🇬🇧 Here in Belfast the weather continues grim as ever. To rub it in I met someone this week who was back from holiday in Scotland where it has been warm and sunny while we wallow in daily showers, thunderstorms, sunny spells and a balmy 17 degrees max. This reminds me of the day when I left Northern Ireland (via Stranraer) aged 18 to go to University; I heard on the radio as I left that the Met Office was able to report that it had rained every day in Northern Ireland over that summer.

One highlight this week was the Bitcoin Meetup on Tuesday. This takes place first Tuesday of the month in Ormeau Baths Belfast - you should go along if you can - you will meet interesting people and learn useful information. Topics that we covered included:

• Getting Started: Get off zero, doing DCA, using self-custody and having and using a lightning wallet
• Recent Interesting developments: AWK, Lightning Splicing (available in Phoenix Android test) and Chaumian eCash - Cashu and Fedi
• Macro situation, Jusridictional Arbitrage, Bitcoin Proxies and much more besides...

If you are interested to know more read the Project Updates section of the newsletters and feel free to reach out and discuss with me - I am happy to meet up for coffee and a chat anywhere that I happen to be - online chat works too.

Books of the week

This week I have two somewhat related but quite different books, both of which I have recommended before. This week I dug them out to re-read some parts and I also found some nice additional insights.

First up: This is just the best summary and review of The 4th Turning that I have seen. This girl is amazing. Listen and learn - it is only 8 minutes!

Neil has a new book out - The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. I have not read the new book yet but he is already talking about it in interviews.

Sovereign Individual

This week I have been reviewing my copy of The Sovereign Individual - as you know we are living through Chapters 10 and 11 of the book at this time. Click below to have this book read to you.

The main focus of Chapter 10 is on the transformation of the traditional welfare state in the face of emerging digital technologies and the rise of the sovereign individual. Here's a summary:

Chapter 10 discusses how the advent of the Information Age and the rise of technology will fundamentally challenge the traditional welfare state. The authors argue that the welfare state, which has been a central feature of the 20th-century political landscape, will become financially unsustainable in the 21st century.

They predict that as technology progresses, the nation-state's power to control individuals and extract taxes will diminish. This is because technology empowers individuals with greater mobility and global reach, allowing them to escape the constraints of their home country's tax regime and regulations.

The authors also explore the concept of "virtual communities," where like-minded individuals can connect and collaborate across borders, sharing interests and goals. These virtual communities can provide social support and services that were traditionally offered by the welfare state, reducing people's dependence on government assistance.

Additionally they predicted that governments would attempt to retain control by resorting to repressive measures (including wars, restrictions and "pandemics") and imposing strict regulations on technology and the movement of people and capital. However, they argue that such efforts will ultimately prove futile as individuals and businesses adapt and find innovative ways to circumvent these restrictions.

I'll save the analysis of Chapter 11 for another week; of course you can always get ahead of the game and read it yourself - let me have your thoughts - happy to discuss. Recall also that, like The 4th Turning, this was written in 1997.

Interesting as virtual communities are I do rather think that real, physical communities are both necessary and better in many cases. For more on this remember that I have suggested you read The Network State and Sovereign Collectives by Balaji.

Cut the crap - what utter bollocks

This is the first of what may be a series of items in the newsletter that highlight things that warrant a "good pinch of salt" - ie where you are being gaslit and propagandised as part of a psychological operation to enforce control and compliance.

Aliens and alien invasion

This is a good read from Caitlin following the recent US Congressional Hearings. As she says: I know that if I'm assigning degrees of probability, "Extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings are here and take a special interest in us and sometimes crash their vehicles and our government recovered them but kept them a secret but suddenly decided not to be so secretive about them anymore" ranks significantly lower than "Our rulers are lying and manipulating to advance their own interests again."

And there's more

Recall that all official narrative in relation to Covid has been debunked and discredited. These were crimes against humanity and need to be prosecuted as such; many courageous individuals and organisations are doing their best to move this forward as we discussed last week.

