Empire showed up and Darth Vader altered the deal. Which seems like the fundamental problem with creating a city on someone else's turf. (Unless it's a Galt's Gulch situation, I suppose...)
Fair enough, I agree their marketing could be better and its not concrete.
But I think a lack of community and meaning are problems particularly Gen Z feels. To create a strong, meaningful community, there is something to be learned from how that was historically done: religion/cults (https://twitter.com/wes_kao/status/1275825916325908481). Their abstract post seems to be playing in the timeless narrative of good and evil and a fall from grace. A call for idealists willing to aim at something audacious. Honestly, I'm pretty interested in at the least the community that emerges.
Huh? How is crypto related to diet and beauty and spirituality? I don't get it. Some of these things seem so bizarre to me because it seems like they live in a totally different world. In their world, rules enforced by governments are the thing they see stopping them from doing what they want but like for most people being able to pay for housing and medicine and food and having money left over to invest in anything is the thing stopping them.
I think there's a postmodernist/Marxist case that our distorted views on beauty and spirituality are downstream of our centralized economic and political systems, although I don't think I'd be able to explain it in my own words.
Could you help me understand your first link? It seems to be a description / discussion of Historical Materialism by Engels, and doesn't directly comment on beauty or spirituality. It seems that the theory of history expounded by Engels in the link is entirely consistent with workers becoming more attuned to beauty, less attuned to beauty, or that capital has no effect on workers' perceptions of beauty.
Could you summarise the Marxist case that our economic / political system leads to a distorted view of beauty (if Scott is correct and this is indeed a Marxist position)? I'd really appreciate a summary written by you rather than another link because it took me about half and hour to read the Engels document and it didn't really answer the question as far as I could see - perhaps it answers the question perfectly if you are very steeped in Marxist theory, but it seems I'm not quite at that level.
Oh I see, so the point was more that when Scott says, "Marxists think that our political and economic system has caused XYZ" this is always going to be trivially true, because all changes are downstream of political and economic systems anyway to a Marxist.
Thanks, really appreciate the clarification - think I was looking for the wrong thing when I initially read the link
I have been thinking about this one and I don't know if I have any clear conclusions. Marxbro is right that Marxists tend to argue that cultural concepts are downstream of the material relations of production. I just don't really see how crypto is meant to change the material relations of production. I haven't really seen any proposal to use crypto to empower the working class and change the relation to the means of production, so I'm still at a bit of a loss. (also as an aside, considering any view of beauty or spirituality distorted seems incompatible with postmodernism as I understand it. Postmodernism is all about considering the ensemble of different views with a sense of equal validity rather than privileging one as 'correct', and understanding them as relations between defined people rather than universals)
> The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me
They are hard to pin down.
There is a strong purity vibe throughout their prose which I would associate more with the right-wing. There is also a new-age hippyism that I'd associate with the left-wing. Passages like the one you highlighted remind me of some of the arguments fascists made for third-way economics: soulless cities with faceless citizens. Something along the lines of the market being good at getting things done but bad at deciding what those things will be. If you let the markets choose, it'll pick something bland, soulless, and inhuman to pursue in the name of efficiency.
Praxis really gives me that vibe.
I know associating anything with fascism is seen as condemning it, but I don't mean to do so in this post.
From the language, I'm almost certain Praxis is right-wing. Moreover, I can't imagine any leftists that would opt to use the founding fathers, Israel or a Tesla gigafactory in the manner that they have.
"The world is deranged and decayed"; "tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity"; "All around us, we see civilizational decay" are all said within a few sentences of each other and all read like they belong in an unsavoury pamphlet.
And I can find a bunch of things I can't see righties using: "Cities will be reorganized around shared values, rather than the labor market principles", "self-actualize", the use of "spiritual" instead of "religious".
I don't see it fitting in either side of the spectrum. It has some draw to both sides, but seems like it is really trying hard to be orthogonal to left vs right.
That sounds a lot like some of the right-wing stuff I've read. (Bear in mind that the Right is a lot more diverse than the Left, so you shouldn't expect all right-wingers to see eye to eye.)
In fact, the whole thing sounds an awful lot like it was written by someone who has read a lot of Bronze Age Pervert (or, with five percent probability, someone who _is_ Bronze Age Pervert).
I don't think it's at all true to say that the right is more diverse than the left.
But this does ring right-wing to me, and not just because Thiel's involved.
It depends how you define "right" and "left". If you count the alt-right, the neoliberals and the Christian conservatives as "right-wing", there are some rather-massive doctrinal differences between them - and all of them are substantial factions in your present Anglospheric democracy.
