Always. Use. Cash.

If you’re not using cash every chance you get, you’re literally part of the problem:

Sainsbury’s is battling a major IT meltdown on one of the busiest shopping days of the week and has left customers fuming after suffering an ‘error with an overnight software update’ that has prevented the supermarket from being able to fulfil online orders or accept contactless payments at the tills.

Stores across the UK are battling a major ‘technical issue’ that has left customers ‘disappointed’ and forced to turn to rival Tesco to complete their Saturday shop.

Frustrated customers say they cannot pay at the tills, while company bosses admit the firm is ‘experiencing issues with contactless payments’ and also ‘will not be able to fulfil the vast majority of today’s Groceries Online deliveries’.

Look, there are many situations that one simply has to use electronic payments, such as when one is not in a face-to-face transaction. But this recent payment failure at Sainsbury’s illustrates the absolute need for cash, which is why it is incumbent upon everyone to insist on cash transactions for all of your face-to-face transactions.

I don’t even have a debit card, much less one of those smartphone app payment methods. And this isn’t because I’m a Boomer who hates and fears newfangled technology, but because I understand exactly where all this “contactless” electronic payment tech is ultimately heading.

Don’t help pave the way for the Mark of the Beast. Don’t participate in it. Don’t make it easier for them.

DISCUSS ON SG


Economics, Reconsidered

In which the Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton and 2015 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences begins to wonder if perhaps everything about the mainstream Neo-Samuelsonian economics he has been utilizing as his basic conceptual model is wrong:

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought…

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century…

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Economists could benefit by greater engagement with the ideas of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, just as Adam Smith once did. The philosophers, historians, and sociologists would likely benefit too.

I can’t cast too many stones in the eminent Prof. Deaton’s direction. I, too, once believed that free trade was economically beneficial to both nations involved in the trade. I, too, once believed that the free movement of peoples was a net benefit to the economy and the well-being of the peoples involved. And while I was always deeply skeptical of, and completely opposed to, globalization, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I recognized the satanic thread that runs through and inevitably connects liberty, democracy, the liberal Enlightenment values, and economic liberalism to obvious evils like globalism, imperialism, techno-authoritarianism, and Clown World.

But the lies, some of them centuries-old, are shattering. They are being broken apart by finally being tested against real-world consequences. And in the aftermath of their discrediting, an entirely new economics, one that is not based on a false model of a perfectly rational economic man, will be constructed.

DISCUSS ON SG


Convergence Kills US Semiconductors

There’s also an interesting geopolitical strategic assumption buried deep in this article on the chip-making industry’s abandonment of the USA, which is particularly intriguing in light of the audience for The Hill:

The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.

Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.

The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.

Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.

That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.

Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.

Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.

Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.

In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America.

DEI killed the CHIPS Act, THE HILL, 7 March 2024

Notice that it’s not “if” Taiwan falls but rather “when”, complete with an estimated range of dates from 2025 to 2027. This may also explain Victoria Nuland’s fall from grace at the State Department, as the pivot to China from Russia is clearly underway.

DISCUSS ON SG


The End of Demonetization

The BRICS alliance – which is to say Russia and China – is taking direct aim at the ability of Clown World’s credit system to demonetize individuals, organizations, and nations of which it disapproves:

The BRICS group of emerging economies plans to create a payment system based on digital technologies, Yury Ushakov, a senior foreign policy aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has told TASS in an interview published on Tuesday.

According to Ushakov, the system would be “outside of politics” and would not depend on national agendas or the fiat currencies of countries around the globe.

“We believe that an important goal for the future is the creation within the BRICS framework of an independent settlement payment system that would be based on the most modern technologies, such as digital currencies and blockchain,” Ushakov stated. “It would be comfortable for any state, person and business, and would not require significant costs.” The presidential aide did not specify the details or the time frame for the development of the new system.

Now, this could certainly be a case of exchanging King Log for King Stork. But it appears the Russians and Chinese have learned from watching the demise of the UK and the USA, and that neither of them are eager to assume the crown of foreign corruption that history teaches inevitably comes with empire and ruling over foreign peoples.

