Category Archives: economy and money

Democratic technology

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I have a weak spot for “democratic technology” – meaning that you can be a kid with very little or no money, and still be able to buy it and use it to learn and start getting your initial experience making money. As a teenager, I had posters on my bedroom wall with HP Integral PC, Compaq Portable 386, IBM PS/2 and a HP 28c calculator, when other boys had posters of cars, girls and football stars; you can see where my priorities were. 🙂

I still have a weak spot for good quality pencils, calculators and computers, into which I projected almost magical qualities of compensating for my limitations. The irony is, I ended up in a place where I do almost all the heavy lifting in my head, and use computers as glorified typewriters, but I digress. 🙂

So, what’s the “democratic technology”? It’s basically the stuff you can actually buy and do all the work you would otherwise do on the hardware you dream of, but can’t afford.

Today, democratic technology is a cheap Xiaomi smartphone, a desktop computer you built from cheapest new or used components, running unlicensed Windows or Linux, or a laptop along similar lines, all bought with pocket money, allowing you to access stuff on the Internet that allows you to learn. Interesting, it’s very rarely the stuff that’s designed and marketed as “democratic”, such as a Raspberry pi. I would actually not recommend that as a computer for kids, because it’s seriously underpowered and not inexpensive enough to be worth the effort. You can actually get a used i5 laptop for the order of magnitude of 100 EUR, which would be greatly preferred. This would be something along the lines of a ThinkPad X240 i5-4300u, which would run either Linux or Windows, and you can install an SSD and add more RAM if required. Such a machine could be used to surf the web, learn Python, PHP or C, and basically get you started in a position where you are very low on money, and very high on motivation. Interestingly, laptops seem to be a cheaper solution than desktops, when you add everything up.

Similar examples can be found in other areas as well; photography, for instance. You can buy a ten year old digital SLR with a lens or two, get cheap macro extension tubes from Ebay, use some free raw converter such as RawTherapee, and that will get you started. Heck, you can use a smartphone to learn composition if you can’t afford a proper camera, but I’ve seen things such as a Canon 30d with a kit lens for the order of magnitude of 50 EUR, and that would be a very good way to get you started. What can you do with a 8MP camera and a kit lens? If you can add a cheap tripod, you can do this:

With only a smartphone, you can do this:

Sure, I wouldn’t attempt large magnifications from phone images, but we’re talking about learning here; in that phase, you could take excellent equipment and produce shit, because you don’t yet know how to pick light, don’t understand dynamic range, don’t know how to compose, or even how to hold the camera still. A phone will do for composition, colour and dynamic range; an old dSLR with a tripod will allow you to learn everything else.

It’s not my field of expertise, but with a piece of paper and colour pencils you can learn how to draw, and then use a cheap flatbed scanner to digitise your drawings and use them as illustrations on websites you design, to give your work a unique look. Or you can learn how to draw in some digital tool, such as Inkscape.

Sure, you need to compensate for technical disadvantages with skill and talent, but the “democratic” part of my point is that you don’t “pay to win”; people usually get the fancy gear only after they got rich using the basic stuff everybody has, or can get. If you have something meaningful to say, you don’t need a Macbook Air to write it down; any computer will do. Heck, a smartphone with a bluetooth keyboard will allow you to write books and articles if you don’t have anything else, although I wouldn’t recommend it if you have options. However, after you had been doing that for long enough, you’ll probably start healing your frustrations caused by inadequate gear the way I’m doing. 🙂 Sure, I could do it on a 386. Been there, done that, didn’t really get a t-shirt, but I did get trauma induced by having to delete the unnecessary multimedia files such as moricons.dll and *.wav from a Win3.11 installation in order to be able to fit my code builds on a 85MB HDD, and edit rich text files of the Ventura Publisher in a DOS text editor because the machine simply didn’t have enough RAM or CPU to edit the tables in the GEM GUI. Sure, it can be done, and you can get started and dig yourself out of the pit with very few resources, compensating for the drawbacks of your tools with some ingenuity. However, fuck me if I’ll do it anymore, now that I have the money. 🙂

Some musings about money

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I’ve been thinking about something for quite a while now.

