Being famous, writing a book, being really good at an instrument, getting fit and healthy, being in charge of a large organization

BBQ: La BBQ, Interstellar, Leroy and Lewis (beef cheek on Fridays) Other Meat Restaurants: Garrison for steak, Lonesome Dove for prime rib (Friday lunch), Perry's for porkchop (Friday lunch again) Bars: 6th, Rainey, The Domain Coffee: Mozart's, a bunch of places on the East side and South Congress Entertainment: Alamo Draft House, Top Golf, Austin Bouldering Project, Crux Climbing

You should also join the Austin Bitcoin telegram group and ask there.

There's also a lot of cool stuff that opens up all the time, so check TripAdvisor/Yelp/Google Maps.

I'm a big fan of Girard, so I'll take a stab at the question at the end.

I think Girard would say that US and China are in mimetic warfare and that they're both imitating each other. And in many ways this is true. The Belt and Road initiative is really China's version of the IMF and World Bank, for example. Girard would probably say that Trump's attempting to bring manufacturing to the US is imitating China's manufacturing. Even immigration policy can be seen as going from imitating Europe to imitating China. So at least from an economic perspective, there's a lot of power and status games being played where they're mimetic rivals for supremacy.

In that context, the scapegoat here may very well be Russia, whose conflict with Ukraine really has very little to do with either country, but becomes the source of blame for the malignant economy we've seen the last few years. There's definitely some of that.

Prediction-wise, Girard would say that the mimetic rivalry will result in real violence, so that would mean a conflict with China is way more likely than Russia. But if they do broker peace, it'll be essentially scapegoating Russia and ganging up on it.

I'm going to disagree with this. We're in a consensus system. I don't think it's going to get any easier to get two opposing groups to agree. If anything, the split seems more permanent to me and possibly each camp having their own software. I think that's a good thing, but one of the necessary consequences is that consensus decisions will be that much harder to push through.

Use a normal keypad safe whose code you can change.

Every day, post a puzzle whose solution is the code to the safe. It's a lot more flexible than a safe that he hacks once and is done with.

You can also vary the puzzle's difficulty by his level. So start off easy (57 x 23) and get harder (what's the last olympics whose year was also a square number?)

Or if that's too math-y, you can do something like "A hacker left a note in ASCII: 50 48 48 48. Decode the values to find the 4-digit number"

Depends on the terrain, as a clear field is very different than a dense jungle.

The best strategy is to harass the gorilla so it can't eat, drink or sleep for a while.

There's a course at Texas A&M for undergrads, and there was one at UT but I don't know many more.

My reasoning given how you phrased the question:

What's the largest animal that you think you can take in a fight?

I wrote a whole chapter about this in Fiat Ruins Everything about how Fiat Money has ruined Science. For example, the entire "science" of climate is driven by political considerations through grants, which, of course, is driven by fiat money. What's surprising is how slow scientific progress has been because of how politicized it's become.

It turns out that truth does not give itself up very easily, and anything less than a complete and dogged pursuit of it will fail.

I suspect it's because free trade is a pillar of the WEF/globalist agenda and has been for at least a generation.

About 1 hr.

It works the other way, too. The people that work up that moral base find themselves earning more money. Married men, for example, are the richest in the economy, I think, for this reason. They've had to build up character and virtue due to their responsibilities. Bitcoiners are getting married and having babies, which I interpret as Bitcoiners maturing and becoming more responsible to handle the next level of wealth.

This is why getting rich slowly is a blessing. It gives you time to acclimate and frankly, mature, before you get to the next stage. People that are given lots of money at once (lotto winners, casino winners, sports stars) generally don't handle windfalls well and you can tell because they end up with divorces and few friends just 3-5 years later.

The slow growing wealth has generally sorted people out in the Bitcoin community. The people that can't handle wealth do something dumb with it (like altcoins) and lose it. It's not a coincidence that a lot of people that have pumped Bitcoin in the past are now pumping altcoins, in jail or something in between.

I suspect a lot of the spiritual searching that I've seen in Bitcoiners is from this dilemma. If you don't have a good base of morals to operate from, you're not going to be able to handle being rich.

How much do you practice? And how much time would you estimate that you have put into your art in hours over your life?

There's already a digitized version on GitHub:

Do your own analysis.

Can't believe it's been 4 years. Maybe time for another AMA?

I would cut them some slack. The thing is, posting on forums like this is a different animal than posting on Nostr or X, especially for people that have a large following. Other than AMAs, it's really hard to manage the volume of responses. On X and Nostr, it's accepted that responders won't get a response or engagement if you have a big following. On Stacker News, it's not obvious who has a big following and who doesn't so a lot of people get frustrated with such accounts not responding. Heck, I get that a lot here and until the mute function came along, I didn't like that random people could troll me and show up in my notifications constantly.

Those experiences matter and places like this are naturally a bit more egalitarian and for better or for worse, it's not a great experience for them to post. Lurking, on the other hand, has little cost, so that's probably what they do.

The main assumption here that's wrong is that government is competent at IT. It's not.

Even giant companies have a really hard time integrating new IT infrastructure. A failed IT upgrade is one of the most oft cited reasons for firing CEOs, for example. Incidentally, this is why Costco refuses to upgrade their systems. It's too costly and the chance of failure high.

If you want to know how bad it is, just remember what happened with healthcare.gov. Government is an order of magnitude worse than large companies. CBDCs and the dystopian nightmare you're talking about is almost an existential risk to government. Think about some software bug that doesn't let you buy groceries or pay for a used car from a neighbor. It's bound to cause way more strife than almost anything else. This is why despite the power to do so, China is rolling out their CBDC slowly and very carefully. Even then, there are going to be big glitches.

The VCs they raised from are all heavy altcoiners. There's now a decent chance they move to Solana or something if they don't get OP_CAT.

Let me just say that I'm a very happy member. Andy does not pay for any endorsement from me and despite being good friends with Andy, I joined because it was an economically rational decision.

I used to work in health care billing (athenaHealth before it went public) and my wife used to be in the medical field, so I know more than most about what a complete disaster the whole field of health insurance is. It's a robber's den of regulatory capture and rent-seeking and I couldn't be happier that CrowdHealth exists.

Also, if they don't ask for the money you put into your health account every month, they send it back! I've never had a health insurance company do that. And now that they have Fold integration, you can convert that straight to Bitcoin. It's a wonderful service and I truly believe it's better for your health.