On the other hand the three biggest ideologies considered "left-wing" at the moment would probably be social justice, socialism and left-libertarianism. There's definitely a lot of difference between social justice and left-libertarianism, but there's a lot of overlap in terms of membership between socialists (or at least social democrats) and the other two. Also, lots of the left-libertarians have been peeled off the left-wing coalition (becoming alt-lite) by SJ's excesses.
It's definitely not what you might call traditionally right-wing talk, but it does sound like it falls pretty cleanly into what I first heard called "ironpill" beliefs but which I would personally coin Neo-Tribal Reactionary Politics. Point-by-point:
1. NTRP aren't a fan of capitalism, because they have correctly identified the fact that capitalism has no loyalty to their ideology and in fact will slowly commodify their culture, turning it into yet another product in service to Moloch. The largest error they make is usually in assuming that Moloch is loyal to neoliberalism, instead of neoliberalism simply being the current ruling paradigm that is being reduced to a commodity by Moloch.
2. "Self-actualization" is the key concept in NTRP; there is a specific way humans are supposed to live which will give them maximum physical, psychological, and spiritual fulfillment. To most NTRP people, this looks like a blend of a romanticized vision of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and being one of the chaps wearing S&M kit in a Mad Max film. There's a tendency to romanticize brutality towards outgroups as some kind of ennobling life-exalting activity a la Social Darwinism. They also tend to buy into the Strong Men-Good Times-Weak Men-Hard Times cyclic view of history (identifying themselves, or in the more lucid the children they raise in their barbarous utopia, as the "strong men".)
3. NTRP groups tend to be contemptuous towards most forms of organized religion in the West, due to a blend of seeing pagan animistic spirituality as more "authentic" or "connected with the world", seeing pagan beliefs as being infinitely more compatible with blood-and-soil ethnonationalism than any universalist belief, and hating Abrahamic religions for being "slave religion"/Semitic.
Addendum to the third point: I feel like the statement implies this pretty naturally, but there's a significant overlap between NTRP types and ethnonationalists/Neo-Nazis (the latter falling into the Black Sun/Esoteric Hitlerism/"far-right spiritualist crackpot" sphere.)
Thanks for this. It makes a lot more sense. I can see now why it was pegged as right wing now.
This seems to be either a (smallish) hub of those beliefs, or an effective parody of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/IronPill/
@Dryden would you say that your community holds similar beliefs?
That sub is too small and too dead to be an example of anything. Prospera beliefs seem to be BAPsphere (not to be confused with BAP himself, but very similar).
I would agree with abc that any group that small, even in a fringe ideology like NTRP, isn't going to be representative. As he's alluded to, reading the writings of the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert is probably the best summary of the foundational beliefs of NTRP.
This is all very poetic and intriguing, but the bottom line is, what are these guys actually going to *do* ? At some point you've got to stop writing purple prose, and start laying actual bricks. What's their plan for doing that ? And don't tell me that their plan is to actualize human nature through self-expression and internal liberation or whatnot; tell me how many bricks they're ordering and what their sewage system will look like.
"atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste”
As a gentleman of means, I expect all-natural bug paste.
...or synthetic steak, at least.
correction: search and replace megawatt with kilowatt.
Several Caribbean countries compete hard to attract rich immigrants and investors with their citizenship by investment programs. I've looked deeply into citizenship by investment in Dominica, which would cost $130k to get me a Dominica passport within 6 months to sorta replace my US passport if I renounced US citizenship for tax/political reasons. That would give the right to spend up to 6 months a year in Schengen, plus visa free access to most of the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia. Wikipedia has a convenient map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Dominica_citizens
I think Bukele is genuinely just really enthusiastic about bitcoin and that's the main reason why he's doing this. It's rare for politicians anywhere to do rigorous cost-benefit analyses about policies they like so I won't grade him too harshly relative to other politicians.
But it's not just a boondoggle based on his personal cheerleading for bitcoin. The potentials are way bigger than just a couple of crypto exchanges. It's about attracting crypto-rich retirees, tourists, and businessmen from all over the world. Total crypto marketcap is 2.4 trillion. If the average crypto owner spends 5% of his crypto wealth per year, that's a $120 billion/year pie to fight over. That's a couple orders of magnitude bigger than just FTX and Binance. If Bukele can get hodlers to spend an extra couple billion a year in El Salvador, by building his brand on social media with stunts like this, that's huge. El Salvador's entire GDP is only 24 billion. He doesn't even need to actually build the city. The two billion will be taxed several times as it passes through various hands down the supply chain, and additional economic growth from investments could increase the tax base.
