sp3ctr4l

Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.

… And script kiddie DOGE interns.

… As would every other currency.

Most of which are backed by more sane, stable, underlying governments and economies than the US…

… and they are much, much more connected to actual tangible factors than a completely speculative asset that has utterly failed to function as an actual generally accepted currency everywhere and time that has been attempted.

Same with gold or silver or fine art… etc.

If a hyperinflation scenario actually happens, all that means is the dollar weakens. It does not mean bitcoin strengthens generally… it would only strengthen in comparison to the dollar.

… But, because the vast majority of real money flowing into funding bitcoin investments is dollars, I would be willing to bet that bitcoin would basically also drop against basically all other currencies.

Bitcoin is largely a proxy currency for gambling with USD. Not entirely of course, not perfectly…but uh… there are way less stablecoins pegged to Not USD, and way less volume in them.

I am fairly confident that… yeah, if the USD hyperinflates, bitcoin exchange rates would pretty much track with USD:EUR and USD:Lira rates… though hey, if you have roughly 10 million USD right now, and think you can run a currency arbitrage when/if the USD goes tits up, maybe you can actually make some money.

Or lose it all due to massively inefficient bitcoin trading markets and exorbitant trading fees as compared to what all the real, giant, big boy financial firms have access to.

Bitcoin doesn’t have fundamentals. Bitcoin being ‘deflationary by design’ doesn’t matter at all, because it isn’t a currency. It isn’t used as a currency in any general economy (that isn’t already inna disaster), it isn’t regulated like a currency is.

It is basically emtirely a barely regulated speculative proxy for mostly USD investments… if you take money out of USD, in a hyperinflation scenario, you may or may not do a bit better than keeping that money in USD, but you will almost certainly still lose money if you want to convert your bitcoin into a non hyperinflating currency.

Everything Mel Brooks.

Airplane!

The Producers

Blazing Saddles… etc.

So many of his movies have such memorable lines and jokes that still hold up today.

I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

To torture a metaphor:

Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.

My only income is Social Security Disability Income.

I am quite literally having a call with a pro bono lawyer from a non profit law firm that specializes in Social Security matters in a few hours, after having gone through their application process last week.

I am just trying to pre emptively set myself for at least some kind of legal counsel… as it now seems inevitable that I will need one, given the insanity going at Social Security, thanks to Musk and DOGE not being able to understand how any of their databases work, and taking a hatchet to staff headcount and shutting down Soc Sec physical locations.

Its hyperreality, as Adam Curtis shows in his documentary mostly focusing on Putin… but the Trump admin is actually too stupid to realize … that that is what it is, they fell for their own bs, sheltered and curated worldviews because they are so, so skilled at (really, privileged enough to be able to) surrounding themselves with yes men and sycophants and cult members.

I mean, a big element of it is falling for much of Putin’s actually intentionally constructed hyperreality… but the Trump admin and MAGA people are actually too stupid to even been correctly just… generally cynical, and the result is honestly more akin to a 1944/45 Nazi movement that has leaders and followers mostly just still in denial/cognitive dissonance and grandiose cult like faith at the same time.

But the MAGA hyperreality … isn’t centrally planned or directed. Its … basically an accidental consensus of a bunch of idiots screaming different kinds of idiocy into the void loud enough, and the kinda sorta generally agreed on hyperreality is whatever ends up echoing the loudest and most clearly.

They can’t even project stability or competency, even as hollow suits, even as a false but semi-convincing front.

Just go look at the last two weeks ish of public appearances of Trump and his cabinet and Elon.

Half of them are having emotional breakdowns, manic episodes live on air, Hohman, whatever, the DHS goon leading deportations… either he was fucking drunk, or his dentures were falling out of his mouth, a reporter/news host asks him a question and he gives like a 75 word rambling response, maybe 10 of the words actually intelligible.

The inmates are running the asylum.

… Oh well, at least I’ve personally passed through the intense despair and depression phase of knowing this was coming, and am now just laughing at how truly stupid and farsical this all is, and how it is honestly, precisely what Americans deserve for either being idiot cult members, apathetic, or placing their faith in an utterly incompetent Democratic party that just still thinks its 1992, or squabbling over inane idpol differences.

We are apparently actually so stupid, irresponsible and/or more concerned with petty nonsense issues that we are just actually going to have to go through the fire of either overthrowing these malevolent morons, or just acquiesce to all becoming true debt serfs and burn to a crisp.

I’ve been saying that Trump and his ‘ideas’ on tariffs are just… completely, fundamentally broken and self contradictory, at every possible level.

He literally just doesn’t get it, he doesn’t grasp what you’d be taught in AP Macroecon or a first quarter of Macroecon at a college or uni.

Yes, of course, more competent oligarchs can profit from an engineered economic collapse…

But Trump and his immediate orbit are literally too stupid to understand why what they are doing won’t work the way they think it will.

These idiots are very largely at the peak of the dunning kruger confidence vs actual knowledge curve, right before you fall off into the abyss of ‘oh shit this is actually really conplicated and i am a moron.’

