Category Archives: society

On bad advice

Posted on by
Reply

Let me discuss some ideas that I consider to be rather bad, but which are expressed frequently online, or they exist as a custom, at least regionally.

The first such idea is “stacking silver”, basically converting part of your monthly income into silver and adding it to your stash, as a form of inflation-proof savings. This makes sense in countries where there is no additional tax on the purchase of silver bullion. In the EU, there is up to 25% of VAT on silver, which makes it an enormously bad idea as a form of saving money, since you lose up to 25% of your income on every transaction, and that doesn’t even account for the losses you will incur on sale. Silver is for Americans, and since the majority of silver-stacking youtubers are Americans, that might seem as a good and commonly practised idea; in Europe, it is not. There is a catch, though. There is no VAT on pre-owned silver, so that might be a good idea to buy, but generally speaking, you need to see what makes the most sense in your country and region.

Things that make sense in America are suicidally dumb somewhere else. For instance, investing in the stock market in Croatia is almost guaranteed to give you a loss; I looked at the investment funds managed by the banks here several times and they all reported negligible or negative income. Investing in stocks in the USA is a sound financial advice, at least until the stock market crash wipes you out. Don’t just listen to advice online and think it’s universally applicable. Also, you can’t just put money somewhere and expect it to do well. You need to actively manage it, for instance if you hold investment papers, you need to always have an eye not only on the stock market, but on the overall state of the economy as well, and you can’t just have someone manage it for you, because you need to know when to get out, and I’m sure the investment fund managers aren’t going to tell you that.

There’s a regional custom of giving your children gold coins, usually for religious or educational milestones. I buy mine new computers, because guess what, gold in the amounts I could give them is useless, and computers, in today’s world, are how you learn to create income. You first need to learn how to make money, and for that you need to invest in yourself, in new tools and in acquiring marketable skills. The same goes for your children. You can’t just send them to school and hope they will magically learn something marketable there, because guess what, almost nobody does. For learning how to take care of yourself, in the sense of creating an income stream, school is worse than useless.

My kids tell me they are all communists there and tell them incredibly stupid ideas such as “you need to do the things you love as a job”. How about no. You need to learn how to do many things, have diverse skills, and then figure out which one of the things you can do, or can quickly train yourself to do, will make you the most money, and then make that your job. Avoid things people would like to do, or which they do as a hobby. That’s the financial red waters, places with many sharks or crocodiles in not much water.

Another horrible idea is saving money; not universally, but if you start too soon. If you’re a teenager or living on small income, don’t buy silver or gold coins with your pocket money and think you’ll have a huge stack of money when you’re older. No, you’ll be poor and stupid. Invest in your skills, buy the tools you need to do jobs, instead of buying silver every month rent an online server and learn how to write code, and then sell services online, or something like that, something that will get your income started, something that aims at the broad global market. Don’t listen to people who tell you to mow lawns or wash cars for money. That’s what they did, and it might have made sense 30 or 50 years ago, but it no longer does. You need to establish a global presence, learn to swim in the great ocean immediately, because all the smaller waters are red with blood and sharks. Everybody there is competing with the global market anyway, so the money you can make is terrible, basically your prices are globalized and your marketplace is local. The worst combination you can have. You have nothing to lose from going global immediately. So, for the greatest part of your career you need to avoid saving money; you need to invest it in yourself and your business, because you don’t have a good income yet, and saving a percentage of almost nothing is, well, less than almost nothing every month. Keep your money in your business, in your tools, and in growing your abilities and business contacts. Of course, that will only get you so far, so there’s no sense in overpaying for tools because that won’t get you anywhere, but if you really need that new iMac because you’re writing iOS code, then you need that new iMac. That’s the core tool of your business. But if you’re writing PHP code in Linux, just get a good monitor, mouse and keyboard, and you’ll save lots of money on hardware by not buying a Mac. It all depends on what you do. As a rule, it makes sense to buy the cheapest tools that will get the work done, but not cheaper than that. Depending on your business, you’ll know that point where overpaying for tools no longer makes any difference in your performance, and just decreases your profitability. So, at that point it might make sense to invest that money in hiring people, instead of just throwing it into equipment. That way you can gradually get your business to the point where it’s working even if you’re not. Which brings us to the most important point.

