rpietila, I moved our discussion about theory of change activism in money systems, and username18333 on the applicability of his Great Empire of Hyperaccelerated Redistribution Theft™ anti-money altcoin, to the Economic Devastation thread which is more apropos. Even Karl Marx understood that the system of social structure was a result of (and not the cause of) the mode of production driven by technology (a.k.a. "natural science"). He eloquently stated that the mode of production shifted over time due to changes in the underlying technological "forces of" production. He explained that what he meant by capitalism is the "modern bourgeois society" which he certainly meant those who could aggregate more capital in the power-law distribution simply because they had more capital. Karl Marx did not state that the reason for this rise of monetary capitalists is because the Industrial Age can be financed with usury because industry (e.g. factories) require high fixed capital investments, with amortized rates of return. And thus industrial society can not produce without concentration of monetary capital. And thus capitalists are then able to capture the government and write off usury defaults to the public backstop, because in an industrial society production is too big to fail because it does not incorporate Taleb's anti-fragility thus investments in production overcommit to egregious estimation errors because there is a contagion effect of increasing debt to stimulate demand and production. In short, the entire industrial system is doomed to corruption by its very technological nature regardless what social structure is attempted to build on top of it. Whereas, in the opening post of the Economic Devastation thread, CoinCube has cited my writings on the theory that the Knowledge Age inverts the control over capital, because knowledge creation (not preexisting knowledge consumption per se, although learning is diversified especially if autodidactic undirected and thus a form of innovative knowledge creation) spawns chaotically and unpredictably, thus can not be control by monetary capital. It is the changes in technology which have enabled individuals to directly "sell" (trade) their knowledge creation into the market of demand for knowledge creation, and stepping out from under the control and reason for existance of the corporation in the Theory of the Firm, that is destroying the utility of excessive quantities of stored monetary capital, because it is implausible to convert these large stores of capital to efficient production of knowledge. This is the why the old world industrial capitalists are creating a new world order of totalitarian control in order to try to hang on to their power which is being fundamentally eroded by technological shift to the Knowledge Age. I believe I am the progenitor of the concept and term Knowledge Age in this context. I have argued to rpietila that the technological struts (e.g. anonymous internet and anonymous money for trading and including micropayments scaling which Monero can't do) have to be in place before the change will occur and that his religious activism is counter-productive. I have argued that username18333 makes the same mistake that all communists and socialists do, in that they can think by force of destroying freedom by stealing from some to give to others that they can change the underlying forces of production. One day I will need to take the time to real all of Marx to understand how he ostensibly transitioned from a correct statement of reality in the Preface to such a horrific killing field of Communism. P.S. I have copied this post to the Dark Enlightenment thread. |
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rpietila, I moved our discussion about theory of change activism in money systems, and username18333 on the applicability of anti-money, to the Economic Devastation thread which is more apropos. |
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The Chinese are getting in the mood to short everything. Once they realize they make more money with their money by putting up as margin shorting than buying becomes the new fad. You think they won't short Bitcoin too?
All assets other than the dollar are going be toasted by shorting over the next months as we head into the contagion that has been assured by the rising interest rates confirmed by the Fed leak a this past week.
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It is all over. $20 here we come...
 I know it's painful to have lost the opportunity to be an early adopter, but this is just sad. And it's also wrong, because someone could take you seriously. Liars who quote out-of-context have no credibility: Actually I don't think we will hit $20. I am thinking higher double-digits.
The only sad outcome is going to be when you (and inca) hide under a rock after I am correct and call out you (and inca) by name in this thread coming soon... |
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This query: https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=site%3Aarmstrongeconomics.com+Windows+8+spywareReturns: Your search - site:armstrongeconomics.com Windows 8 spyware - did not match any documents. Any other query on "site:armstrongeconomics.com" returns a slew of listings. I know for a fact that Armstrong wrote numerous times about how Windows 8 is spyware. But now I can't find a single listing via Google. So this tells you in whose back pocket Google is in. I ran the same search again on duckduckgo.com and received many listings! |
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This query: https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=site%3Aarmstrongeconomics.com+Windows+8+spywareReturns: Your search - site:armstrongeconomics.com Windows 8 spyware - did not match any documents. Any other query on "site:armstrongeconomics.com" returns a slew of listings. I know for a fact that Armstrong wrote numerous times about how Windows 8 is spyware. But now I can't find a single listing via Google. So this tells you in whose back pocket Google is in. I ran the same search again on duckduckgo.com and received many listings! |
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We need gold, perhaps other things, as a Store of Value.