When I was much younger and had just started working with people and writing, I had very little money, and the people I worked with at the time for some reason found it impressive how I seemed to not care about it at all – I would wear torn clothes, buy a used computer somewhere and work with it, drive a shitbox, and seem not to perceive the entire material sphere, instead focusing on spiritual realities and energy work.

What troubles me there is that they thought this was a good thing, that it’s fine for “spiritual people” to be poor, that it’s somehow a positive status symbol of spirituality or whatever. It’s not. They saw that I don’t care about matter but they were wrong – I didn’t care about it while I was working with them, because they were the priority. The entirety of my focus was placed on trying to get them to overcome their limitations and get the taste of transcendence, so to speak. However, when I was alone I had rent and bills to pay, groceries to buy, car to service and fuel, and not enough money to cover almost any of it. I didn’t wear ragged clothes because I didn’t care about my appearance; I wore them because I had no money, and I truly didn’t care about my appearance when I was doing more important things, so they kind of made a flawed conclusion that this is how things are supposed to be, and anything else represents a spiritual downfall.

Of course I cared about money – I had constant problems caused by the lack of money, that I could never truly solve. However, the fact was that people I worked with tended not to have money, and the people with money tended not to care about me, and my priority was to focus on people most receptive to what I wanted to teach, not teaching people who could be of most material use to me. Sure, I made some compromises, namely continuing to work with some people whom I would otherwise have sent away sooner due to them showing no perspective, due to them “bankrolling” my work with talented but broke people, and in only one instance this turned out to be a bad idea because the person in question turned out to be coercing and manipulating others with money and created a really toxic atmosphere that made everybody’s lives more unpleasant and difficult. The concept itself isn’t bad – you see, anything else makes an implicit assumption that the teacher himself should bankroll the entire operation so that he would be independent of any kind of financial pressure or free from financial concerns that could otherwise bias his selection of students and general approach, or that money is such a bad thing that you should never give it to good people who are doing useful things, especially if you’re not the only one incurring benefit. The concept that people with money should support things that are of spiritual use not only to them, but to other people who might be better positioned to benefit from it than themselves is perfectly rational. Furthermore, people who support good and useful things with money incur a karmic benefit.

But to return to my situation – I had very serious and persistent financial problems, but I did not allow this to influence my choices and work to any great extent. I never rejected a poor but qualified student, or spent less time with them than was needed to produce optimal outcomes. It’s just that I allowed some more affluent, but unqualified people to hang around, thinking no harm can come from it, and they might pick up useful things in the process and acquire spiritual benefits. You see, it wasn’t that I really had that many options. I could have abandoned the whole thing, returned to software engineering, made a career in that and have no problems with money, however I felt this would have been a waste of life, because I felt I had to contribute to the world in the most meaningful way I am capable of, not merely in the way that people would pay the most money for. The result was that I was poor for decades, but, in hindsight, I can say that I did the best I could and followed the line of righteousness that made me essentially immune to all kinds of karmic attachments and backlash that normally destroys spiritual people.

So, no, I wasn’t poor because that’s a good thing. I was poor because people with money didn’t give a fuck about what I did, and even some people I did work with thought poverty suited me just fine. Of course I could have used a car with air conditioning back then, and a computer that is actually capable of editing a book cover 600 DPI TIFF, and has a screen bigger than 15”. The thing is, good things tend to be owned by people who have the money to buy them, not the people who need them the most. However, that’s not the part that irritates me. What I found really, truly humiliating is the attitude of some of my then-students, who sincerely thought that good things were too good for me, and shitty things are just right, and liked the feeling of being financially above me. Of course I could se that in their minds, it was more than obvious, and this truly pissed me off, because it reeked of contempt and disrespect.

