Chris Liss

liss@getalby.com

posting without conscience things in which most people are not interested | www.chrisliss.com

Overview Articles Media Highlights

There is a large class of people who believe they are wiser and morally superior than those who disagree with them. They think that if you voted for candidate A you are a better person than if you voted for B. That who you voted for and how much you verbally signal your concern for various policies is important. One day it could be wearing your mask, another taking your booster, maybe it’s your views on Ukraine or Gaza, systemic racism, climate change or teenagers who believe they’ve been born in the wrong body.

The truth is, and of this one thing I am certain, you do not know better than I do. I am an adult human being, and there is no higher authority in the known universe than me. I can very well make my own errors without compounding them by taking on your flawed presumptions and biases.

The truth is, and of this one thing I am certain, you do not know better than I do. I am an adult human being, and there is no higher authority in the known universe than me. I can very well make my own errors without compounding them by taking on your flawed presumptions and biases.

Simulation Theory, the idea our entire existence is part of a simulation, that we are just code running on some more advanced civilization’s supercomputer has come up in conversations of late. I’m writing to say it’s not just wrong, but bullshit. A category error, at best, and cover for a nefarious agenda at worst.

The Fourth Turning might well be upon us, indeed “the centre [may not] hold.” There is no guarantee your response will ensure you or those you love survive. There has never been such a guarantee for anyone, only the freedom to direct your attention, to choose your state of mind, to the extent you are capable, in the conditions that arise. To respond to the older fish that the water is okay, it’s pretty nice actually.

The Fourth Turning might well be upon us, indeed “the centre [may not] hold.” There is no guarantee your response will ensure you or those you love survive. There has never been such a guarantee for anyone, only the freedom to direct your attention, to choose your state of mind, to the extent you are capable, in the conditions that arise. To respond to the older fish that the water is okay, it’s pretty nice actually.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

If enough people transact peer to peer in bitcoin rather than over the closed-circuit rails of the global banking system, and enough people share information over nostr, rather than via the centralized tech platforms, laws and actions that violate free speech would be as effective as ones outlawing gravity or laws of thermodynamics.

The next revolution won’t be with the guillotine or the pitchfork, but bottom-up person to person, permissionless interaction and transaction. You can still be excommunicated from the platforms by their commissars and state apparatchiks, but their edicts no longer run merely afoul of a consecrated piece of paper — they come up against an infrastructure over which they no longer have enforceable jurisdiction.

At first the black hole was tiny, its Schwarzschild radius measurable in Planck lengths. Whenever someone’s labor generated a surplus of energy, requiring storage for future use, there was an infinitesimal pull, undetectable beyond a narrow range. But slowly small amounts of energy close to it got pulled in, and like an ordinary black hole it grew in reach and strength.

You’d also think given how many ways citizens are taxed that roads would be in tip top condition, our water and environment would be clean, our airports modern and state of the art, our health care affordable and accessible, but of course none of that is the case. Again per Dostoyevsky — we have betrayed ourselves for nothing.

All governments are fascistic in that they use force to achieve their agendas. But the best ones use only the minimum necessary force to create conditions for bottom-up prosperity. There is no other kind of prosperity.

Like most members of the human race, I don’t enjoy filing my taxes. “Don’t enjoy” though understates my actual feeling which is “would rather do a tour in Afghanistan.” It’s not even the money I’m forced to pay that I know for sure will be misallocated, stolen or worse — put to use in ways that are anathema to everything I believe and in direct opposition to conditions in which human beings thrive. That’s only part of it.

There will be no legal consequences. No one will be arrested or put in a camp, delusions of persecution notwithstanding. If you produce real value for a real employer, you are not at risk of being fired. If you insist on perpetuating your derangement on social media you will not be deplatformed or canceled (that only happens to people speaking the truths inconvenient to the powerful.)

What’s really happening is people who were assured they were the “good”, the empathic, the compassionate ones, those who towed the line during covid, got their boosters, wore their masks, “social distanced,” put pronouns in their bios, are being confronted with a terrifying realization: the behaviors and beliefs, to which they so dutifully attached themselves, for which they publicly and stridently advocated, whether online or at Thanksgiving dinner, are no longer being rewarded. In fact, they are being openly ridiculed. Instead of the pat on the back, increasingly Team Good is facing mockery and outright scorn.

This might seem like a trivial point on which to base a post, but I don’t think it is. It’s not because “prejudice is bad” or “racism!” That’s just one type of instance in which this midwit tendency — to assign individuals to a group and then pretend you are being “data-driven” — rears its terrible head. I remember a couple years ago people on Twitter accused me of “taking up an ICU bed” because I refused to inject myself with Pfizer’s latest. Their reasoning was similar: because the unvaccinated are more likely to take up ICU beds (which turned out to be a lie, but let’s assume it were true), I was in the group taking up more beds, therefore I was taking up a bed.

One thing that happened to me (and a lot of people I know) during Covid is we were forced to become more resilient. It’s not easy learning what you thought was a corrupt but not-that-important state would actively disrupt your life so severely in violation of the law and without any valid scientific basis. That the corporate media would gaslight you and foment compliance and division only augmented the stress and sense of despair. In order to retain one’s sanity in the face of so much capitulation and abdication of rational sense-making one had to reach deeper within, trust one’s own judgment and connect with one’s core values more entirely.

The truth is, and of this one thing I am certain, you do not know better than I do. I am an adult human being, and there is no higher authority in the known universe than me. I can very well make my own errors without compounding them by taking on your flawed presumptions and biases.

So I have rambled a bit, but I wanted to convey as thoroughly as possible the enormity of the weight I feel lifted off my back as a result of this election. Yes, someone can still continue to be a condescending, insufferable, moralizing asshole, but what’s changed is he is no longer getting rewarded for such behavior by those in power. You can report me to HR for believing climate change (as it’s marketed to the masses) is a cynical and evil scam, but when you get to the HR office you’ll find Karen clearing out her desk.