Avoid types of jobs where each additional unit of money means you need to do an additional unit of work. That’s what my father did for a living, and that’s how I learned it’s not good. He was/is a sci/tech translator, and for each 10 EUR of income he had to translate a page of text. That’s a very reliable way of being poor and at a huge long-term financial risk, because when you’re sick or when you need to retire, you’re basically fucked. You need to create passive income, things that produce money even when you’re not there working. You don’t want to be unloading watermelons from trucks and being paid per watermelon or per hour. You want to be in a position where you own a company with ten workers, five of which write/maintain code, five of which sell, give user support and do paperwork, and you want to be in a position of finding other areas to branch into, thinking of ideas about future products, and while you’re doing it, code gets written and products get sold, and nothing had ground to a halt just because you had a flu.

Also, if your parents aren’t wealthy self-made businessmen, you need to understand that everything they taught you was probably wrong, and school didn’t help a bit. I was in such a position regarding finances and earning money; everything I knew about it was wrong, and produced costly mistakes, but I had to stumble along and learn things the hard way, until I got to the point where I’m teaching my kids the things you can learn from wealthy people online, but which I didn’t listen to because everything I knew was wrong and I didn’t know it was wrong. That’s the most dangerous position to find oneself in, because when you think you know how things work, and you’re wrong, you don’t feel like shutting up and learning. Also, while I was learning it the hard way there wasn’t really anything useful on the Internet.

Now comes the strange part: break those rules whenever necessary. Do completely non-profitable things just to help others whenever you feel like it. Save money if you don’t have an obvious investment path ahead of you, and then you’ll have the means to exploit an opening when it does occur. Do incremental work until it’s possible to generate a passive income stream, and even when you have a passive income stream, just to complement it, because income streams fail. Listen to the experienced people, but have in mind that things change and the world today has opportunities and openings much different from those before, and don’t be afraid to plunge into something new and untested, especially if you’re young enough and you can afford the experiments. Do things locally if there’s a good business opportunity, and especially if you can extend it online and create a broader market later. Basically, when listening to advice, including mine, use your brain first, and see what’s actually applicable and useful for your specific situation.

About identity

Posted on by
Reply

There’s another thing where I can’t find much commonality with the right-wing politicians, and that’s identity politics.

You see, they either say it’s a terrible thing and the political left is wrong to embrace it (often citing Martin Luther King as someone who was against it), or they embrace their identity as White Europeans, with a possible addition of Christianity to the identity-definition.

I lose them in both cases, because my primary identity is spiritual. It’s not that I don’t understand or have the lower kinds of identity – as male, white, European, Croatian – but frankly, I would feel immediate identity-level kinship with a black or Asian woman who has a vajra-level soul type, meditates on Shiva and practices sophisticated yogic techniques, and I am surrounded by white male Croats whom I see as basically cattle, empty soulless things bred by Satan in his contempt for God and everything that is holy.

So yes, I practice “identity politics” on a very instinctual and practical level on a daily basis, but my understanding of identity has nothing to do with any physical or even civilisational or cultural traits. It doesn’t even have anything to do with intellect, intelligence, education, or anything of the sort: all my enemies, who worked day and night for years to harm me in every possible way, all share the same superficial identity as my physical body – all being male, white Europeans – and I feel nothing for them but hatred, disgust and contempt.

Most people I felt deepest kinship with are either women from Europe, or men from India, long dead. So this right-wing notion that I should somehow identify with white Europeans against other races, or MGTOW notion that I should identify with men against women, is something that feels incredibly alien. I can identify with St. Augustine, who was a Berber from North Africa in the late Roman Empire, with St. Theresa of Avila who was a woman from the medieval Spain, with Ibn Tufayl who was a medieval Muslim, with several yogis from India, with Buddha or Jesus, but I feel absolutely no common identity with a white male from Zagreb, who is a piece of shit soul spending his worthless life scheming, plotting, gossiping and basically doing everything in his power to harm me, because through me he saw God whom he bitterly hates with every kalapa of his worthless being that is sentenced to eternal damnation in hell, where he belongs for all eternity.