Another thing that pissed me off were the people who arrogantly criticised me as being materialistically disposed and trying to personally benefit from others by charging money for my books. Putting those books on the market was hugely expensive for both me and my students, in both money and labour. It was a significant sacrifice to make those books available to a wider audience, and it came with a spiritual blessing that was to awaken the presence of God in people, that would grow and overcome everything else if they chose to allow it. What I expected in return was that they buy the books, so that the financial load on my students would be reduced, and, possibly, that I could pay the bills without being a burden on them at all; it looked like a karmically beneficial thing, a way to spread both the benefit and the load. What I got instead was an opportunity for all kinds of worthless assholes to denigrate and humiliate both me and my work, and this made me very angry, especially since some people made it a point of pride for themselves to offend me for making the effort. It made me so angry I withdrew the books from the market and physically destroyed all the available copies, and I also withdrew the blessing. No, the books are not available for free in the digital form now because I’m more spiritual now or anything. They are free because of my contempt. You see, I earned substantial amounts of money in the payment industry, by charging a percentage for a service of navigating through the maze necessary for supposedly high-risk businesses to get a merchant account in order to sell their goods and services online. It was frequently some highly questionable stuff, such as the online dating sites, but I always had a feeling of a clean and transparent business transaction. I was never insulted or humiliated for any of it – quite the opposite, I was the respectable businessman and a gentleman who provides a valuable service to others. The only time I was exposed to deliberate ridicule and humiliation and treated as if I’m defrauding the naive and doing it all for money, and called a worthless and stupid poor person who wants to get rich by scamming others, was when I made the choice to endure financial hardship in order to provide the greatest benefit to others that I was capable of. This truly traumatised and offended me, and I feel that this is a mere shadow of God’s cold rage directed at those who offended me then, because what I did was expose the presence of God in this world and make it available, and all the contempt was in fact directed at and felt by God, and God didn’t like it one bit, let me tell you that. All the contempt, ridicule and abuse hurled at me went straight to God. All the thoughts of how shitty stuff is good enough and just right for me went straight to God, and let me tell you something: I am very glad God isn’t that angry at me.

So, at this point I live in a place that’s too good for what those people would wish for me. I drive a car that’s much better than they would let me have, I wear a watch that’s much more expensive than they would approve for me, and write this on a computer they would deem much too powerful and good for what I need. Fortunately, nobody really gives a fuck about their opinion any more.

There’s another implicit premise the worthless people assume – that if a man of God works for God, he should be paid by God, not by them. No, that’s not how things work. A man of God is the presence of God in this world, and God doesn’t actually like you or think you’re worthy, because He knows what you are, and you need to pass His tests, because that’s how things work – you don’t test God, or place demands God should meet, because you’re not the ones in charge and nobody asks you how things should be done. No, God tests you, to see if you show promise. God tests you by taking something that is a known absolute quality, such as His own tulku. A test for you is for this person to be presented before you, and you have to decide what it is, and how you will treat it. Basically, it’s like having two places presented to you, and you need to decide which is heaven, and which is hell, and then of course you go to heaven of your choice. God tests you by showing up among you every now and then, and you have to decide what that is, and how much it is worth to you. And then you go to a heaven that’s created for you by your choices.

CIA controlling your sources and money

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There is strong evidence that CIA is editing the Wikipedia.

However, if you think it’s the only source they are manipulating in order to provide you with their “facts”, you are too naive for this world. You see, what is usually called the “main stream media” in the West, is basically the CIA. They give you the “main stream”, and if you want actual facts, you need to carefully sift through “discredited conspiracy theorists”, of which some are crazy, some are giving you the truth, and some are both.

The political class in the West, both opposition and the government, is pre-selected by the CIA, except for the politicians and parties that are laughed at and discredited by the media – those actually represent your interests, but if you vote for them, like people did for Trump, nothing will come of it because the actually elected politicians are sabotaged and the next election is carefully rigged to remove them from office, and then possibly imprison or kill them.

If you want to know what’s actually in your interest, make an intersection of all the things main stream media tells you is bad, laughable, ridiculous, criminal and dangerous, and go for it, because that’s your only hope. If they say only criminals would use encryption, use encryption. If they say only criminals would use crypto, use crypto. If they say only criminals would use gold, use gold. Those people divide people into three groups: sheep that trust them and are exploited and occasionally culled, when it’s good for the environment; “criminals”, who are the competition and who act independently; and sheep dogs, the police and the military, that keep the sheep obedient and “criminals” controlled. They have only two weaknesses: they are sensitive to revolution, which is why they try very hard to brainwash the sheep and keep them docile, playing video games in virtual reality and not paying attention to the physical world, and feeding them propaganda about the next group they should hate. The other thing they are traditionally sensitive to is running out of money.

