I used to believe that little things mattered, like shutting off the water while brushing my teeth or giving a bag of food to the food pantry. They don't. Better to spend time on something that actually moves the needle.
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1136 sats \ 4 replies \ @SatAttack 8 Oct
I used to be strong anti government and it’s what drove me to Bitcoin originally. However, being in the space, seeing some serious talent and serious intelligence, really focusing on the things outside of bitcoin that bitcoin almost forces you to focus on has been incredibly humbling. Bitcoin will flay you open and force the truth out if you aren’t being true to yourself to begin with and I really appreciate that part of its community.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that I don’t know anything really and the reality is the some (most) people do want to be governed. There should be government available for those who want it. In bitcoin and in life it’s the individuals that matter. The small pieces that make up the whole. So who am I to champion removing or deciding what people want in their lives? If bitcoin didn’t exist, I still believe little to no government would be ideal. The risk of ruin and the ability for control is just too great. But now that capital flight controls are slowly eroding (ty Satoshi) I feel it’s best to live and let live. I’ll focus on me and prepare myself for truly chaotic outcomes and I will support your decision to subject yourself to a government of any type. What really bothered me before was the forceful removal of optionality from individuals but…. Bitcoin fixes this.
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Signal312 9 Oct
Well said.
How are you preparing yourself for truly chaotic outcomes?
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34 sats \ 1 reply \ @SatAttack 9 Oct
Admittedly not nearly enough but
Foraging classes in my geo location
99%btc/1% gold stash
Mountaineering (basic) classes
Hunt/prep/smoke knowledge (I don’t have this and I have a hard time killing things :/ )
Canning and jarring self taught
Always staying physically capable
Martial arts
I don’t like guns but I’ve done a little to gain proficiency but I don’t own one.
Actively working in Spanish in case I need to head south.
I don’t have much of a plan other than head to the Sierras and eat squirrels and plants
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 9 Oct
Love it. Better than most people!
I would add...having a good contact list. Keeping in touch with lots of people, having community and friends. That, to me (and also based on my readings about past chaotic outcomes) is one of the most important things in dealing with an uncertain future.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 8 Oct
Join me and adopt a minarchist position.
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114 sats \ 10 replies \ @magnolia_mayhem 8 Oct
Religion. Most societal norms, really.
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0 sats \ 9 replies \ @Scoresby 8 Oct
I'm curious about what it was like for you abandoning religion - what got you to see it differently?
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1032 sats \ 8 replies \ @magnolia_mayhem 8 Oct
It was weirdly quick. Most people talk about how they spend months or years slowly moving from one position to the other. For me, it was a single work day. I just had a good ten hours by myself with nobody else able to talk to me and I let my thoughts flow. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to believe what is true, even if it makes me uncomfortable. I left my house a Southern Baptist and came home an atheist.
There's a million things that drove me to come to the conclusion. One was that I was born and raised in a young-Earth family that believed that the entire universe was 6000 years old. I listened to an astronomer explain parallax triangulation and how we can work out that stars are much farther away than 6000 lightyears and it kept bouncing around in my head. Of course there are apologetics, but they're always just excuse-making when you look at them objectively.
The last little thing that I held on to was duality. I don't know how you can build a machine complicated enough that it produces subjective experiences, but those subjective experiences can be altered by changing the structure that generates them anyway. There isn't room for a soul anywhere in the process. My uncle had a brain tumor and I watched him transform from a quiet, loving man to a wife-beating slobbering mess that was incoherent and hallucinating when he died. For years, I kept telling myself that his soul had already left his body, but again, it's just excuse making.
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @SimpleStacker 8 Oct
Have you heard of the "appearance of age hypothesis"? That God created a universe in motion and with physical laws, that allow us to "look back" and see age, even if it was just created?
The easiest way to think about this is to ask "When Adam was first created, how old was he?" Most people would envision that he was formed as a fully adult human male, which by our biological time keeping would put him at say 25 years old, but he would have been 0 from a chronological standpoint.
Just food for thought.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @magnolia_mayhem 9 Oct
I haven't heard it called that, but I've had people use that specific argument. The first thing that jumps out at me is how it makes God into a liar. We now have a 6K year old universe that is created to look billions of years old. Why would a god create a universe to appear much older than the Bible claims it to be? At that point, he's doing everything that he can to trick us into thinking that the bible is wrong.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 9 Oct
I don't see it that way. For example, I don't think it makes God a liar if he created Adam as a fully formed adult male instead of a newborn baby. And it seems to me that any universe God could have created that obeys physical laws and motion would have an appearance of age, no matter what. And it's not like God kept the days of creation hidden from us, he actually revealed it to us in the book of Genesis. So, it's fine if you don't believe it, but I don't think it makes God into a liar.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @magnolia_mayhem 9 Oct
That's what I'm pointing out. We have a book where God creates the universe in six days, then have the genealogies adding up to something like 6000 years, depending on which you go with.
And then we have the universe we can look out and see, a universe that attests to billions of years. I don't see how you can make those two jive. If the universe appears to be billions of years old and the bible says that it's 6000, either the universe was created to appear much older than it is or the bible is wrong. Either way, God has lied to us.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 10 Oct
It's more like this, is God lying if he created Adam as a fully formed adult male who looks to be about 25, but 5 years after creation he tells someone, "I created Adam 5 years ago?"
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 8 Oct
That last bit about duality (didn't know that was the term for it) is about where I'm at. Still feels like a mystery and yet...the structure that generates.
It is uncomfortable.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @magnolia_mayhem 9 Oct
Very. There's a lot like that out there.
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167 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 8 Oct
I used to think that dressing nicely is vanity. Now I think that dressing nicely is a way to respect the people you're with and making them feel comfortable
I still don't dress that nicely, but I don't look down on people who do anymore haha
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @wackster OP 8 Oct
this is a good observation.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 8 Oct
Used to be an anarchist until I realised most people want government and the security and rule of law and property rights that governments provision.
I still want maximum freedom but that can be achieved in some jurisdictions, at least up to a point.
Human nature is such, imo, that governments are required.
And for sure most governments are far from perfect, but so are most of their citizens.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 9 Oct
I used to believe that vaccines are good, people who don't get them are idiots or evil.
Covid made me do a 180 on that one. I'm never getting another shot in my life, and I'll try to convince other people to be skeptical on them as well.
I just met a lady a couple weeks ago that had severe heart damage from her second covid shot. It was very clear, based on the timing of the shot and the heart damage. None of her doctors would admit that it could have been the shot.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @falsefaucet 8 Oct
i used to think the world was round. /s
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 8 Oct
I believed I could fly. Kinda hurts still.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 8 Oct
Back then, I really believed in Santa! Ahaha
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @035736735e 8 Oct outlawed
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.