Similarly - everything you see in mainstream media about "climate change" and "climate emergency" is likewise UTTER BOLLOCKS. To the extent that there is man-made climate change it is done by governments against their own population (eg the Australian government (and others) causing extensive flooding by cloud seeding (and possibly other techniques) last year, the Canadian forrest fires that were started by government Agents-Provocateurs (and they also prevented local firefighters from working) and most recently the Rhodes Greek Island fires that were also manually stoked - not to mention all those ridiculously coloured weather maps that you might have been presented with.

This link here explains yet one more piece of blatant trickery and lies that the government and media tried to pull off in the last week.

Remember last week's discussion on The Theory of Stupidity from WW2. Then reflect too on the lunacy and criminality of what is happening in Ukraine and all the other political theatre and corruption that is happening around you.

More in this issue

• Photo memories - Cool & cloudy in and around Belfast
• Project Updates - Nostr (so much is happening), VPS services and handy tools
• Plenty of useful links - don't say nobody told you!
• Closing out - Jason's Chronicon and a Primer

🛠️ Project Updates

The following are updates from some projects that I am following and/or supporting and collaborating with. What are you doing?

Nostr is just killing it - where to start?

You must listen to this, the latest review of Nostr development; we have this meeting every other week. The amount of development that is ongoing is incredible. I have never seen anything like it and the results that emerging from open source projects collaborating on this scale with the additional benefit of internet-native real money being exchanged over Lightning and Bitcoin.

Check the shownotes here - a few highlights that I must mention include:

• OpenSats First Wave of Nostr Grants - many worthy projects now funded
• The increasing number of clients that are now favouring Progressive WebApp architecture since this allows to bypass censorship in the App Stores. Primal, Iris and Snort. You will find links to others in the notes.
• Pablof7z is amazing. Check out what he is doing with Highlighter. Listen too to his contributions in the meeting - he has something useful to add in nearly every area.
• Nostr is now being used to support Bitcoin Developments - including: Postr A proof-of-concept for doing payjoin using Nostr, Mutiny Wallet Beta.
• Why should I care about nostr? by Bitcoin Barry
• All Your (Advertising) Models are Broken footstr
• Zapplepay: Zap Even if They Say it’s Forbidden by Tony

Cloud Services and VPS

You might recall that I have been experimenting with hosted cloud services using Linode that is certainly interesting for the ease of spinning up things and testing. However it gets rather costly for longer running jobs and it's pretty pricey if you want a dedicated service (a VPS - Virtual Private Server) as opposed to shared compute.

So I was delighted to discover SSDnodes - you can check their comparisons at the link below. I am really impressed. You get much less features but the prices are dramatically less if you want your own private server with just the essentials and they do have responsive customer support 7/24.

(Re)discoveries of the week

With all the work I have been doing recently in Linux I have got plenty of practice in Terminal and File Manager.

Midnight Commander

I have to say that the Mac file manager is nicer than all of the linux ones I have tried. However Midnight Commander is a real find - this is a power user tool and once you master it you will wonder how you ever did without it. And it works the same on Mac, Linux and PC - brilliant!

You do need to watch this though a couple of times with mc open in the background and try things. It really is only by trying and using this that you will get to be able to benefit from the power that it gives. I particularly like the ease of access to remote systems and file transfer operations between them.

TMUX

If you are not yet using tmux you likely should be. This is just the very best way to access remote servers and other unix/linux based systems. The main advantage is that once you set up your sessions they are retained even when you disconnect. So when you reconnect you can pick up exactly where you left off - even on another or multiple concurrent machines.

Rob's explanations are superb; in this one he takes you step by step through many customisation options that you will likely want to consider and adopt or refine. You should check his channel for all sorts of interesting tricks and techniques that he can teach you.

Syncthing

Next he does a great explainer of Syncthing. This is a superb solution for Mac, PC and Android. For iOS devices he suggests a couple of options. On my part, I have found Möbius Sync to work fine.