The present situation, as I see it, makes all the governments in the West highly sensitive to bankruptcy, because they have been persistently eroding every productive force in society and feeding parasites and madmen for quite a while, in their anti-meritocratic, anti-capitalist policies, and this genuinely looks like they forgot how and why things work, which is good because it imposes a limit on their efforts of eliminating individual freedoms. You can’t finance the giant oppressive system that feeds useless immigrants if you’re broke. However, before they go bankrupt, they will do their best to completely drain all the useful resources from the system, and impose unseen methods of totalitarian control. Imagine a credit card that is rejected if you’re not sufficiently vaccinated, chipped, or if you didn’t make enough public displays of support for the current thing. Yeah, not hard to imagine because that’s how things work now, it’s just that now you have alternatives, such as cash. However, cash is being increasingly limited because “it’s good for money laundering”, which means it’s something you can use to escape totalitarian control, so they are working on eliminating it by making steps toward some central bank digital currency that will be controlled from a central place and all alternatives will be outlawed.

That’s their most vulnerable point, because if that digital currency is not adopted, and people start transacting in gold-backed stablecoins, they are fucked, and that’s exactly what we need to do – face them with a situation where over 90% of population is non-compliant, because they can’t deal with that. They can only deal with situations where 90% is compliant, and they violently oppress the rest. When nobody accepts their shit, there’s nothing they can do. Furthermore, people only use their fiat money due to inertia, because that shit isn’t backed by anything and has no actual value other than people accepting it out of habit, because it all works. However, since the governments have inflated the fiat currencies to the point where this system will break, they intend to replace it with another system, which will give them totalitarian control over whether you eat or not. Basically, obey or starve. You see, Bitcoin is shit represented by a gold coin, but why not use crypto that’s actually redeemable in gold on demand, eh? Something that’s actually a pointer to a gold coin. Yes, it’s excellent for money laundering. It’s even better for blocking totalitarian, anti-democratic shadow world government that works on your enslavement and extinction.

Transact in crypto. Settle in gold.

Recession

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Take this as an observation based on my personal experience with several recessions and growth cycles over the decades.

The way you can tell we’re at the peak of the growth cycle is the generally positive social attitude towards overt displays of wealth – people driving expensive cars, wearing expensive watches and other trinkets, and so on. The social attitude is, basically, aspirational – “good for him; we’re all doing well, some are doing better than most, but we all aspire to be there”. There’s abundance of money in the system, and there’s an abundance of people having lots of money, as well. The attitude is that if you don’t have money at that point, it’s your fault.

The way you can tell we’re entering recession is that the attitude towards boastful displays of wealth grows increasingly negative – an increasing number of people either lost their jobs, or had their salary cut, or the prices grew; the pension funds went bust, some people couldn’t pay their mortgage and so lost their homes, and so on, and the attitude is that we’re all basically fucked and trying to make ends meet, and the goal is no longer to make the most money, but to survive to the other side of this. The attitude towards wealth is no longer aspirational, because it’s seen as a dream we had to abandon and will most likely never reach, so displays of opulence are seen as someone poking at our wounds, intentionally reminding us of our misery and loss, and the rich people who don’t understand that the times had changed might find themselves at the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been noticing this souring of attitude towards fake and real displays of wealth for a while now, which, to me, signals recession, and not only recession, but widespread pain of recession, that is not being acknowledged by the media, which makes it worse because it makes people assume it’s probably just them and not everybody else, and they feel as if they should keep up a facade of opulence in order not to stick out and be seen as losers, and keeping up the facade is increasing the financial pain. So, whenever they see someone who is buying a fancy new toy to show how well they are doing, they feel this as pressure to keep the expensive pretence and hasten their financial ruin.

Usually, when it’s publicly acknowledged that we’re in a recession, there’s a collective sigh of relief because then people feel they are allowed to show signs of adversity, because it’s seen as something that happens to everybody – they can keep wearing old clothes, sell the expensive car and get an old beater, not buy wasteful trinkets as holiday presents, and so on. Even the rich people usually have enough sense to tone it down, because they don’t want to be seen as the only ones not suffering; when everybody is doing well, doing better is good, but when everybody is doing poorly, doing better might single you out for retribution.