OTOH his proposed construction cost is 300k bitcoins, which is about $15 billion, or two thirds of El Salvador's GDP. Spending two thirds of GDP building a model city seems way too ambitious, if they actually do it. I am not confident it will increase tax revenue enough to cover the interest on $15 billion of debt.
He seems not crazy at all in this interview with the Council of the Americas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPs_eif3Z8Y It sounds like he puts a very high priority on free trade and attracting foreign investment to develop El Salvador. His style of speaking sort of reminds me of Elon Musk (another good option for the dictator book club after he becomes God-Emperor of Mars).
"correction: search and replace megawatt with kilowatt."
I've confirmed that my source said megawatt - is that a ridiculous enough number that it has to be wrong?
Definitely. I've looked deep into crypto mining. Very cheap electricity prices (e.g., hydroelectric in Chelan county Washington) would be around 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Here in Las Vegas, electricity is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Here is a map of US electricity prices where the lowest bucket is <5 cents/kwh and the highest bucket is >15 cents/kwh: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_price_map_of_the_United_States_2013.jpeg
Here is a list of countries around the world, where the only ones under 4 cents per kwh are Iran, Ethiopia, and Qatar: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
I think your source meant to say kilowatt hours, because 4 cents per kwh would be typical of the places bitcoin miners go.
Sounds like you're right and Fortune magazine is wrong, thank you.
Yes. Residential electricity in the US tends to run between 5 and 50 cents per kWh, and there's really no way (99% confidence) "industrial" electricity in other places is 3 orders of magnitude lower. For example, new solar installations tend to target 10 or so cents per kWh. 4 cents / megawatt hour would mean you could rent the entire output of a good-sized nuclear powerplant (typically in the 500 MW - 1GW range) for less than minimum wage.
$0.04/MWh * 1000 MW = $40/hr, so not minimum wage, but it would still be insane.
Wholesale electricity is typically in the neighborhood of $40-$80/MWh.
Yeah, that cannot be right. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/ has data on wholesale electricity trades at various grid interconnect points, and the weighted average (by volume) for this year is $58.46/MW-h (not coincidentally, roughly 1000 times more). There are weird moment wen the price is zero (or even negative), due to crazy grid imbalances. But not significant volume at such prices (those trades have to be more "I will pay you to take power so my plant does not blow up before I can throttle it down"). Pennies per MW-h is not plausible.
Seems like Free Private Cities ( https://www.freeprivatecities.com/en/ ) is helpin El Salvador with Bitcoin City. https://twitter.com/CrisFloresSV/status/1466528655325106182
Also, worth mentioning. Bukele seems to act quite quickly with his bitcoin plan. They made BTC legal tender after 3 months of announcing it, then started to build a hospital with gains from BTC (already almost finished!) 1 month after announcing it. ( https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1457919970000658442 )
I think the Balaji Srinivasan mention refers to this tweet: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1269178671086006273?lang=en
"How to start a new city
- Build a community in the cloud
- Organize economy around remote work
- Enforce laws with smart contracts
- Practice in-person norms of civility
- Simulate architecture in VR
- Eventually, crowdfund territory
- And materialize city into the real world"
Seems like a decent plan. Rationalists did something similar on a smaller scale when their online community decided to buy houses on the same street in Berkeley. Unfortunately they haven't become a semi-independent microstate, YET.
Why is everyone so keen on starting a new city? Why not focus on the more achievable goal of starting a new village, and think about how to grow it into a town, and _then_ think about how to grow it into a city?
Maybe people see the success of "overnight cities" like Dubai or Shenzhen and want to aim for that from the get go.
I'm as much into "MVP and then iterate" as the next guy, but if a core part of the plan is to kick off a positive feedback explosion of citizens, investment, and business then there's at least a case for thinking about city scale infrastructure from the start
Is Dubai a success in any way except as a demonstation of oil princes' ability to build something (anything) tangible using their excess trillions? Everything I've seen seems to suggest that it's something between a sad joke and a crime against humanity.
Ha, I couldn't say I'm not familiar with Dubai beyond often hearing it in the list of "cities built very fast" 😅. I could believe it's not a very nice place to live, indeed I could see that happening with many experimental cities. Hopfully citzens voting with their feet will mean that's not a show stopping issue for the whole enterprise
See "Dubai is a Parody of the 21st Century"
https://youtu.be/tJuqe6sre2I
It went viral a while back. It's a pretty convincing video essay that has gone unrefuted.
It's a major economic hub, seems to have a locally (and globally) high standard of living and a lot of people really like it. That seems to be a definition of successful city to me?
