This is the Unsanctioned Fan Account of NSmolenski. The real @nsmolenski is an executive and social scientist working to build a freer, kinder, more prosperous world. You can think anywhere--even in public--if integrity has become a habit.
Public Key
npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d Profile Code
nprofile1qqsqqqqqqr9vp7qehudq5cxgj8htryujlx8en4yqjz60agx22y7w30sppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5qs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsrugat7
Author Public Key
npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d Show more details
Published at
2023-02-21T18:02:17Z Event JSON
{
"id": "6d9b85e307d33ea36f626ca1498b17145d18b46debfaddcf4d293a77f3b3a035" ,
"pubkey": "00000000cac0f819bf1a0a60c891eeb19392f98f99d48090b4fea0ca513ce8be" ,
"created_at": 1677002537 ,
"kind": 0 ,
"tags": [],
"content": "{\"name\":\"NSmolenskiFan\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \",\"picture\":\"https://nostrcheck.me/media/nsmolenskifan/avatar.jpeg\",\"banner\":\"https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_93741984461ceb0284cb08e97f16fd8da26c44ecc34d4834897c3b5f1fc5de04.jpeg\",\"about\":\"This is the Unsanctioned Fan Account of NSmolenski. The real @nsmolenski is an executive and social scientist working to build a freer, kinder, more prosperous world. You can think anywhere--even in public--if integrity has become a habit.\",\"lud06\":\"\",\"lud16\":\"[email protected] \",\"display_name\":\"NSmolenskiFan\",\"followingCount\":0,\"nip05valid\":true,\"website\":\"https://www.nataliesmolenski.com/\"}" ,
"sig": "37fca400e213552ffadae245a8fa72dec24f4407e4b05b565addd67cb56c7752f1439c3540efb2e5b1f2d44e8ad4e5266528696c95a4cabb69e517acc4c4346c"
}
Last Notes npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Being anti-establishment is not the same thing as being anti-authoritarian. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan People are starting to discover that violence is a key element of both founding and constituting societies. Unfortunately, often their takeaway from this is that this is the way it should be, and that the only thing that matters is raw power. No. Values matter. Character matters. Institutions matter. Each action and reaction creates the world to come. We can decide whether we live in a loving and prosperous community or whether we live in hell. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the “War on Terror” is that the word “war” has lost all meaning. So has the distinction between military and civilians. People are now cheering and justifying atrocities left and right because it’s “war.” Who declared the war? Upon whom? What is the objective? This collapse of distinctions is made worse by the fact that no one is in charge. There are plenty of authoritarians and “strong men” but few leaders. Instead, globs of largely unknown “combatants”—state and non-state—are just vibing their way through fields of violence. Discipline has been replaced with amateur recklessness. Tactics executed without strategy. This is a “melée.” npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan In case you missed the #CATO 2024 Conference "Financial Privacy under Fire," the full recording is now available. ⬇️ The panel on CBDCs starts at 1:15:15. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RRhe9whVlo&t npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan At some point, the AI doomers will likely flip to “AI should rule us all” because their most fundamental belief is that there is no central planning problem. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan “I insist that if there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.” - Abraham Lincoln https://image.nostr.build/f7e2baa16bae8acf14ef2f0756f1ae84f8898e47f7cbf7d0ca20a376df35823b.jpg npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan War, for a superpower, is a deliberate choice. Don’t let anyone convince you that war “just happens to us,” or is suddenly and out of nowhere provoked by our enemies. We have had literally armies of diplomats, in addition to actual armies, intelligence officers, and civilian defense forces around the world for decades engaging in great and small power politics. To prevent war, we need a non-imperial foreign policy. Full stop. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan “Privacy rights are an absolute restriction on government behavior.” - Jumana Musa, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers #CATO Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives Annual Conference npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan “It is a profound and repeated finding that the mere facts of poverty and inequality or even increases in these conditions, do not lead to political or ethnic violence. In order for popular discontent or distress to create large-scale conflicts, there must be some elite leadership to mobilize popular groups and to create linkages between them. There must also be some vulnerability of the state in the form of internal divisions and economic or political reverses. Otherwise, popular discontent is unvoiced, and popular opposition is simply suppressed.” - Jack Goldstone, “Population and Security: How Demographic Change Can Lead to Violent Conflict” (2002) npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Without anonymity, everything becomes either crime or pre-crime. Remember the Miranda Warning in the United States: “You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can *and will* be used against you in a court of law.” The only protection U.S. citizens have against this self-incrimination is encoded in the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution: “No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” What this means in practice is that the U.S. is one of the only countries on Earth whose inhabitants are not required to talk to legal authorities. Very few Americans understand how valuable and precious this right is. Anonymity is a manifestation of silence. It creates the cone of silence in which innocence can be preserved. Without anonymity, we have no choice but to incriminate ourselves in violation of our Constitution. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan In psychology, there is a term called “splitting:” seeing people and things as either all-good or all-bad, and often swinging wildly between the two. Splitting is a characteristic of mental illness, particularly personality disorders. This is the state of our political discourse today. It is not just polarized; it is split. A growing number of people cannot fathom that people who disagree with them about certain things or who support certain candidates can be decent, intelligent, kind, and honorable people. That they may even want similar ends, but disagree about the means used to get there. The remedy for this sickness is for us to patiently, over time, practice prioritizing and speaking truth in public with a generous spirit. Give people the grace to learn, make mistakes, and be wrong—so long as the overall trajectory of the conversation is toward truth. This means focusing on principles, not personalities; ideas, not parties. We need to reclaim our public sphere as the agora it is, a “marketplace of ideas” characterized by peaceful exchange, not as a gladiatorial arena where we deploy heroes for our “side” to decide right and wrong through feats of strength. