Reject Nocoiner Orthodoxy

I often see Bitcoiners try to dispel criticism of its energy consumption by citing Bitcoin’s benefits as countervailing factors: “Electricity is expensive, but sound money is priceless!”

Never works. No matter what social good is cited, it’s never enough.

Bitcoiners are a well-meaning lot who genuinely seek to educate. Even though private energy consumption is a private matter and should be off-limits to public scrutiny, Bitcoiners routinely suspend this belief to reason with Nocoiners.

It’s a trap! Nocoiners don’t believe in private property. They don’t have much regard for economic or political liberty at all. Once you buy into their faulty assumptions, you can’t win. In a world where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Theft is Good, any attempt at rational debate is an exercise in futility.

So don’t do it. Never indulge a Nocoiner.

By criticizing Bitcoin’s energy expenditure, Nocoiners are advancing the false premise that electricity usage is an unassailable Bad. The correct response is not to come up with an equal-and-opposite Good, but to say No.

No, we’re not going to play your stupid game.

No, we will not accept Nocoiner values as our own.

No, we refuse to normalize your communist anti-freedom orthodoxy.

Once we disabuse ourselves of Nocoiner fallacies, it becomes very easy to counter concern trolls. See:

FUD: Bitcoin uses more electricity than all of Denmark!
₿: Good! I sleep better at night knowing that my money is protected by obscene amounts of computational power. It’s a shame for Denmark; their GDP has been in steady decline for the last decade. I’m not sure it’s even fair to acknowledge them as a country anymore. The Danish krone? Total shitcoin.

For most of human history, energy consumption was a measure of civilizational progress. Unless you’re looking for a return to the Dark Ages, it still is.

FUD: Bitcoin can be used to bypass sanctions!
₿: That’s great news! Sanctions punish innocent civilians, empowering terrible dictators as the population is reduced to poverty. UN sanctions should be considered a war crime and I am utterly ashamed of my country for promoting them.

FUD: Bitcoin is used for tax evasion!
₿: Excellent! Private individuals have the benefit of local knowledge and can allocate capital better than any central authority. If you prefer to have the government do your thinking for you, feel free to donate your savings to the Fed and become a ward of the state.

FUD: Bitcoin (all of crypto, really) is full of scammers!
₿: Indeed! Money flows to where it’s treated best. Bitcoin is doing God’s work.

FUD: Bitcoin’s price is entirely driven by speculation!
₿: Ah, what is speculation but hope? And how can anyone deny the value of hope??

FUD: Bitcoin is being used by neo-Nazis!
₿: Wonderful! I’m so glad we finally have a payment system that is impervious to bullying from the shakedown racket known as the SPLC.

FUD: North Korea is mining Bitcoin!
₿: Fantastic! This is so great. China’s concentration of mining power has long been one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin, and the entry of state-sponsored competitors would enhance miner decentralization. Jurisdictional diversity is Bitcoin’s greatest strength!

FUD: Bitcoin has a high Gini coefficient and massive wealth inequality!
₿: Yes! Economic inequality is something that happens when wealth is created, and a permissionless financial system democratizes wealth creation. Even though socioeconomic mobility has gone to shit in this country, Bitcoin is still the land of opportunity!

FUD: Bitcoin is being used to fund Terrorism!
₿: This one might be of legitimate concern. There’s a theory that Bitcoin was created by the CIA to fund extremist groups in the Middle East and effect a regime change in Syria and Iran. Well, the second part of that sentence isn’t just theory — the CIA is financing terrorism regardless of Bitcoin. Let’s abolish the CIA.

The First Hit is Free

The local Tractor Supply Center is doing Chick Days. It’s a semiannual event where they have newly-hatched chickens and ducklings for sale, something like two dollars apiece. It’s cute.

Tractor Supply doesn’t make money off baby birds; it costs more than $2 to run heat lamps and clean all that duck poop. The event is sponsored by pet food manufacturers — Purina, MannaPro, Nutrena, &co. Because once you get the animal, you’re stuck buying animal food for the rest of its life. Come to think of it, my childhood kitten was “free” as well.

That’s how they get you.

It’s a good strategy. All those countries struggling with sub-replacement fertility rates – Japan, Germany, the US – why don’t they do this to rope in new parents?

I don’t mean handing out free babies; people much prefer to make their own. But baby food companies like Gerber and Similac should incentivize this sort of market expansion. Who’s gonna consume their products if the birth rate falls to zero? H-1B workers?

Childbirth subsidies might be a good start, but people don’t avoid kids only due to cost. People avoid kids due to the widespread perception that children are obnoxious little demons. It’s not wrong, but it’s not something that can’t be fixed with a bit of marketing.

You know what sucks? Homeownership. Owning a house is a heck of a lot of work with all sorts of potential liability. But thanks to a taxpayer-funded marketing campaign, the Federal Housing Administration convinced multiple generations of Americans that the quickest path to freedom is to mire yourself in debt.

Screw that. The American Dream is being able to call my landlord any time I clog the toilet or lock myself out. Wanna know why the rent is so damn high? BECAUSE IT’S WORTH IT.