And this will be a very good thing for both the BRICSIA alliance as well as the persecuted people and organizations living under Clown World’s increasingly despotic rule. As with sanctions, the practice of demonitization is going to backfire with catastrophic results for the organizations that engage in it, as they will no longer be able to compete effectively with more trustworthy competitors upon whom their clients can rely.

DISCUSS ON SG


The American Dream is Over

Forget the next generation living better lives than their parents did. That ended with Generation X, the 1986 Immigration Amnesty, and NAFTA. But the next two generations are seeing even the standard to which their great-great-grandparents were accustomed is now beyond them.

Recent analysis by Investopedia revealed that you now need a whopping $3.4 million to cover the costs of traditional American dream milestones such as marriage, raising children and owning a home. But most Americans fall short of that target by over a million dollars. The average lifetime earnings of Americans across all education levels is closer to $2.3 million, according to Investopedia, leaving a big financial gap that’s forcing people to reassess their life goals.

One look at the attainability of a basic element of the traditional American dream — homeownership — is telling.

According to real estate brokerage Redfin, 2023 was the least affordable year for home buying on record. To buy a median-priced home, worth $408,806, with the median U.S. income $78,642, you would’ve had to spend a record 41.4% of your earnings on housing costs, up from 38.7% in 2022 and 31.0% in 2021. To buy that same home without spending more than 30% of your income — a popular rule of thumb among personal finance experts — you would need an annual salary of $109,868, according to Redfin, which is $31,226 more than the typical household makes in a year.

It was a nice run. But Americans should have listened to Ben Franklin. Once the 1965 Immigration Act passed after 40 years of relentless agitation, the fate of the USA was sealed.

DISCUSS ON SG


The End of Economic Ideology

There is no more economic Left or Right in Clown World. Because once a government starts primarily distributing national resources on the basis of identity groups and foreign interests, everyone on both extremes of the ideological divide realizes that there is no more national interest, any appeal to it is pointless, and therefore there is absolutely no point in working toward anything but maximal distribution to their own identity groups.

On Sunday, 58.2% of Swiss voters, and a majority of cantons, backed the “Better living in retirement” initiativeExternal link, which will grant an additional 13th monthly pension payment to help retirees struggling to make ends meet in the face of rising living costs.

Support for the 13th monthly pension payment initiative was exceptionally high. What is your analysis of the Swiss vote?

This is the first time that Swiss voters have clearly accepted a left-wing initiative in the field of social policy. The success can be explained by the fact that it was not just a left-wing vote. The initiative also resonated widely with centre-right voters and, above all, the conservative right. And, in their case, it was less about solidarity and compensating for the poverty of pensioners and much more about ‘now it’s my turn’.

Where does this idea come from?

It is a protest against the past excesses of the economy – the fall of Credit Suisse, the high salaries of managers, the past rescue of UBS and the rescue plan for [the energy company] Axpo. There is a widespread sentiment that Switzerland is able to mobilise very large sums of money for crises like the Covid-19 pandemic for big businesses, while ordinary people do not benefit. The population has the impression that business readily helps itself to any profits while passing on losses to society. There is a now willingness to change this.

It was perhaps another argument, which was very popular in conservative circles, that helped to topple the country’s most conservative strongholds, particularly in German-speaking Switzerland: if the Swiss authorities are capable of spending billions of francs on development aid and welcoming refugees, then we should do the same for pensioners. Even the country’s most seasoned political scientists are at a loss. Never before has an initiative from the left and the unions sparked such sympathy among right-wing voters.

This is why both liberalism and conservatism are dead across the West, and have been replaced by globalism vs nationalism combined with international identity politics on the foreign policy side and pure identity politics on the domestic side.

What is the point of being fiscally conservative or not spending every last bit of money on yourself while it lasts if the politicians are just going to use it to import refugees, send the money to Israel or Ukraine, or bailing out failed corporations if you don’t? It’s an irrefutable argument, and this is why Clown World will inevitably, and necessarily, turn against its own sacred cow of democracy before it collapses.