We are in an unacknowledged recession.

Preparations

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Nothing extreme seems to be going on, but I have a feeling that “something” is around the corner and things might quite suddenly go to shit, so I’ll write down what I think makes sense to do.

Spiritual preparations

From what I can tell, the last warning was given around this time in 2020 – get your affairs in order, acquire and keep spiritual detachment from this world, orient yourselves towards God, basically live as if this might go on for a long time, and yet be ready to leave at any moment. When the warning was given I had the feeling that what follows will be a relatively long period of “nothing”, which will make people not take the warning seriously, and then the lightning will strike in an instant, and then they’ll whine that they haven’t been warned. Apparently, you can’t win – if you issue a warning and the event you’re warning against follows quickly, they whine that they haven’t been warned early enough to do anything constructive. If you warn them early enough, they laugh at you and say that obviously nothing happened and you’re deluded.

Financial preparations

You already know what I’ll say here – keep all savings in form of physical gold and silver. Ensure that you have access to it and that it isn’t kept in some building with armed guards who will keep you from entering in a crisis. Don’t trust the system – the banks and the states will conspire against you. The corporations will obey the laws, and the laws will be made by the people who couldn’t care less about you. Keep as much money in the bank as you need for the monthly liquidity; bills need to be paid and you need to be practical about it. Also, keep enough cash in case the banks become defunct, but not too much – cash is a necessary intermediary step between banks not working and you having to resort to gold and silver for expenses. My rule of the thumb for cash is always keep at least 200 dollars or euros per person, and don’t exceed the amount you need for food, fuel and medical expenses per month. This is not even that much of a “prepping” advice, it’s a common sense thing, because the credit/debit cards are known not to work occasionally and you need to have backup. Any kind of debt might become fatal, in the sense that if the banking and financial system becomes defunct, you will not be able to service your debt, but the banks and the states will conspire to simply take your collateral without even asking for your input in any way. Some kind of emergency measures will be taken and everybody will get fucked, except for the rich people in power. They will do the fucking.

Physical preparations

Shelter, food, water, medications, hygiene products. Try to stock up on things you need that might become unavailable if foreign trade is disrupted – detergent, soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and so on. Try to have everything you need to keep in touch with family and friends in case of emergency – at an absolute minimum, a smartphone, charger and a battery pack to keep it working in case of a prolonged power outage. Keep a “return home safely” backpack ready and take it in your car whenever you go far enough that you would have a problem if you had to return home on foot in case of a total traffic collapse. Keep spare bottles of drinking water in your car – it costs you nothing to have them there, and it won’t go bad, so it’s cheap insurance. If you have multiple residences, keep a cache of food, water and other stuff at each location. Keep your car ready at all times. The absolute minimum you must be able to endure with your cache of food is two weeks; the absolute minimum of drinking water supplies should be two days, if you can rely on the utilities working. In any case, do the best you can. I am aware that if the water and electricity are permanently disrupted, it’s game over, and having your own off-grid water and electricity supply is just not an option for most people. However, assume that what you have locally will keep working, and whatever is sourced remotely will be unavailable, so stock up on that well in advance, while the prices are still normal. As for the gadgets, having computers behind an UPS that filters power is recommended; having a radiation dosimeter that is able to detect alpha and beta sources, in order to check if food and water are safe, is great. Having a battery-powered radio to be able to hear the news in case of an emergency combined with a power outage and Internet failure is good, but you probably already have one in your car. Having a quadcopter drone in order to be able to see from a high vantage point and check the surroundings out of your line of sight is useful. Having a bicycle that will give you mobility in case there’s no fuel for the car is very good. Absolutely have at least one battery powered flashlight per person, and a cache of both rechargeable and alkaline batteries at each residence. Having a garden where you can grow some food is great in case of a prolonged collapse.

Summary

The point of preparations is to return to God with your soul in good condition, and to avoid as much of misery, suffering, destitution, starvation and other joys of material existence as possible before that.