There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem that the MVP route tries to address. How many citizens are currently living in a model city? It feels relatively untested. Urban growth is so incremental (usually) that it seems unlikely you'll get an overnight success story.
It's a terrible plan, in the sense that it has no chance of achieving the stated goal of a physical city. The reasons people would agree to "laws" for a virtual city are completely different from those for a physical city, and the people who would live (and more importantly, work) in such a city are necessarily different from the crypto-libertarians who would be attracted to this idea.
The whole "community" and "civility" thing really feels like it's not building a city, it's building a discussion forum. I thought that calling a discussion forum a "virtual city" died out years ago once people decided Second Life was not the next big thing. Or when people decided Geocities was not the next big thing.
Which side of Dunbar's number is the IRL Rat community?
Hey Scott, I'm Dryden from Praxis. You made a number of basic mistakes in your description of us. One glaring example: Peter Thiel is not an investor (the investors in our seed round are extremely visible -- pinned on our Twitter account). If you're interested in making edits to improve the accuracy of your post, feel free to reach out.
Wait, why not just correct the record here?
Charitably? They want to resolve this without it becoming fodder for the commentariat's entertainment. Uncharitably? Harder to control the narrative in a public space.
"They want to resolve this without it becoming fodder for the commentariat's entertainment."
Too late for me!
If Oroville is mostly trying to resist California laws, instead of federal laws, then there are some precedents: the Free and Independent State of Scott (Tennessee) and the Republic of Winston (Alabama). These counties succeeded from their states during the Civil War because they wanted to remain with the Union. I'm not sure that this is a good precedence: both saw violence as a result (although the war might have come through there anyway).
Along with being symbolic, Oroville might be trying to trigger some lawsuits, with the hope that the courts will strike down some or all of the covid restrictions.
I'm skeptical of your description of the Zelaya situation in Honduras, because the Supreme Court *did* let the current right-wing president amend the constitution to run for a second term only six years after the coup against Zelaya for trying the same thing. So the Supreme Court is not really acting in good faith here; it seems right to be suspicious of it.
https://elpais.com/internacional/2015/04/24/actualidad/1429839601_867027.html
Failing to understand socialist theory according to you, is very different from not being aware of the specific instantiations of corruption in a south american country
Implying that Scott should have interviewed south american socialists as research for this post is an unreasonable expectation.
I'm not horribly surprised that the model city in Honduras has run into problems with regard to the political state of the country, and I'm not hugely sympathetic to them either, given that they picked Honduras for the very reason that they could wangle the political situation to their benefit (dangle the lure of sacks of gold in front of the government's eyes).
I imagine if they haven't gone too far to call it a day, the best thing might be to back out and wait for the wind to change again. If they are already too committed to down tools and leave, then coming to an arrangement (handing over sacks of gold to the new regime) will be the way to survive.
Summary of the first episode of the Praxis podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/3pNmFlFnobsZ0tBRdIgmZr):
claim: the founder dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer, then worked for an activist hedge fund and a master plan community developer.
claim: morality is the OS of a civilization and our civilization evidently isn't working because of the high incidence of obesity, mental illness, ennui, and bad remakes of movies.
claim: the solution is to build a community around shared values, but that sort of thing was suppressed after WWII to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Since WWII the memetic powers that be have been trying to maximize trade and interconnectedness between countries to reduce the risk of war, which is totally understandable, but the side effect is that you lose distinctive cultures built around shared values.
claim: building a community online first allows you to get the people and funding first and make it almost a fait accompli before you negotiate with governments for real world territory, so you get better leverage in those negotiations.
In the second episode they interview Sol Brah, who is a 100k-follower bodybuilder on twitter who posts 50 times a day.
I give this a way higher chance of success than Black Hammer.
Looked into Sol Brah out of curiosity. Notable information about Sol Brah:
-He's an anti-vaxxer (as in, anti-all-vaccines)
- He's a monarchist
-He worships the sun (hence the name) and believes that the human body derives spiritual power from it
-He believes all disease is caused by malnutrition.
- He believes in psychic powers (not sure if he believes he PERSONALLY has them but signs point to yes).
- He believes Bluetooth radiation is a physical and spiritual poison.
-He claims to have elaborate lucid dreams of spiritual significance when he consumes protein powder.
- He believes that shampoo is "chemical slop that causes hair loss".
These are all things he has posted in the past week. He also really likes calling everything he hates "soy", which, combined with all the above tells me he probably falls into the "ironpill"/Neo-Tribal Reactionary camp.
The fact he's who Praxis picked as their first guest doesn't exactly help in their attempts to dispel the idea that they're a cult or cult-adjacent organization.
A bodybuilder who worships the sun?