Gold is hedge against government malfeasance but isn't a hedge against mad max failure of the government. In that scenario, gold becomes worthless and only food and ammo (and other supplies) are money. This has been backtested throughout all history by Armstrong. If the government doesn't correct itself within about 2 - 3 years of the start of the crisis and it the crisis envelopes all possible safe havens globally (or the government blocks your escape), then gold is worthless to you. Gold is a very, very risky store-of-value with very minimal utility. That already minimal utility is declining drastically now that the technology has arrived to eliminate cash and control every nook and cranny of the globe with drones. The Bible says they will throw their gold and silver into the streets. And that is precisely what is coming. Gold might have some utility in a scenario where you can trade some coins (not bars) in exchange for some passage to a safer venue, or in exchange for some unregistered asset (such as an unregistered boat or plane if those things exist or perhaps a large box of ammo or guns). But it won't be something you can trade regularly for supplies. It will be something you will be lucky to trade seldom (and each trade you will be rolling the dice on your life). It is possible that there will be "resistance movement" that will trade gold for anonymous cryptocurrency, but these movements willl be infiltrated and you will risk life or imprisonment every time you risk a trade. You can have a runner do it for you, but TPTB can torture your runner and turn him against you. In short, gold will be a powder that hold and use only in desperation and sparingly. Thus it will be difficult to find anyone who will trade for it. It will have very low value in black markets, fractions of its "spot price". Liquidity will be horrendous. All the reasons I can think why we desperately need reliable anonymous communications and currency. Gold is needed to preserve your value over the time of crisis, precisely what OROBTC said. It will not be of much use during the crisis. Some items mentioned by you might come in handy. Saying that gold is "very very risky" is very very stupid if no explanation is given. Furthermore, you should really think about my thesis of portfolio allocation based on the least intercorrelation of the total loss risk of its components. In this context gold is very nice risk profile. All I can fathom is you didn't grasp from my elucidation that if a crisis moves past the Overton window, the slide into a Dark Age outlives your lifespan; thus gold is useless. Thus gold has no utility in the center of the Overton window and only protects during ephemeral moves away from the center which revert within a few years. I think any one can see we are not facing a localized crisis. I define the NWO as an ongoing crisis of unthinkables, because it is an inherently bankrupt paradigm thus will be a resource extraction paradigm. In a near zero margin industrial age economy, this means expropriating first all private wealth and then later moving on to extracting blood (wavelength blood red 666, the number of man) a.k.a. eugenics. So even though you might define a monetary reset as the end of the crisis, I expect this will include a "tax" on exchanging gold for the new "SDR" unit, i.e. expropriation. In other words, a continuation of the crisis in the form of fascist-totalitarianism where production is increasingly consolidated under control by a few. |
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Many things that happen in the world are scripted for the media and public discourse. They are arranged solely to probe whether the members of the public continue to be as clueless as they have been programmed to be and are wished to continue to be. You do not overthrow a regime by requiring a majority of society to become freethinkers simultaneously, rather by creating a scenario by which the CONFIDENCE in the regime is trashed in a dominoes cascade. And not thrashed under a controlled crash managed by the TPTB prospiracy of progressivism (i.e. where they can expropriate, tax, and force austerity), but rather one of decentralized communication and trade which pulls the rug from under them (or less ideally a military conquest and meritorious restructuring a la Genghis Khan but that seems highly unrealistic now). Noam Chomsky killed you by teaching to fight with the dull pitchfork of activism. Here is a summary of Moldbuggery. Wed, 2008-09-17 22:49by Martin Regnen
The man hiding under the odd pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug is certainly one of the more interesting anti-democracy thinkers today. It is unfortunate that his writings are not easily absorbed because they are long-winded and completely unedited. I am not aware of any presentation of Moldbug's ideas in a simpler form other than one guest post by Arnold Kling at Creative Capitalism. So, as a service to the public, I am presenting here my understanding of Mencius Moldbug's major ideas. I personally agree with most of them and think all are interesting. Some seem strange and extreme at first, but they explain a lot of otherwise insane things going on in the world today - from the absurd number of lawyers employed by the US military to the fact that National Socialism is far more unfashionable today than plain ol' socialism even though the latter killed a lot more people.
This piece is intended to serve as an easily digestible introduction to the Moldbuggian worldview and also as a convenient reference for when you're reading one of his essays and suddenly stop to ask yourself "What the hell is this Polygon he's talking about?" Of course, do read the original.