I will rather live in harmony with people who are of different sex, race, culture, religion and intellect, who don’t even speak my language, but whose souls are immersed in meditation on God, than have to bear the hateful existence of people who share all kinds of superficial traits with my physical body, and yet they hate and oppose everything I love and hold dear. So, yes, I’m a racist; deeply and to the core, but I care primarily for the hardness and nature of the soul. Secondarily, I care for virtues and their manifestation in the world. And all that because I care only for God.

You therefore need to understand this: when I express contempt for the Arab and other immigrants into Europe, this contempt is not based on the fact they are Arabs, or that they are Muslim. It’s based on the clear understanding that they are human garbage devoid of all virtues, who came here for free money and easy pussy. However, when I would pick who goes to hell, or whom I would like to commune with in eternity, physical or cultural traits would not even come into consideration.

Who should buy gold and when

Posted on by
2

Let me clarify a few things about buying gold.

Imagine you have a hybrid car. The car can run either on gasoline or on electricity. It is not a plug-in hybrid that can be charged from the grid, it can only be filled with fuel at the gas station. In that analogy, you are the car, refilling at the gas station is your pay check, the amount of gas in the tank is the amount of money you have, and the LiIon battery is gold.

Gold is something you buy when you want to store the excess money that you have, instead of keeping it in the bank where you would get a negligible interest rate that doesn’t cover inflation. In order to have extra money to buy gold, if we’re talking about non-emergency, normal-inflation times, debt generates financial loss as a function of time. Debt, however, is sometimes necessary, because there are worse things than incurring a loss over time. You can gain utility that covers the loss and even allows you to increase your profitability. Debt can sometimes save you from disaster. Reasonable debt, such as a fixed-interest mortgage loan, can be a good long term strategy for getting yourself a place to live. I’m not going to preach against debt here, because people who do usually didn’t have to choose between debt and a terrible disaster, as I have many times. However, when you are maxed out on your credit cards, when you have a mortgage loan and you drive a car bought on credit or leased, it might be a very bad idea for you to buy gold with what little extra money you have. You need to pour concrete into those holes in your finances first. Get yourself to the point where you pay everything cash, have no revolving credit and the only loan you have is a mortgage for the place where you live. At that point it makes sense to put extra money into gold, because then you can actually say you have savings. Before that point, you’re just deluding yourself, because that money you poured into gold would serve a better financial use if you poured it into your credit pit, to make it generate less interest every month.

As I said before, this is the state of things in case of a normal economy. In a hyperinflatory economy, there is a good chance that your debts will be erased by the combined effects of the collapse of banks, state and global economy. This is what happened prior to the collapse of Yugoslavia, during the hyperinflatory phase, where all mortgage loans were expressed in local currency, and hyperinflation reduced them to nothing within months. Basically, the banks were ruined and people got apartments for free. Be quite sure that won’t be repeated quite the same way, because they learned on this experience and all the loans now have a foreign currency (usually EUR) clause. However, I’m quite sure they are not protected from a large EUR devaluation event. If your income grows due to inflation, and your loan doesn’t, you will be able to pay it off rather quickly in the hyperinflatory scenario; however, considering how the banks and the states are known to conspire against the citizenry, they are more likely to be allowed to completely fuck you over and declare an emergency event whereby they will confiscate your collateral (read: house) and evict you. This is of course a point where massive upheaval will take place and the state will likely collapse. Your property rights will remain questionable, until a successor-state forms and settles the matter in some way or another, which doesn’t guarantee anyone any safety. Even if you have perfectly clean property rights, you are likely to be forced to sign it over to mafia at gunpoint and be evicted.