Why do you guys encourage me?
Here we go, from Chesterton's "Father Brown" story 'The Eye of Apollo':
"What on earth is that?" asked Father Brown, and stood still. "Oh, a new religion," said Flambeau, laughing; "one of those new religions that forgive your sins by saying you never had any. Rather like Christian Science, I should think. The fact is that a fellow calling himself Kalon (I don't know what his name is, except that it can't be that) has taken the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters underneath me, and this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the New Priest of Apollo, and he worships the sun."
"Let him look out," said Father Brown. "The sun was the cruellest of all the gods. But what does that monstrous eye mean?"
...The man who called himself Kalon was a magnificent creature, worthy, in a physical sense, to be the pontiff of Apollo. He was nearly as tall even as Flambeau, and very much better looking, with a golden beard, strong blue eyes, and a mane flung back like a lion's. In structure he was the blonde beast of Nietzsche, but all this animal beauty was heightened, brightened and softened by genuine intellect and spirituality. If he looked like one of the great Saxon kings, he looked like one of the kings that were also saints. ...When all was said, a man in the presence of this quack did feel in the presence of a great man. Even in the loose jacket-suit of linen that he wore as a workshop dress in his office he was a fascinating and formidable figure; and when robed in the white vestments and crowned with the golden circlet, in which he daily saluted the sun, he really looked so splendid that the laughter of the street people sometimes died suddenly on their lips. For three times in the day the new sun-worshipper went out on his little balcony, in the face of all Westminster, to say some litany to his shining lord: once at daybreak, once at sunset, and once at the shock of noon. And it was while the shock of noon still shook faintly from the towers of Parliament and parish church that Father Brown, the friend of Flambeau, first looked up and saw the white priest of Apollo.
But Father Brown, whether from a professional interest in ritual or a strong individual interest in tomfoolery, stopped and stared up at the balcony of the sun-worshipper, just as he might have stopped and stared up at a Punch and Judy. Kalon the Prophet was already erect, with argent garments and uplifted hands, and the sound of his strangely penetrating voice could be heard all the way down the busy street uttering his solar litany. He was already in the middle of it; his eyes were fixed upon the flaming disc. It is doubtful if he saw anything or anyone on this earth; it is substantially certain that he did not see a stunted, round-faced priest who, in the crowd below, looked up at him with blinking eyes. That was perhaps the most startling difference between even these two far-divided men. Father Brown could not look at anything without blinking; but the priest of Apollo could look on the blaze at noon without a quiver of the eyelid.
"O sun," cried the prophet, "O star that art too great to be allowed among the stars! O fountain that flowest quietly in that secret spot that is called space. White Father of all white unwearied things, white flames and white flowers and white peaks. Father, who art more innocent than all thy most innocent and quiet children; primal purity, into the peace of which--"
...It came with this precious prophet, or whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."
I rarely miss the like button, but these apropos chesterton quotes are one of the times.
Ironically (or perhaps perfectly appropriately), Sol Brah ALSO believes that you should spend lots of time staring directly at the sun, and that things like "skin cancer" and "retinal damage" were made up by "THEM" to cut humanity off from the divine life-giving energy of the sun.
Well, either somebody is copying somebody, or This Is Not A Coincidence Because Nothing Is Ever A Coincidence.
From "The Eye of Apollo":
"As I understand it, it is a theory of theirs," answered Flambeau, "that a man can endure anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say that if a man were really healthy he could stare at the sun."
"If a man were really healthy," said Father Brown, "he would not bother to stare at it."
"Well, that's all I can tell you about the new religion," went on Flambeau carelessly. "It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases."
...Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids of an ethical tirade about the "sickly medical notions" and the morbid admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.
Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.
"That is so different," said Pauline Stacey, loftily. "Batteries and motors and all those things are marks of the force of man--yes, Mr Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and splendid--that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the doctors sell--why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I was free-born, Mr Flambeau! People only think they need these things because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the sun, and so they can't do it without blinking. But why among the stars should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose."
..."The truth is one word, and a short one," said Father Brown. "Pauline Stacey was blind."
"Blind!" repeated Flambeau, and rose slowly to his whole huge stature.
"She was subject to it by blood," Brown proceeded. "Her sister would have started eyeglasses if Pauline would have let her; but it was her special philosophy or fad that one must not encourage such diseases by yielding to them. She would not admit the cloud; or she tried to dispel it by will. So her eyes got worse and worse with straining; but the worst strain was to come. It came with this precious prophet, or whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."
I love that movie!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXy0JrUpXts
Oroville, Oroville... where have I heard that name?