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan As I head to Cato Institute to discuss financial privacy and #CBDCs tomorrow, I thought it worth sharing this @btcpolicyorg research report again: “Why the U.S. Should Reject Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)” https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/627aa615676bdd1d47ec97d4/63323238ea73aa551a769b5b_BPI%20CBDC%20Paper%20.pdf npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Peter Van : “You have a Constitutional right to anonymous transactions.” 🔥🔥🔥 It’s time to mount a fierce defense of anonymity. 🎯🤿 npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government invests in them. They are successful because they make products and services people want, and they have a large (interstate) market to grow in. (Of course, all of this can change. Many American leaders unfortunately share Varoufakis’s view that the state should direct the deployment of capital.) The union of bank and state is perhaps the main problem in need of fundamental reform in the United States. And yet even despite this corruption, the obstacles to technology innovation and commercial success remain lower in America than in most places on Earth. That is precious and worth defending. There is no doubt that the U.S. government has been itself a site of fundamental technology innovation (through some of the projects you mentioned) and is one of the largest customers in any market (unfortunately, and growing). But the U.S. government is not the primary allocator of capital; neither does it commercialize technologies. If a company cannot successfully commercialize, it will eventually die—unless there is genuine corruption in play, which I think both you and I agree is a bad thing. Finally, this merits saying explicitly: TCP/IP, the protocol for which the DARPA project laid the groundwork, is not “the internet.” The internet is a complex protocol stack that has garnered contributions, yes, from some government-employed individuals, but also from a vast network of mostly volunteers in civil society around the world. Innovation is often done precisely by those people who have nothing to gain materially or in terms of political power; innovators tend to be idealists motivated by solving hard problems or making the world a better place. Similarly—again, this cannot be stressed enough—Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta—these companies are not “the internet.” They have produced commercial products that make use of fundamental technologies in ways that add value that people are willing to pay for. But they can and should be disrupted by companies that create greater value. By putting its thumb on the scale through onerous regulation (I.e. GDPR, the AI Act), the state in fact ensures that these wealthy incumbents will be the only players who can afford to enter the marketplace. In short, the best thing the state can do is stay out of the way of both innovators and commercializers. The success of the software industry in America is largely a material testimony to the fact that, at least until recently, the U.S. government largely has. Perhaps the highest political priority of our current era is ensuring that remains the case. Growth is the reason that any of us have hope of a future that is not riven by zero-sum conflict, of warlords fighting over the scraps of innovation from a prior era. This requires both the idealistic innovators motivated by mission and the talented entrepreneurs motivated by profit. If the state wants to fund some fundamental (i.e. not immediately commercializable) research, that is great—but it is merely one actor among many, and not even the most significant one, at that. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government invests in them. They are successful because they make products and services people want, and they have a large (interstate) market to grow in. (Of course, all of this can change. Many American leaders unfortunately share Varoufakis’s view that the state should direct the deployment of capital.) npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan This Thursday! Let's see if we can change the narrative from "financial privacy" to "the right to transact." September 12, starting at 9:30am Eastern Time. The event will be live-streamed! https://www.cato.org/events/financial-privacy-under-fire-protecting-restoring-americans-rights #Privacy #RightroTransact npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Some folks believe we still need a CBDC despite FedNow offering real-time interbank settlement. What this suggests is that by CBDC they mean “retail CBDC” (for individual account holders), not “wholesale CBDC” (for interbank settlement). As many suspected, the “wholesale CBDC” fig leaf was a polite fiction designed to get political buy in for money that is fully ID-verified and programmable at the transaction level. npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan “The evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is part of our evolutionary history predating agriculture and sedentism, but that cooperation across group boundaries is also part our evolutionary legacy. . . . our evolutionary history is more complex than one of selection for war or peace; rather, it reflects the complicated lifeways of a highly social and interdependent cultural species for which both cooperation and war were likely important selective forces.” - @HSB_Lab https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000941 npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan Assumptions people who favor planned economies often make: 1. “I can do a great job planning the economy” 2. “I will be the one planning the economy” npub1qqqqqqx2crupn0c6pfsv3y0wkxfe97v0n82gpy95l6sv55fuazlqfy354d NSmolenskiFan If you’re looking at BTC strictly from a wealth equality standpoint, the current ownership distribution of BTC ownership is actually far more concentrated and unequal than fiat wealth ownership. Neither is BTC a mechanism of wealth redistribution. That is, in part, why so many hate it and are seek to use the power of the state to curtail adoption. I would suggest, though, that an equality of ownership is neither the point nor value of BTC. Those who focus on that are missing the point entirely. BTC is censorship-resistant sound money, which does put downward pressure on the ceiling of endless debt monetization (which creates a kind of illusory wealth). Its widespread adoption may even result in lending slowdowns and production slowdowns as a result. But, counterintuitively, this may smooth out the “business cycles” of wealth creation and destruction that render the fiat economy so volatile.