Baby companies currently tailor their marketing to those who already have (or expect) kids. That kind of blinkered thinking is EXACTLY why Toys R Us went out of business! People with kids are hosed; they’re stuck buying your products whether they like it or not. Baby brands need to target the real untapped market: Those who don’t have kids.

Take a page from the FHA strategy book! Inspire your audience to keep up with the Joneses; instill a healthy sense of FOMO! Like this:

All Creatures Great and Small

I haven’t been posting. I’m handfeeding an injured bird — Did you know that birds eat up to half their weight in food each day? Don’t lecture me about priorities; I don’t wanna hear it. After a month she’s still a cripple, so she’ll likely become a permanent ward of the state. Haven’t really thought things through. We are creating a new website and we would like to share web design north palm beach who helped us a lot on web design.

Oh, and ground squirrels. I’m killing several dozen of these each week, and they just keep coming. Is it…is it bad that I relish each kill? I almost typed “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to small fuzzy squirrels” but then I realized that that makes me sound like a sociopath.

And I don’t enjoy it, really. Now we have coyotes trying to get at the cadavers, scads of fleas looking for a new host, and OH GOD THE SMELL. Combined with the swarming flies and turkey vultures circling the yard, I swear to god my neighbors are gonna think I murdered someone. What did Jeffrey Dahmer use to disappear all those dead bodies? I want to google it but I’m scared of having this query on my permanent record.

AHHH I HATE NATURE! Why can’t I have nature in a sterile glass bubble, like Jeff Bezos and his eco-terrarium at Amazon? I mean, I like wildlife and diversity and all things bright and beautiful, as long as they stay in the wilderness and I can selectively see them when I please. As long as I can pick and choose which diversity gets to live near my home.

This is the future liberals want.

See also: San Francisco.

Bezos’s Balls

Aside: Why do people feel sympathy for birds but not rodents? Why do we complain about domestic cats killing songbirds, but say nothing about the same cats decimating the rat population? Is it because rats carry human-infectious diseases? If so, then shouldn’t we feel WORSE about killing rats? They’re so genetically similar to humans that we can share diseases!

I like how this article features a picture of a field mouse running with a baby. OH MY GOD, that mouse is somebody’s MOTHER!! Every time you eat a slice of bread, YOU ARE KILLING SOMEONE’S MOMMY.

Nope, still gross.

A Lockean Theory of Digital Property

Alex Jones and his show have been banned from Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, YouPorn, and Pinterest, and people have Opinions.

CENSORSHIP, his defenders cry.

Private companies enforcing private rules on private property, detractors reply.

Maybe they’re both right.

Cullen Roche likens Alex Jones to a guest pissing on the carpet. If someone pisses on your carpet, you kick them out of the house, no problem.

BUT! Suppose Cullen lived in San Francisco, where pissing on the ground is the norm. Suppose Alex Jones showed up at Cullen’s house and pissed on the carpet, and Cullen did not object. Suppose Alex showed up the next day and pissed, and Cullen still did not protest. Suppose Alex shows up day after day, and Cullen allows the behavior to pass.

And suppose this continues for many years, until one day Cullen decides that piss puddles are no longer welcome in his house.

You’ll need to find somewhere else to piss, Cullen might say to Alex.

No, Alex might reply. I’ve become accustomed to using your carpet as a chamber pot and quite like it here. I think I’ll stay.

TOO BAD, Cullen would say. THIS IS MY HOUSE. GO BUILD YOUR OWN HOUSE TO PISS IN.

Not so fast, Alex could reply. I’ve been marking my territory for many years. As a result, I now have a prescriptive easement. This spot of carpet is mine to piss on.

Right, that’s a thing. According to state law, an entity can earn an interest in the property of another through regular use*. In California, if you use someone’s carpet as a toilet for at least five years, you establish the right to continue doing so. This is also known as squatter’s rights.

Squatter’s rights don’t often come up in disputes because people are generally quick to remove strangers who urinate in their homes. THEY DON’T WAIT FIVE YEARS TO FORCE PAST BEHAVIOR TO CONFORM TO THE SHIFTING STANDARDS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE.

Use-rights appropriation isn’t just Marxist bullshit; John Locke’s labor theory of property also applies: An individual owns their own labor, and has a right to any mixing of their labor with property. I don’t know about Alex Jones, but I put a lot of work into my Twitter account! Nine years of careful supervision, to be exact. Witticisms needed my re-broadcasting, funny memes my endorsement. I tilled the soil, sowed the seeds, trimmed the flowers, watered the weeds. Today I have 20,000 followers. They may not matter to Twitter, but they matter to ME. If Alex Jones worked as hard on his accounts as I have on mine, I daresay he’s earned the right to continue using his plot of virtual real estate.

* Remember when people got all worked up after Vinod Khosla bought some beachfront property and blocked off access to Martins Beach? The California Coastal Commission claimed that families had been accessing the shoreline via that land since the 1920s. Thanks to a compulsory easement, Khosla was forced to open his Private Property to all manner of derelicts, many of whom probably pissed on it (this is San Francisco, after all).

DIY Firearms

While everyone’s freaking out about 3D-printed plastic guns, here’s a long-forgotten gem from the US Army:

Kids, don’t try this at home.

How to make explosives out of bodily fluids. Your parents’ tax dollars paid for this:

TM 31-210. Department of the Army Technical Manual