Oh, right! The Yuba county 5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCsPV0eiqxg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuba_County_Five) may have been heading there when they disappeared.
It also shares a name with a nearby dam that nearly collapsed in 2017. The dam incident received substantial news coverage for about three weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam
ACX and DSL favorite YouTube channel "Practical Engineering" has a nifty video on the spillway failure, for those who might be interested. Grady does a good job explaining it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNM4DGBRMU
I'm not too versed on the history of Zionism, but wasn't the creation of Israel not simply because of Judaism but the larger alienation of not only religious Jews, but Jews as an ethnicity as well? Some founders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky were said to be "divorced from Jewish faith and tradition", and he was one of the significant right-wing Zionists too, the left-wing Zionists were famously materialist and formed socialist agrarian communes such as the Kibbutz and the slightly less socialist Moshavs, so in a lot of cases the foundation of Israel isn't very much about religious Judaism (which, is maybe just being too picky about word choice, if you said "Jewish community" I would agree absolutely), and more so just community/autonomy/identity. Really, Judaism at the time was and to a lesser extent is today somewhat hostile to Israel: orthodox Jews were from what I know quite opposed to its conception, as the Torah and their local Jewish practice is the only homeland they need and they should focus on piety and the Halakha... plus I don't think the majority of Jews were very enthusiastic about migrating to an inhospitable desert in an Islamic empire with a violent military tradition. In the modern day Haredi Jews sometimes participate in anti-Zionist stuff since they pertain to the belief that only the Messiah can create the state of Israel (although obviously now like to pick up more common arguments about military violence and anti-Arab discrimination, since, y'know, that's what the hip anti-Zionists do these days). In some ways it's reasonable to consider the creation of Israel a reaction to Judaism, or at the least the negation of Jewish traditions which considered Zionism unacceptable.
That's a bit of a tangent though, I still do think it's quite incorrect to compare charter cities to the creation of Israel. Even if it was conceptualised as dominantly secular and materialist, thinking it was just something new that popped up is silly and I hope no one spoils to them that Jews have always lived in the Old Yishuv and didn't just get super ideologically driven when people wanted to found a new country based on similar principles of governance like charter cities have.
FWIW, to Jews in USSR, Israel was a refuge. Few of them were religious, but when you're essentially hunted for sport in your home town, it was nice to imagine that, one day, you could escape to a land where *you* are the major ethnic group, for once. When Communist control slipped, there was a massive wave of Jewish emigration.
Jews in the Soviet Union were discriminated against but they were not essentially hunted for sport.
It came pretty close. Stalin was gearing up for a proper purge (doctors' plot), but died just in time.
Ditto this. I know some Jews who emigrated to Israel after the breakdown of the USSR but mostly they did because they saw better prospects in Israel than in post-Soviet country and maybe also because they wanted to live in closer community with other Jews. But in most cases they didn't run away from the USSR out of fear of their lives.
"Essentially hunted for sport" sounds like a colorful description of the Pogroms of the later Czarist era, much more than anything I'm aware of during the Soviet era outside of stuff the Nazis did in occupied Soviet territory during WW2. Although I could see the Pogroms making a deep enough cultural impression on the survivors that the differently-shaped Soviet-era persecutions might be interpreted as more of the same.
Yes. My parents were driven to immigrate partly by the rumors of pomgroms, but these pomgroms never materialized.
I'm not quite sure what to think of the USSR issue, because yeah on one hand you have the discriminations of Jews by people very paranoid and distrustful of them after the Doctors' Plot, but the USSR also created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast within their own territory and briefly sold arms to Israel through Czechoslovakia in 1948 (as well as being the first state to recognise it). I get that for a few years there is a top-down campaign trying to uncover imaginary paranoid plots by alleging Zionist Jews have infiltrated the academia, but this was mostly from the brief period between the arms deals and Stalin's death which was rabidly antisemetic and even then I'm hesitant to believe in turn the general population of the USSR became xenophobic, and furthermore, xenophobic beyond the years of '48-53. I certainly lack the experiences of a Jew in the USSR but to me this is kinda a "humans aren't that evil, right?", especially after fighting a war against the people who perpetuated the Holocaust and liberating many camps.
Antisemitism was definitely common in the USSR, both in the populace and the government (inofficial-but-official quotas for accepting Jews to university is an example of the latter). I think that the brief support of Israel was because so many Zionists were into socialism and the USSR might have thought Israel will be a communist country. Later the Arab-Israeli conflict became completely aligned with the Cold War with the USSR firmly on the Arab side, supplying them with weapons and training.