Progressivism
Progressivism (also called Universalism) is responsible for the vast majority of the world's problems today. It is a non-theistic religion descended in a direct line from the various Dissenter sects of England. Although the belief in God was dropped during the religion's evolution in order to improve its ability to spread, the core of progressive beliefs are very similar to the Quaker beliefs of a few centuries ago. In short, progressives are dangerous and creepy religious maniacs who don't need to believe in God but that makes them no less dangerous, creepy or maniacal.
The conflict between progressivism and conservatism
Progressivism always wins in the long run. Conservatism can at most slow down the implementation of selected progressive ideas. This is because progressives dominate the universities, media and non-governmental organizations which allows them to mold public opinion. Progressives dominate those institutions because progressivism is a far more attractive ideology for people who are intelligent, ambitious and status-seeking. In the US conservatives are largely members of Protestant sects of American origin (mostly Evangelical sects) whereas progressives are the spiritual descendants of the English dissenters, so this conflict is essentially a religious one.
The US government
The Presidency and Congress are mainly ceremonial. The US is governed mainly by the permanent civil service bureaucracy although the real decisions are made at elite universities and then spread by the media and by non-governmental organizations. The universities, media and NGOs are all essential elements of the de facto government, which is referred to as the Polygon or the Cathedral. There is no conspiracy involved - the system is self-organized and self-perpetuating with no need for central leadership.
The military
Militaries are the only institutions with any importance or power which is not dominated by progressives. Because of this progressives burden the military with rules of engagement which make victory impossible and then use left-wing insurgencies or adventures in foreign countries to defeat the military in proxy wars.
Political parties
In a democracy with two major political parties, the more progressive party is referred to as the Inner Party and the more conservative party is the Outer Party. Supporting the Outer Party in any way is not an effective strategy against progressivism.
International relations
The US essentially runs the world since the aftermath of World War II. Many military conflicts around the world are usually best understood proxy wars in the struggle between progressivism and conservatism. What progressives refer to as independence means total dependence on the US. The current system should be replaced by a return to classical international law with all non-nuclear countries becoming client states of nuclear countries.
Insurgency
There has never been a successful right-wing insurgency in the XX century with the possible exception of Franco. Left-wing insurgencies can succeed as progressive auxillaries in the progressive-conservative in another (more powerful) country.
Activism
Progressive political activism is directed against the elected government and supports the unelected civil service bureaucracy. Anti-American political activism consists of pressuring the US to live up to its own progressive ideals, and therefore is more accurately called ultra-Americanism. Both are effective methods of influencing US government policy in the progressive direction.
Castes
In an earlier version, the population of the US was divided into five castes: Brahmin, Optimate, Vaisya, Helot and Dalit. In the new, simplified version we have Eloi, Morlocks and Proles. A caste is a large social group with its own internal rules for ranking social status. The Eloi or Brahmin are the well-educated progressive elites. The Proles or Vaisyas are regular people who work for a living. The Morlocks or Dalits are the underclass supported by crime and/or welfare. The Optimates are the remnants of the old WASP elites and Southern aristocracy, but they no longer are of any importance - in the simplified version they have either joined the Eloi or become Proles. The Helots are unskilled laborers, largely of Mexican origin - they've been split up between the Proles and the Morlocks in the simplified version.
Crime
The criminal underclass is a military auxillary of the progressives. The criminals see themselves as taking what's rightfully theirs and waging war against an unjust society. Progressives enable and support this war by supporting ineffective crime policy.
Removing a democracy
The removal of a democratic government is called a restoration. It cannot be accomplished by forming a political party and winning elections. It can be achieved either by military coup or by making democracy sufficiently unpopular. The latter can be done by convincing sufficiently large numbers of the public that progressivism is a harmful and untruthful ideology.
Replacing a democracy
Democracy should be replaced by a temporary government headed by a Receiver with plenary powers which acts similar to what is done in a corporate bankruptcy - sells off assets and restructures. The future shape of government is left up to the temporary government but in order to prevent progressivism from taking over the new government, all parts of the Cathedral should be dissolved.
Neocameralism
The preferred alternative to democracy is neocameralism in which the government is a joint-stock corporation with ownership of the country and the goal of maximizing profits.
Recommended reading
If you are new to the world of Moldbug and want to dive in head-first, I recommend starting with the first part of the "Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" series. Then you can go through the rest of the series: Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, and finally Part XII.