DISCUSS ON SG


A Few Thoughts on Usury

First, it’s necessary to define usury, which is not synonymous with either “loan” or “interest”, although unsurprisingly, the modern definition has been corrupted and is incorrect. The American Heritage defines it thusly:

  • The practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest, especially at an exorbitant or illegally high rate.
  • An excessive or illegally high rate of interest charged on borrowed money.
  • Interest charged or paid on a loan.

Even in the precise wordings of the definition, we can see the ambiguity that is the red flag that a word spell has been cast. If both interest charged and paid on a loan are usury, then both the lender and the borrower are usurers. And if all interest paid is usury, then there is no need to bring the rate of interest into the equation at all, and any exorbitant, excessive, or illegal aspect is irrelevant.

Now, the history of economics, especially as recounted by Murray Rothbard, is essentially the history of relentlessly challenging the Catholic Church’s ban on usury. And in retrospect, it’s clear that this incoherence is the direct result of centuries of gradually chipping away at the concept through adulteration and expansion of the moral and legal permissibility of usury.

In order to determine if a proposed contract is usurious, only three questions need be asked. If the answers to all three questions are unanimously yes, then the contract is not usurious and it is a legitimate census agreement as opposed to an illegitimate and usurious mutuum agreement:

  1. Is interest charged on the loan?
  2. Has the borrower posted collateral providing security on the loan?
  3. Is the lender’s recourse for recovery of principal and interest, in a case of default, limited to the named collateral and only the named collateral?

The difference, as is made abundantly clear in this extremely useful and well-informed FAQ on the subject, depends upon the nature of the guarantee for the loan, and NOT the existence of any interest. This is why student loans, credit card loans, and even car and home loans that are backed by personal guarantees are wicked, whereas corporate bonds and convertible notes are not. It is also why usury is so uniformly destructive from an entirely secular sense, while allowing the usurers to hide behind the legitimate utility of debt that permits the healthy growth of agriculture and industry without inevitably giving way to a credit bubble and eventual economic collapse.

In fact, the etymological shift in the definitional focus from collateral to interest looks downright suspicious to me as a student of historical kakology.

When reading old books and documents on usury it is important to keep in mind that the word ‘loan’ in English translations is almost always a translation of ‘mutuum’ or the like. It refers specifically to loans secured by the personal guarantee of the borrower, sometimes called a ‘loan for consumption’. Not all modern ‘debt’ or ‘loans’ are secured by the personal guarantee of a borrower or borrowers…

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that usurious lending involves selling something which does not exist.  This is very counterintuitive to people indoctrinated in modernity, and yet obvious once you’ve set aside modern anti-realism about property and economic value. 

Another way to see that what is bought-and-sold in a mutuum does not exist is to observe that, under the terms of the contract, it is possible for the lender to fail to recover everything he is entitled to recover under the contract. The reason a full recourse lender is sometimes unable to recover what he is owed under the terms of the contract is because what he is owed under the terms of the contract does not exist…

Part of what made the usury doctrine clear to me when I first really began to grasp it (as opposed to – and I was as guilty of this as anyone – superficially dismissing caricatures rooted in anti-realist modernism) is that as an investor and entrepreneur, I see investment contracts involving peronal guarantees of repayment as inherently dysfunctional. If either the investor or the entrepreneur feels the need to throw personal guarantees into the mix in order to get the deal done, that is a major red flag that the proposed capital structure of the investment doesn’t make sense on its own terms. Usually this is because the property risks – the risks of partial or total loss of capital invested – in the investment are high enough to make a simple fixed-interest debt instrument inappropriate. Instead of personal guarantees the structure should be something like a convertible note, with equity upside, or it should be secured by a larger base of existing (though probably illiquid) capital. Basically, someone is trying to consume capital they don’t have and/or shift their own risks – the risks inherent in their own portfolios of property – onto third parties, personally.