+1, Zionism was a form of nationalism inspired by other nationalist movements in Europe and spurred on by the prevalence of antisemitism, *not* a religious thing (religious Zionism did exist but accounted for a minority of the momentum)
Hey, I was eating bugs before it was cool (or uncool, or whatever). Paprika-fried crickets were quite good; and my friend also let me try some Korean street-food style bugs that tasted pretty interesting. I wouldn't mind having some again, but they're super hard to find.
At reed college, every year, they have bug eating day where students bring bugs and other students bid on how little they will eat them for. My brother's best friend ate a 1.5" cockroach for $0.32. (They also have naked water slide day on the grass slope in front of the college.)
I was going to fully endorse this event, until the last part. Nudity + bugs seems like a rather... refined... combination.
"Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo."
I'm pretty sure this is just a typo, but I prefer to think that the Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza is going to contain a smaller Bitcoin-logo-shaped central plaza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJVdFxdaV84
Before laughing too loud about present-day attempts at creating model Bitcoin-cities in Latin American countries, remember that there were many attempts to create micro "model cities" and "model societies" within the US between 1800 and 1900. All of them fizzled out. Either because they never got off the ground in the first place, or because they destroyed themselves from within, or because the central (federal) US government could not really tolerate that parts of its territory was not fully under its control.
I expect the same to happen in Honduras and anywhere else that "model cities" might threaten to become successful.
Should Honduras have written in that in order to evict a ZEDE, Honduras must pay back the taxes collected from the ZEDE?
Great article as usual. Do you know the blog 1729 by Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase? He shares some super disruptive ideas about starting new cities and new states, starting with an online community first, land second so you get leverage to negociate.
"It is now possible to start a community, a business or even a currency from your laptop. The next step is to make it possible to create new cities and countries, rather than just inherit them."
https://1729.com/summary
Balaji is great, and he follows Scott as im sure Scott knows of him. However, Balaji is referring to digital cities, more like a metaverse, while Scott is talking about actual cities. At some point, utilities and food matter, even if the rest of your life is spent online.
GG, I don't accuse anyone, but it seems one of us didn't read the article I linked :))
"Digitally connect physical communities. Finally, network the
nodes into a new kind of state: a network state, a digital archipelago with pieces of territory distributed around the world, ranging from single-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size." That's not a physical city.
No, that's multiple potential physical cities :)
I am very skeptical of "online community first" as a strategy. The idea that you'll get "leverage" by pointing to 10,000 random people as willing to join your jurisdiction seems very disconnected from the actual issues experienced by those trying to build physical cities. Growing quickly, attracting lots of foreigners, being perceived as an insular community showing up out of nowhere, these are all things that motivate opposition at least as much as support. The only real draw for governments to sign on is attracting investment, for tax revenue and job creation, and that's not denominated in headcount, and not made up of internet randos.
Plus your 10,000 online members are going to be mostly all-talk-no-action, because they haven't gone through the "actually willing to relocate" filter yet. Think Free State Project (only 1/4 of signers have actually moved, despite an explicit commitment to relocate), but even worse as the FSP was about moving states within the US, rather than moving to a different country.
Meanwhile the people willing to relocate are very limited by the lack of real projects out there. There's lots of scams or will-never-happen projects though, so the ability to show results (even something simple like Próspera's Beta Building) is crucial if you want to attract those people.
I’ve sailed with Finbar, Supreme Commander of the Conch Republic Navy. His stories are incredible enough that someone made a documentary about him. What I picked up about the Key West/Conch Republic situation was actually a little disheartening. Key West followed Florida/USA law, but was being treated like a separate country. The government had roadblocks and searches on vehicles traveling on the highway from key west to Florida, and it hurt key west tourism, but also made key west feel like they weren’t fully American. They jokingly made up a sovereign nation, but it sure seems like a lot of people from that generation are Key West people first, Floridian/American second. It made me realize how little influence individuals have, and how big you have to get before your concerns are addressed at all.
As Honduras sadly shows: we absolutely need to get our own sovereign state to build Utopia. Luckily there is one up for grabs: Nevis! (She says: What?! I said: Nevis!) - As in "St. Kitts and Nevis". Tiny, but sovereign (The Queen is head - but as Barbados showed last week, she can be cancelled.). The best: It is TWO islands. Nevis is the smaller - just 7k registered voters. With the constitutional right to secede from the federation (yep, smallest federation ever), if they want! And they want: Last referendum was just 573 votes short of a 2/3 majority! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Nevis_independence_referendum
They sell their passports, of course (works visa-free for 140 countries). Since 1984. https://www.ciu.gov.kn/ Right now they have an end-of-year sale: 150,000 US-$ for a family of four (my 2 adult kids from first marriage are eligible. So only 569 votes left to go!) And they do have their own regional airport.