If you prefer to first dip your toes in something less massive and less overtly political, I suggest a post about how progressivism destroyed the arts.
Enjoy.
Note: The views of Mencius Moldbug are not necessarily those of Corrupt. |
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Can anyone explain why even though the dates in the following chart do not align on a 8.6 year cycle, that Armstrong is not deviating from the scientific method?  P.S. This is a test. I can explain it. Hint, pay careful attention to what the dates represent and what the 8.6 cycle represents and then read his other post and this one. wavefronts interference. The business cycle is not the same wave as the international crisis cycle. This is why you would need computer to search all of fractal patterns and pull out the cycles from the interference.
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We are facing more of a prospiracy than a conspiracy. Our proposed decentralized solutions are a rejection of neo-reactionary's corporatism, monarchy, or tribalism "anything but the Hoppe God That Failed Us" postulate, while embracing many of its criticisms. 
Simpleton minds think degrees-of-freedom only applies to 3D spacial movement.
Degrees-of-freedom applies to all possible events, including the freedom to think, live long, etc..
Perhaps you were just being humorous, but that fiery imagery is the antithesis of the concept of Antifragility. Antifragility has nothing to do with power, strength, nor any controllable attributes. Antifragility is about the ability of autonomous systems to fit(ness) to a plurality of orthogonal (a.k.a. divergent or multifurcating) paths that always exist in reality, because the autonomous actors have degrees-of-freedom with which to follow divergent paths. For example tying shoelaces together forsakes the degrees-of-freedom to run, and can at best hobble or hop. Whereas, top-down controlled systems (such as collectivized governance) remove degrees-of-freedom—that is have lower entropy (a.k.a. more order per the physicists' and mathematicians' definition of order)—and thus can't adapt to a plurality of divergent paths, instead spiraling into (single-minded) self-reinforcing “over commitment to egregious error”. Mathematically the error is the aggregate (such as the root mean square of the) distance of the plurality of paths from what they would have been if autonomous. Note that the ability to top-down control others is mathematically coupled to the ability to top-down create this error! Profound. Read that over and over again until the significance is fully appreciated. You even cited my noteworthy contribution on this topic as follows. ... Order is high entropy which means decentralized leadership by a smorgasbord, plurality of autonomous actors and small groups (communities). Large scale collectivized top-down control is cancer. (Individual or free market groups top-down control is decentralized leadership). Both of you are introducing confusion about the meaning of chaos. What you really mean to say is if top-down control is killing the host, then order becomes too high and the autonomous actors all end of scavenging for food and unable to anneal the system with knowledge production. An English definition of chaos relates it to confusion and a very high level of disorder. Whereas, Chaos Theory is the study of how the real world is really a non-linear system of autonomous surprises. Fundamentally this is because for example no entity could possibly measure everything in real-time because the speed-of-light is not infinite thus the signal could not travel from the autonomous event to the single observer in infinitesimal time. |
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Not content with making explicit attacks on Uber, AirBnB, and the “sharing economy” as a whole, Democrats have launched an even more egregious attack on something that rivals sex, alcohol, and food on Millennials’ “can’t survive without” lists: streaming entertainment. As of July 1, 2015, citizens of Chicago who enjoy their Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Prime, Xbox Live, and/or PlayStation Network subscriptions are now subject to the city’s 9 percent “Amusement Tax” for the privilege. Further, should you decide to digitally rent a movie or video game via these services, the 9 percent tax would be applied for every rental. In other words, Chicago now taxes its citizens 9 percent on their $99 annual Amazon Prime subscription because of its instant video/music service, plus 9 percent for each $3.99 digital rental through the same service. The same applies for rentals and music services offered directly from Microsoft and Sony. Fans of Sony’s PlayStation Network ecosystem are hit hardest: a 9 percent tax each on their PlayStation Plus subscription, PlayStation Music, PlayStation Now (videogame streaming), and Sony’s recently introduced PlayStation Vue live-TV service. Throw in other rental/subscription services such as Hulu, Gamefly, Google Play, HBO Go, iTunes, and Vudu, and you get a sense of the sheer breadth of this tax on Chicago consumers’ digital lives.