I’m basing my assessment on past events of that kind, which were quite abundant in recent history. If such a disaster takes place where you live, the logic according to which real-estate is a safe long-term investment might prove quite fragile; real-estate wasn’t worth shit in 1991 Vukovar. If you have gold, you can leave the country with it and use it to start over somewhere else. If you have to start somewhere else and you don’t have gold, you are in an incredibly difficult position, because you’ll basically be a refugee who will not be distinguished from the social parasites from the Middle East and Africa. Running away is therefore the last thing I would recommend, but sometimes it is actually the best option, if things get incredibly bad. Why am I saying “gold” instead of “money”? Because if your country is at war, that country’s money is usually in a hyperinflatory phase and is for the most part worthless, especially outside the country. Inside the country it is usually useful for buying day-to-day things and barely making by. The money you have in form of gold is the only actual money you will have. Gold is not practical for buying things on a daily basis, because you need to convert it into paper first, so it’s not something I would recommend during normal times, but in times of a terrible crisis you either have it, or you are fucked.

So, there are basically three forms of gold you might own. First is the gold jewelry, second are the gold coins, and third are the gold bars. Gold jewelry is terrible investment because large portion of the price is not the actual gold, but labour and bullshit.

If you already have it, fine, but don’t buy it with the rationale that you can always sell it later if push comes to shove. It’s a bad idea, because it’s always worth less than you think, it takes up lots of space, is very visible and therefore makes you vulnerable to theft, and you always overpay for it.

The gold coins exist in two basic forms: 1 oz and fractional. 1 oz coins are large enough to be considered mini gold bars. One such coin is around 1300 EUR.

This is the amount you would use in a crisis to buy guns and ammo, to bribe border guards to let you out of the country, or to buy a cow. Those are your safety net in case of a crisis. Consider the amount you would need per family member, and plan accordingly. In the EU, 1 oz Vienna Philharmonic gold coin is the cheapest per unit of mass and therefore the way to go.

Fractional coins (basically ½, ¼ and so on of troy ounce) are the kind you would buy in the EU instead of silver, to pay for the small expenses, as 1 ducat Franz Joseph gold coin is around 150 EUR.

You want to buy the kind that is most common, most recognizable and therefore easiest to trade in your area. The one I mentioned, the 1 ducat Franz Joseph gold coin is the way to go in Croatia, for instance. They are very small and don’t seem like much, but 150 EUR is just that kind of money that makes sense for medium-sized trading, for instance you might get a gun for five of those, or quite a bit of ammo or food for one.

Gold bars are a different matter entirely. You wouldn’t use those as bribe, on the black market to buy food or anything similar. You would use them as money when you want to buy a house. Normally, the bigger the bar the less of a premium you pay per unit of mass, but this function ends somewhere around 250g, and 500g costs exactly as much as two 250g bars, so 250g bars are the way to go.

This is serious money, as one 250g bar is around 10000 EUR. If you can bring enough of those out of the country or region that is impacted by a crisis, you can start anew, but not from zero. Just remember those people carrying their belongings in nylon bags during the Yugoslavia civil war.

That’s what you’ll be able to carry with you if you have to relocate quickly under weapons fire. You’ll have a backpack and two bags. If you have 250g gold bars in your backpack, and each member of the family has five of those, when you arrive on your destination you use those to buy a new house; you are not a poor refugee with only some clothes to his name. However, if you have gold bars, you would be wise to also have some gold coins, for small trading, bribing and getting your family out of trouble on the way. You don’t want to be forced to bribe a guard with a 250g gold bar just because you don’t have 1 oz coins with you. That one bar is ten thousand fucking euros. That’s a nice used car.

And yes, despite gold, you should always have paper money with you, the local kind, no matter how worthless. Always. It’s for paying small expenses in daily situations without attracting attention to the fact that you own gold, because if you’re in a vulnerable position, gold is a liability, beside being an asset.

Mining asteroids for gold

Posted on by
Reply

I recently saw articles speculating about asteroids with high metal content and feasibility of mining gold, platinum and similar expensive stuff there. The calculations is basically that there must be a zillion tons of gold there and if we bring it to Earth the price of gold would plummet because the supply would suddenly increase.

I agree with Schiff’s analysis. However, I would also explore the details, as I once used the “gold is a discovery of a golden asteroid away from being worthless”. At first, this argument is sound, since the value of gold is based on restricted supply, and all the gold ever mined on Earth would fit in a cube with a side of 20 meters.