In this he does a great explanation of advanced features and you will likely learn something from this even if you think you are an advanced user; I thought I knew this well but I learned quite a few handy tips.

More still...

And Rob tells you his favourite 7 add-on tools - these are all great. Try them.

00:40 - exa 01:36 - bat 02:06 - ripgrep 04:08 - fzf 05:20 - zoxide 06:42 - entr 07:17 - mc - Midnight Commander

And even more

A further 6 fantastic tools - once you have these you will wonder how you ever did without them.

00:20 - rmlint 02:05 - rsync 03:51 - rclone 04:58 - ncdu 06:02 - btop 07:06 - ntfy

Subscriber feedback

And a word of thanks to one of my subscribers who has suggested that I look into ArchiveBox. It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several formats: HTML, PDF and more out-of-the-box, with a wide variety of content extracted and preserved automatically (article text, audio/video, git repos, etc.).

The goal is to sleep soundly knowing the part of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in durable, easily accessible formats for decades after it goes down. For sure I will be looking into this as part of my SSDnodes setup.

Nick Sweeting (the author of ArchiveBox) explains why this is why it is important and though it seems like it should be easy it is difficult in practice. You will understand why tools like ArchiveBox are important and help. I did learn so much from this talk and he gives so many interesting resource links - eg Chrome Headless, Webrecorder and Kiwix with their .zim files - who knew?!

...and that led me on to this interesting one - you may already see why things like this are, and will become, increasingly important.

🔗 Links for your edification

The following are links from my NetNewswire feeds - learn, enjoy and share.

Read and reflect...

This is a short read and I highly recommend it. The ideal sound money system is one in which many currencies, both state-issued and privately issued, compete in a transparent global marketplace. In other words, a system in which participants decide what they value as sound money, liquid means of exchange, etc. in a wide-open marketplace outside the control of governments, alliances or any centralised power node.

And then listen to Jeff Snider explain what's happening in the EuroDollar System which is the real deal.

No Informed Consent

Guy explains the dystopia that is Nigeria. In case you did not know, the population of Nigeria is about the same as Europe (and USA) - so pay careful attention to what is happening there. The empire will be pushing this to you in your country sooner than you would want. Nobody has voted for this and I doubt anyone would support it if they were asked. There is no informed consent.

Recall our discussions on: Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Can you see it yet?

Once seen this cannot be unseen

You may have heard about this but did you notice the woman in Green? Watch and see how she pushes in from behind and reaches out to touch his wrist and then he "switches off". WDYT? Do let me know

You might be interested in Jesús Enrique's expert analysis - albeit inconclusive.

Exiting a toxic and abusive relationship

Last year I missed cancelling my last Evernote renewal - it just went through without any reminder and, with all my travelling ongoing, I just lost track of it. Anyway I have now happily cancelled all future renewals and I have to say that Nick Milo describes very well how the relationship with Evernote became toxic and abusive with good (step by step) suggestions on what you can do about it!

Absolutely the best alternative is Obsidian - we have discussed this before back in issue 11 with pointers to quite a few useful starter tutorials. If you too were sitting on this - take action before you regret it further!

🤔 Closing Thoughts

Follow-up to Jason's paradox video last week. His main work is based on a rather remarkable assembly of historical events, all based on original historical documents and books; he does not use internet-based sources and points out that much original material has been suppressed or reissued in modified reprints since 1902.

His analysis (gathered over 26 years of research) is collated into his Chronicon that is available here to download and freely share - graphical summary is below. As he says: Prophesies are actually historical events written by survivors in retrospect.

If you prefer to have the Chronicon read to you then Nick has a complete reading on his Youtube channel - first reading below.

Jason goes on to explain this with a short 15 minute primer.

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No one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
- Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix

Remember this? From one year ago - this one is a classic. BTC is 33% up from one year ago; or you might say that fiat money is 33% down in one year! Everyone gets bitcoin at the price they deserve....

You have to see it for yourself.

Any questions or anything else? Feel free to comment below!
You can also email me at: LetterFrom@rogerprice.me

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