Anyway, I haven’t really added anything new to the ancient understanding of usury here. I was just a guy who happened to be standing in the right spot to see what caused the train wreck, and I’m trying to explain what I saw in our common modern language as best I can. Like theft usury often does pay, at least in the short run, and it causes all sorts of damage that impacts different people differently and unfairly. Usury is inherently dysfunctional and morally evil, like theft. It may be mildly interesting sociologically that the Catholic Church was right for millennia about a simple core financial and moral truth that modern people, for all their putative economic and technical sophistication, have gotten completely wrong.

This may be useful in the current economic hard times, as those who are wise stewards of their resources are likely to have friends, families, and acquaintances coming to them and asking them for help that goes beyond the usual charity that does not require deciding between one serious opportunity and another. The thing that is important to understand is that while one can provide a loan, and one can legitimately receive interest on that loan, the collateral provided as a guarantee against default on it must be real, specific, and, of course, proportional to the value of the combined principle and scheduled interest of the loan.

For example, if a farmer who owns ten acres of land worth 60k borrows 10k from you, you cannot hold him responsible for repaying it. And while you can require him to put up his land as collateral as a condition for the loan, you can’t legitimately have him provide all ten acres he owns as a guarantee since the land is worth 6k per acre. In that case, two acres is sufficient backing for the principle and interest; a proper census contract tends to look a lot more like a normal sale with a time delay than a bank loan full of terms and conditions that are manifestly one-sided and predatory.

Now, all this being said, it is still possible that the traditional distinction made by Christendom between mutuum and census is insufficient without a periodic jubilee, as this selection from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica shows:

In Athens about the time of Solon’s legislation (594 B.C.) the bulk of the population, who had originally been small proprietors or metayers, became gradually indebted to the rich to such an extent that they were practically slaves. Those who still kept their property nominally were in the position of Irish cottiers: they owed more than they could pay, and stone pillars erected on their land showed the amount of the debts and the names of the lenders. Usury had given all the power of the state to a small plutocracy.

The remedy which Solon adopted was of a kind that we are accustomed to consider as purely modern. In the first place, it is true that according to ancient practice he proclaimed a general seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens: he cancelled all the debts made on the security of the land or the person of the debtor. This measure alone would, however, have been of little service had he not at the same time enacted that henceforth no loans could be made on the bodily security of the debtor, and the creditor was confined to a share of the property. The consequence of this simple but effective reform was that Athens was never again disturbed by the agitation of insolvent debtors. Solon left the rate of interest to be determined by free contract, and sometimes the rate was exceedingly high, but none of the evils so generally prevalent in antiquity were experienced.

It is informative to observe that Solon’s successful solution to the problem of usury-based plutocracy of the sort that we are presently observing all across the West was very similar, though not identical, to the later teachings of Aquinas on the subject. And it’s interesting to note that the Solonic imposition of a limit to the share on the property serving as collateral is exactly the same conclusion that I independently reached in the paragraph above, while his proclamation of a general seisachtheia is exactly what Michael Hudson prescribes for the global economy.

DISCUSS ON SG


Mailvox: The Logic of the Cult of Free

I thought this exchange with a member of the Cult of Free who is upset over Torba’s very sensible decision to stop permitting users who pay nothing for Gab’s services to utilize them at considerable expense to Gab was informative, as it raised a basic philosophical issue that some people obviously fail to understand.

You might want to check and see how many of the “free cult” are among YOUR followers. Most paid users rely on their “free” followers to make people like you more “relevant” and give people like you a reason to pay to be here. The “free cult” also brings other people to Gab and some spend their money on products being sold on Gab. THAT is the REAL WORLD. Andrew Torba, paid users and “attention seekers” like yourself, are NOTHING without the “free cult”!

Totally wrong. I don’t care at all about the “free followers”. We have a community of more than 10,000, all of whom have skin in the game and are not only supportive, but reliable. Free followers are, by and large, useless cowards who abandon ship whenever their feelings get hurt.