Fabulous. They are creating economic demand for a high-latency, high-bandwidth anonymity network. Working on it... |
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I must admit rpietila's HODL theme is one choice of "free money": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1133160.msg11976538#msg11976538
Not content with making explicit attacks on Uber, AirBnB, and the “sharing economy” as a whole, Democrats have launched an even more egregious attack on something that rivals sex, alcohol, and food on Millennials’ “can’t survive without” lists: streaming entertainment. As of July 1, 2015, citizens of Chicago who enjoy their Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Prime, Xbox Live, and/or PlayStation Network subscriptions are now subject to the city’s 9 percent “Amusement Tax” for the privilege. Further, should you decide to digitally rent a movie or video game via these services, the 9 percent tax would be applied for every rental. In other words, Chicago now taxes its citizens 9 percent on their $99 annual Amazon Prime subscription because of its instant video/music service, plus 9 percent for each $3.99 digital rental through the same service. The same applies for rentals and music services offered directly from Microsoft and Sony. Fans of Sony’s PlayStation Network ecosystem are hit hardest: a 9 percent tax each on their PlayStation Plus subscription, PlayStation Music, PlayStation Now (videogame streaming), and Sony’s recently introduced PlayStation Vue live-TV service. Throw in other rental/subscription services such as Hulu, Gamefly, Google Play, HBO Go, iTunes, and Vudu, and you get a sense of the sheer breadth of this tax on Chicago consumers’ digital lives.
Fabulous. They are creating economic demand for a high-latency, high-bandwidth anonymity network. Working on it... |
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and i thought there really is free money here
There is. Just go long BTC and wait years. Free money doesn't say anything about the interest rate. (And optionally loan BTC at roughly 30% per annum return denominated in BTC at bitfinex so others can sell your BTC short) Or the alternative is sell BTC and wait some months. Also "free money" doesn't speak to the risk involved, e.g. the risk of being long BTC for years (your life priorities and needs change while BTC is < $100 for example) or the risk of borrowing BTC to sell short. Even doing nothing, breathing or driving in a car has risk. Your timing and risk profile determines your choice amongst those options. For me, the optimum choice was to sell BTC for dollars at $300+. Because I need to expend the dollars over the next months on mathematicians and programmers. And I can't tolerate a drop in the dollar value, because my near-term expenses are in dollars. Also my upside is on R&D and not expending my time watching my short positions. And return of dollars is more crucial to me than riskier capital gains on dollars, because my upside is much greater on R&D with much less risk vs. reward, than on speculate investing. Others have different situations thus a different choice to make. The interest rates have turned (as of yesterday in shocking development which has been predicted since the 1980s) which implies collapsing global liquidity, thus you don't stand a chance in hell of being correct against me and Armstrong's supercomputer with $1 billion of historical data pattern matched for periodic patterns. inca I am not retired and when I replace Bitcoin, you can go hide under a rock. inca, I suggest you view a volatility chart of which the recent pattern low was how in May we called for the rise to $315 (long-term trend line, now headed to $320) as well as the seasonality factor for gold which was pointed out by Armstrong. |
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wow the topic you linked to is very interesting . it is funny to see the same arguments going on before on the price of $20
You fail to understand the distinction between talking that way after collapsing to a rock solid bottom and everyone being dejected and a slow rise back up. Compared to now where so many bulls are arguing we can't go lower (not dejected and not arguing about we can't go up to $1000 again), yet the recent "bottom" at $160ish was an instantaneous V reversal which never demarcates a bottom in bear market. Clearly not the same psychological situation. We are clearly in a bottom finding mode still. |
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interesting that rumblings of an EM crash have since intensified - the debt racked up by overseas entities priced in dollars is over $5T according to BIS (iirc)
Yup. May be it's just USD is currently being pumped so that everything else goes down compared to USD ?
Can it be that IMF and the Fed decided to sell all of it's gold, silver and other reserves to pump USD and Dow ?
If you had been reading Martin Armstrong's blog and my posts here, you'd have known for over 2 years that the dollar would becoming stronger because all the QE sent out into the world as carry trade of the ZIRP is going come rushing back to the USA (leaving the rest of the world in a short position in dollars bankrupting the emerging markets) as it will be safe haven as the rest of the world collapses. This would cause the USA to raise interest rates, thus compounding the problem for all nations except the USA. The target date was Oct 2015. Right on time... |
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maybe big investors are holding their money for now to decide the next move, some of them might consider crypto like bitcoin as a new big form of investment
if the price start to climb fast you know that this is the reason
They will all chase the dollar moving higher while all the private assets are dumping, so they will short them. You forget that people can make money shorting as well as long. Armstrong predicted this for October 2015, since decades ago. |
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