Of course, they’ll never admit they are morons or were ever wrong, they’ll just keep lying, misdirecting, and inventing new insane conspiracy theories with secret enemies thaf explain why they failed

Well so far we’ve managed to do the equivalent of the Enabling Act in… was it 33 or 34? before the hyperinflation, but yeah, I get what you’re going for with the very apt Nazi historical comparison.

We are headed for ‘idiot American Real Estate Mob Boss Hitler rises to power during moderate economic decline for all but the top 5ish %, proceeds to immediately blow up entire economy with tariffs and hyperinflation.’

These actual mouth breathing morons have no idea what they are even attempting to describe.

…

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/does-the-federal-reserve-own-or-hold-gold.htm

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate_(United_States)

…

The Federal Reserve doesn’t actually own, nor physically possess, any physical gold, that they could just sell off or speculate with.

When FDR outlawed gold private ownership in 1934, all physical gold was handed over to the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve (and other banks) were given gold certificates, valued at $42.22… per ounce… a set value that hasn’t changed, and is used for the Fed’s modest valuation of its previously held gold reserves… which are utterly insignificant and dwarfed by the other assets it holds.

(This isn’t super current, but it gives you an idea. Light blue is gold certificates. Its a one pixel thin line at the bottom. The overall balance is even more huge than this now after Covid, and Gold Certs, even if they were revalued from $42.2222 to the current market rate, would basically be small, it would go from about 10 billion to 750 billion, when the Fed’s current total assets are about 7 trillion)

About 5% of the US Treasury’s gold is held at the New York Fed, but the Fed doesn’t own it, it’s just there because there is a vault there. The rest of the US’s gold is physically held at Treasury operated locations.

…

What the Fed does own are Gold Certificates, back from 1934, which are still valued at the old $42.2222 price, in terms of the Fed calculating its own balance sheet.

To… have the US gov… order the Fed to sell off its gold certificates… that’s not a thing the US gov can actually legally do, not without asserting total direct control over the Fed, and thus basically instantly making its existence pointless…

Again, to repeat, the US government cannot legally command the Fed to sell off its gold certificates, the Fed cannot legally sell its gold certificates, nor could said certificates be legally exchanged for actual physical gold from the US Treasury.

This would be approximately analagous to the US government ordering a corporation to sell off its own capital assets and then just sending the money from that sale to a government account.

It is expropriation.

For this to be any kind of legal, they’d have to repeal or greatly amend … at least the laws that established the Federal Reserve, and the Gold Reserve Act, likely many more… or basically do a whole bunch of rat fuckery to get their own people in positions on various Fed Reserve boards, and possibly prevent other people on Fed Reserve boards from actually voting on motions.

This would amount to basically performing a coup on the US’s central banking system, and putting total control of the monetary system within the Treasury.

…

This would upend the century old bedrock of the US’s financial system.

Now, I am no full, uncritical advocate of the Federal Reserve system in its current form… but this is what it is, a complete usurpation of the US’s existing monetary system, which would then be put in charge of the astoundingly incompetent current administration.

This is how you get hyperinflation.

This is quite literally fucking with the money at its most fundamental level.

This is how you speed run destroying the USD as the world reserve currency.

…

tldr;

This isn’t only stupid in the sense of ‘sell gold to buy bitcoin’ is a dubious investment strategy, it is particularly stupid in that if the actual pursued strategy is ‘force the Fed to sell its gold certificates’…

(to who? its not legal for any private entity to ‘purchase’ them at the market rate for gold, nor is it legal for said hypothetical purchaser, not even the Fed, to actually redeem them for physical gold, nor is it even legal for the Fed to sell them even of its own accord!)

… then that method blows up the entire concept of a legally defined, semi-independent Federal Reserve, and that then blows up the entire basis of the US monetary system.

Yeah, you are right that it could just be a coincidence, and the image is based off of an actual corpse… but it could also be intentionally altered off of the actual real world source image to extentuate the seeming stoppage of the burn damage to stop roughly where the mask/faceplate/helmet segments are.

My face when the Combine roll up:

Notice how the … dermis is stripped off, right up until about the area the faceplate of a CP/OW stops, and connects into the rear/neck part of their headgear?

This guy is either a dead, former CP/OW, or an early attempt at making a human into a CP/OW that… didn’t work out so well.

… This is basically confirmed in HL Alyx, you can find some OW with… very similarly fucked up faces.

Once the mask goes on… taking it off will almost certainly kill you.

Oh dear, I am reasonably confident I do not want to exist in the world of Kenshi.

I haven’t had a dream I remembered in years, but I do distinctly remember a dream I had as a kid.

Some… Dr Suess book? Features basically an animated, living pair of pants.

The night after I read it, I basically had a horror movie dream (hadn’t seen any horror movies yet)… basically I tried to open my dresser and get ready for school, the pants burst out of the dresser, knocked me over, and I ran through an infinite hallway with the pants chasing me.

In summary, my Freddy Kruger is a pair of jeans.