Drawbacks: As Greg Cochran (see blogroll) will readily point out: It is one of those IQ-barely-80-countries (as is Honduras). Completely unrelated: It is also one of those with an impressive homicide-rate - but that is mainly man-kills-wife. Or rape-murder. Not foreigners (Paraguay!). They re-started hanging now, should help. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1110973/Return-noose-St-Kitts-just-hanged-man-decade-believes-way-beat-violent-crime.html
And they still seem to have those ol' British sodomite-laws. So save your rainbow-shirts for later. First we take Montenegro, err, Nevis, then we take ... off. Peter, please,10 Million will let us secede! Another 100 and we dominate politics there for good. (Both less, if done smartly). I volunteer for first secretary of defense. (Better check those Kitties - a force of around 0.24 k. Till we take them over -their airport is better.)
Else: Svalbard aka Spitzbergen. If you prefer the cold. As Alex Tabarrok tweeted out (to B. Caplan, I guess) : There you have your "open-borders"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty
"Svalbard is part of Norway: However, Norway's power over Svalbard is restricted by the limitations listed below:
• Taxation: This allows taxes to be collected, but only enough to support Svalbard and the Svalbard government. This results in lower taxes than mainland Norway and the exclusion of any taxes on Svalbard supporting Norway directly.
• Non-discrimination: All citizens and all companies of every nation under the treaty are allowed to become residents and to have access to Svalbard including the right to fish, hunt or undertake any kind of maritime, industrial, mining or trade activity. The residents of Svalbard must follow Norwegian law, though Norwegian authority cannot discriminate against or favor any residents of any given nationality."
The problem with all these new cities is that there are no new frontiers to establish new ways of life. It's a boundary problem. 300 years ago, if you wanted to start a new society, you would just pick up stakes and head west with a bunch of like-minded people, claim a bit of unclaimed territory, and start doing your thing. Today, that's impossible because there *is* no unclaimed territory. That means the best way to establish a new society is through conquest.
This may sound sinister, but "conquest" doesn't have to be violent. It can be be done through political means as well. For example, look how effectively Donald Trump conquered the Republican Party. In the context of setting up a new society, conquest could mean something like the following.
1) Start a religion.
2) Have the followers of your religion all move to one town.
3) Vote their fellow believers into positions of power.
4) Establish a prosperous community that neighboring societies are jealous of.
5) Use your community's success to evangelize your religious beliefs, promising other communities that they can be as successful as you if they just share your values and follow your example.
6) Once you have enough followers in those neighboring communities, vote members of your religion into positions of power.
7) Rinse and repeat.
It doesn't even have to be a religion per se - in this example, "religion" is just shorthand for "an ethical ideology which is very memetically sticky and replicates fast"... which, OK, I guess "religion" would probably be the best word for, even though that word tends to frighten people.
(from the Praxis citation)
>>Crypto is a fundamentally political technology
Yes, absolutely. The ability to communicate securely over untrusted networks is essential not only for any kind of e-commerce, but also to thwart the big brother fantasies of three letter agencies, so it is very much a political technology. Key points in the political crypto history would be Zimmermann exporting the source of PGP in print to circumvent US export restrictions, or Facebooks WhatsApp adopting end-to-end encryption in response to the Snowden revelations.
Oh, you are talking about cryptocurrencies, aren't you? I concede the political dimension in of cryptocurrency /transactions/ (such as wikileaks being funded via bitcoin since the financial blockade), but the fact that OnlyFans was ready to give in to pressure from the banking sector instead of saying "if you ban us from using credit cards, our users will just pay with cryptocurrencies" speaks volumes about the lack of practical impact of cryptocurrency transactions.
The main media focus is always on cryptocurrencies as an investment. In some way, the ability to do transactions is necessary and required for investments, but practically, I find it much less interesting. Questions of legitimacy aside, rich people have been hiding their wealth from the state since practically forever. Now they have yet another tool to do that, fueling the cryptocurrency bubble. News at 11.
I get it, the mainstream co-opts whatever terms catches their attention, then changes the meaning beyond recognition. Similar things have happened to the term "hacker" and probably countless others. Still, I can not help but feel sympathetic to Bruce's position here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/crypto-means-cryptography-not-cryptocurrency.html
People aren't aware of just how dictatorial Nayib Bukele really is. Forcing legislative branch at gunpoint to militarize the police.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/16/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-military-alarming-memories?utm_source=pocket_mylist
This clip is particularly enlightening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecAZnjPKa3Y
I do not believe Bitcoin City will ever be built