I do hope all of the “free followers” read this and realize that they are considered “nothing” to people like you. Have fun in your imagined “important” world!

So, do all of the so-called “free followers” here at VP realize that you are considered nothing to me? Have I failed to make that sufficiently clear to all and sundry? Are you fully cognizant of the fact that this blog existed before you were here, exists without any help or support from you now, and will continue to exist long after you cease visiting here?

Is everyone perfectly clear on that?

While I have nothing against people who read this site, or Sigma Game, or Castalia Library, or Castalia House, or the Arkhaven blog, or Arktoons, and still decide not to participate in or support any of our community’s various projects for what are no doubt very good reasons, I don’t regard them as being important, I don’t rely upon them in any way, and, in fact, I don’t think about them at all. They’re not on my radar.

If you’re not involved, you are irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong, or even negative, about being irrelevant. You’re not a problem, you’re simply not a factor at all. For better or for worse, you don’t matter any more than some random individual in Ghana or Myanmar who has never heard of me.

Everyone is welcome to read this site for free. That’s literally what it’s here for. I would write here and post here even if there were only two or three people visiting the site every day instead of 30,000; it gives me no more and no less pleasure to go through the discipline of articulating my thoughts on a regular basis now than when there were only a few thousand pageviews a month back in 2003. But this site is just something I do for my own reasons, it is not a business, it employs no one, and it does not require any resources to make it work. Die Gedanken, sie sind frei.

The Cult of Free was created by the false application of an outmoded business model to a series of government-funded data-mining platforms. It’s not a surprise that so many people were misled by this; even 30 years after Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver published “The Death of Advertising” in Vol. 23, Issue No. 4 of the Journal of Advertising, the Cult of Free retards still think that sites like Gab can be funded by nonexistent advertising revenue.

They don’t realize that X has never, ever, made a profit. They aren’t aware that Google loses $2 billion or more on YouTube every year. And they have no idea how Meta actually makes its money. Silicon Valley’s One Million Eyeballs and Exit model was always fraudulent, on every single conceptual level, even though it appeared to work well for certain favored ticket-takers.

What is necessary, what is vital, what is absolutely required for an operation that is going to survive and thrive over the long haul is to build a community of 10,000 or more people and provide them with enough value for them to justify their moral and material support. We are very, very fortunate to have been able to do that, and it is my goal, every single day, to provide an excuse, a reason, or a justification for all of our supporters to continue with their support.

I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to think about those who not only don’t have skin in the game, they simply aren’t in the game at all. The value of the free content they create is zero. I know this for a fact, because when I shut down comments at this blog, all the same stupid arguments were mustered against it. I was “killing the blog” by shutting down the discourse here, or so they claimed. “Just as many people come to read the comments as read your posts,” they argued. The result: absolutely no change in traffic at all.

And here is how you know the so-called “support” of freeloaders is worthless: they never even do the free and easy things they could be doing to benefit the community without spending a single dime.

This isn’t a request for anyone to do anything at all. It is merely an philosophical explanation.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Price of Belligerence

The Swiss politicians are belatedly beginning to discover that the benefits of strict neutrality were considerably greater than they’d believed possible when they were being wined and dined by the diplomats of Clown World:

We don’t expect Switzerland to be directly attacked in the next six months. But we must prepare ourselves for a new range of threats, while the old, conventional threats have not diminished. The likelihood of Switzerland being attacked has increased over the last two years.
– Viola Amherd, President of Switzerland

This is precisely why General Henri Guisan, the hero of Switzerland in World War II, made it very, very clear to all the politicians of his day that surrendering to Nazi Germany would be an effective death sentence for themselves, and that their actions would be irrelevant anyhow. When the then-President of Switzerland was cozying up to the Nazis, in much the same way that the current Swiss administration is now cozying up to the European Union and NATO, he “punished” two young officers who were caught planning to assassinate the president by promoting them, then announced that no government authority, including the Head of State, had the power to surrender to any foreign power on behalf of the Swiss nation.