I believe were King Solomon to weigh in on this dispute he would say, “Let’s flip a coin. If it’s heads, ideas with which I disagree would be banned, and if it’s tails the ideas with which I agree would be banned.” Then he would take me aside and whisper: “Don’t worry, both sides of the coin are heads!” (And he would take the misinformation police aside and assure them both were tails.)

I had only a small taste of violence growing up, getting mugged, punched in the face on the street a couple times, chased by a gang with sticks and bats. I never got seriously injured, and in fact no one I know did, either, but there was a sense of menace back then that it could happen.

And many of those standing up for civil liberties and personal autonomy were not who I would have expected. Wealthy people who didn’t depend on their peers’ good graces to live comfortably, it turns out, were often cowardly beyond belief. Academia, which purports to value truth and open inquiry, were among the most compliant, in many cases enforcers of the party dogmas to the point of abetting the US government in illegally censoring dissent. Even some of those I had most thought of as independent thinkers like Nassim Taleb, Noam Chomsky and “the bad boy of radio” during my formative years, Howard Stern, capitulated abjectly and totally.

We were there for probably 5-10 minutes. I don’t remember who spoke first, or the entirety of the conversation, only a few snippets which have stayed with me. I told him I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I thought maybe I wanted to be a writer. He laughed out loud. “You want to be artist?” he said with his thick accent. “You pumping gas. Hahahahahah!” Then he looked at me seriously, and said, “Business and law. You study business and law.”

As such we now have a wide swath of educated, above-average IQ, ostensibly otherwise sensible Americans cheering on the fomenting of World War III in Ukraine, justifying ideological censorship contra the very First Amendment of the United States Constitution, unchecked illegal immigration irrespective of financial and social cost, among other insane policies of which virtually no one had been in favor when they identified as garden-variety liberals 10 years ago.

This “difficulty adjustment” of sorts — the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need to increase your speed — means that the timeline of events is secure and cannot be tampered with no matter how much power one has at his disposal — your enemy can never acquire the ultimate weapon.

I suspect that’s going on now — the child has noticed, word is getting out. They are desperately trying to shut it down with the most Orwellian measures (Bureau of Disinformation!) They will not succeed, but lasting damage has been done, and more will be inflicted before it’s over. The biggest question now is the lengths to which the emperor’s minions will go — creating a ministry of truth is extreme, but that pales in comparison to, say, starting World War III.

The notion that anything could be money if attached to the right story, or any music is good if it’s marketed properly is deeply cynical. I am not arguing people can’t be convinced to buy bad records — clearly they can — but that no matter how much you market it, it will not stand the test of time unless it is in fact good.

  1. Separate passengers from their bags as early as possible. The single stupidest airline policy is that checking a bag costs extra while carry-ons are free. What that does is incentivize everyone to drag their luggage through the airport and onto the plane. This has several negative consequences: a) Even though most airlines have assigned seats, everyone lines up 10 or 20 minutes before the start of the already too long boarding process, frantically hoping to secure some scarce overhead space rather than relaxing in the terminal and boarding at their leisure before the door closes.
Separate passengers from their bags as early as possible. The single stupidest airline policy is that checking a bag costs extra while carry-ons are free. What that does is incentivize everyone to drag their luggage through the airport and onto the plane. This has several negative consequences: a) Even though most airlines have assigned seats, everyone lines up 10 or 20 minutes before the start of the already too long boarding process, frantically hoping to secure some scarce overhead space rather than relaxing in the terminal and boarding at their leisure before the door closes.

But it’s not about the money, and it’s not even about the herculean effort per se, but the feeling and narrative I crafted around it. I was the guy who got this done. I flew from Portugal to San Francisco for 12 hours, two days later from SF to Palm Springs to help my 87-YO uncle with his affairs, improvised to get from Palm Springs to Vegas, which took six hours due to road closures, signed up for the contests, made the flight back to San Francisco, flew to Denver at 7 am the next day, took my daughter the Rockies game in the afternoon and then on to Boulder the following day. Maybe that’s not so impressive to some of you, but for me, an idle ideas person, a thinker, observer, someone who likes to express himself via a keyboard, it was like Alexander the Great conquering Persia.

I won’t let the Survivor debacle undermine my real mission to bring sports to nostr. Team of Destiny 2 would have been a compelling story, but it was never essential. After all, my flight was cancelled and I had to improvise, so now my Survivor entry is cancelled, and I’ll have to improvise again. The branch of the multiverse where the Bengals won didn’t give me the information I wanted, but maybe it was what I really needed to know. That I am the man in the arena yet, the battle was ever against myself, and for a brief moment, while my team was losing, I prevailed.

I imagine it might go down like this: The administration, whoever it is, meets with Brian Armstrong of Coinbase and the CEOs of the ETF issuers, gives them a very brief heads up: “We’re taking the coins for national security and compensating all your clients at the face value at which they’re trading,” i.e., they would just give them today’s market value if they were to sell, i.e., $1M per coin. So if there were two million coins in ETF custody, that would be $2T distributed pro rata among the investors.

Marty kept making his case, but Hunt, 25-odd years his senior with a knowing tone of world-weariness, insisted it was futile because of what “they” will do. As I listened, I couldn’t help but wonder who Hunt thought “they” were since “he” was doing yeoman’s work on “their” behalf to dissuade listeners from considering a parallel system.

I now understood his argument. If we had certainty about how our actions would affect the world, the moral imperative would be clear. But certainty about the future was unattainable, for the path from unknown to known is the arrow of time itself. Henry’s hypothetical then was inherently contradictory, a square circle he imagined were an actual shape.