The current Swiss government is the party solely responsible for increasing the likelihood of Switzerland being attacked over the last two years. It very foolishly, unnecessarily, and very, very stupidly, chose to violate the nation’s historic neutrality in order to take sides against Russia on behalf of NATO, the EU, and the United States. Now Russia, China, and the BRICSIA nations now regard it as “a hostile entity” and, quite reasonably, no longer recognize Switzerland as an impartial party capable of hosting the sort of peace talks it has traditionally hosted for generations.

Now the government is at an important nexus. Having taken the first step into belligerence, it is now being forced to choose whether to join the EU, the UK, and the USA in their sanctions on China or not, which would be a much more serious step in economic terms than the sanctions on Russia were. One sincerely hopes that the politicians will learn from their previous mistake of violating the nation’s precious neutrality, and have the wisdom to step back from the brink and staunchly refuse to join the denizens of Clown World in leaping into the inevitable abyss of the military and economic ruin that is already in process.

If you choose to enter the ring, you cannot be surprised when you get punched in the face. And if you choose to enter the ring against a massive opponent who is four times larger than you and all your supposed friends combined, you are absolutely, 100 percent, going to lose, and you are going to lose badly.

The winning strategy, as generations of Swiss leaders have known, is to stay the hell out of the ring.

DISCUSS ON SG


Gab Ends the Cult of Free

Andrew Torba makes a wise and long-overdue business decision, which I support 100 percent:

Starting in March, media uploads on Gab will be a privilege reserved for GabPRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users. We will no longer be supporting free media uploads and hosting huge amounts of data for free. Let me explain why.

As you all know Gab has to maintain our own in-house infrastructure because we have been banned from all cloud hosting providers. Over the past year we’ve had so much data uploaded, largely from free users, that we have to purchase more storage and spend our precious and limited engineering resources trying to expand our infrastructure storage. We’ve also faced an onslaught of bot accounts over the past few months that we believe are purposely uploading tons of media files on purpose to flood our storage space.

Finally, there are many real users who have been here for years and posted tens of thousands of times and have 10-100GB+ of media stored on Gab’s drives for free. Add those all up and it becomes extremely costly to maintain.

We can’t do it anymore. Every user will be able to speak freely with words, but if you want the privilege of Gab hosting and an endless stream of large images and videos you’ll need to help support the service. It’s just that simple. PRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users will notice no change when this happens, things will continue as normal for you. Everyone else will need to upgrade to PRO to unlock the privilege of posting media files on Gab.

Freeloaders have nothing to offer a community except drama, expense, and trouble. Their uselessness is highlighted by their reaction to the news that they won’t be able to make use of Gab’s infrastructure any longer for their own purposes, which in many cases are directly in opposition to Torba’s own objectives.

One of the reasons this community is strong is that everyone has an amount of skin in the game. Everyone is willing to contribute time, energy, and resources toward our collective vision, toward advancing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. And any resources that are diverted to those who are unwilling to even contribute the modern equivalent of the widow’s mite are almost certainly wasted.

It’s not about greed. Right now, UATV is operating without having a single subscriber, advertiser, or revenue stream. And that’s fine, because it’s part of the mission and it’s important to the community that it carry on without interruption. It never occurred to a single member of the team to reduce access or temporarily shut things down until subscriptions are opened again in March. We aren’t even going to bother with a crowdfund or anything else, because we never operate anywhere close to the edge.

But you can’t run an operation without resources, and you have to be wise about where you devote those resources. Spending them on people who are unwilling to make even the smallest commitment to the operation is a fool’s game, which is why I have been predicting the end of the cult of free for some time now, and why we never set up any operation on that model.

In fact, Torba will probably see a bonus effect of eradicating the larger part of the trolls and paid propagandists, because the former won’t pay to play and he just increased the cost of doing business for the latter. So, it’s a very smart decision on his part.

If you care more about a Macchiato Grande from Starbucks than supporting the platform on which you spend hours every day, you don’t deserve to have access to it.

DISCUSS ON SG