However, another argument is that gold is extremely abundant on Earth. Earth is unique among the planets because of its extraordinarily high metallicity. That’s why we have a magnetic field at the time where other rocky planets have cooled down and no longer have a core floating in a molten mantle. We have so much heavy elements, that nuclear fission and radioactive decay create over half of the temperature that keeps Earth’s interior molten. A significant portion of that are the elements we would deem precious, such as gold and the platinoids. Also, Earth’s crust contains quite a lot of gold. It’s quite easy to create heavy machinery assisted by human labour here on Earth, and create mining shafts and what not. Despite all that, mining gold is barely profitable.

Now let’s imagine we really do find out that there are significant amounts of gold on some asteroid. You know what would happen to the price of gold on the market? Nothing. Why? Because we still haven’t managed to bring home a sample of material from an asteroid. In comparison to mining asteroids, having a steady population on Mars is child’s play.

Operating a mine, which basically means crushing millions of tons of iron ore into dust, separating what you want to keep from what you want to discard, all in micro-gravity, high radiation and no atmosphere, no food for the workers, it’s such an enormous task, it could realistically be imagined by a Kardashev type II civilization, and we are not yet type I. You can realistically imagine us crushing asteroids for mining when it’s easy for us to terraform Venus and have six billion people living there, and have cities on Titan and Europa. However, at that point adding all the gold in the solar system still wouldn’t be enough to cover a GDP of the size necessary to run a civilization that mines the asteroid field for minerals and creates a Dyson sphere with the remaining material, just because they need the solar energy to operate the thing. Mining asteroids for minerals isn’t something that would be done by Earth. It would be done as a joint endeavour of Mars, Europa and Ganymede, by the Russians and the Chinese who would make up the population of the colonies; Earth would be too busy talking about genders to take part.

A Delta IV rocket launch costs $17,400 per kg delivered to lower Earth orbit (LEO). Falcon Heavy is supposed to reduce the cost to $1700 per kg. Essentially, you have to pay at least an ounce of gold to get a kilo of anything into orbit. This includes an entire asteroid-mining spacecraft, with human crew because a mine can’t be safely operated over more than half an hour delay due to light speed. If an AI could operate a mine in the asteroid field independently, then it would have a Kardashev type II civilization and you would be either apes in a zoo, or fossils. If remote operation is impractical because of the speed of light, AI operation is possible but then you have bigger problems, it leaves you with the simplest and the most practical option of maintaining a manned space station in the asteroid belt, supplying it from Earth, shielding it from radiation and impact in an area full of high-speed debris, dealing with rock and metal dust produced by crushing ore, in microgravity conditions, mining gold, shaping it into a sun sail in order to slowly reduce its orbital velocity and send it to Earth, catch it there by the second crew somewhere in Earth or Moon orbit, melt it into gold bullion and send it to Earth to be recovered.

In short, gold is going to become cheap once the AI running the solar system finds no use for it, but until then, or other cause or extinction, it’s the best place to store your life savings.

Failures at the right-wing

Posted on by
8

There’s no reason for me to criticise the left-wing politics any more. They are so obviously insane that nobody in his right mind needs any kind of argument regarding this. However, I am increasingly troubled by the right-wing apologists, and I’m going to explain my reasoning here. However, this might be difficult since I’ve been thinking about this extensively and the depth and scope of my true analysis will certainly exceed the limitations of a single article. For this reason, I’ll try to start with the conclusion, and then branch the argument further until I get something usable.

The conclusion is that they have nothing to offer that hadn’t been tried already, and the attempts to fix the problems that arose in the historical attempts to implement their ideas gradually produced the mess of a political scene and, on a more profound level, a dysfunctional civilization in the process of collapse.

They offer nationalism as a remedy for globalism, secularism as a remedy for the infiltration of Islam into the social fabric of the West, occasionally they resort to some sort of a spiritually vapid form of Christianity as a remedy for the even more spiritually vapid secular atheism, they assume that the separation of Church and State is the way to go, democracy is implicitly assumed as a superior solution, they never question the concept of the rule of law as opposed to the rule of specific individuals, they never question the concept of shielding oneself from the corruptibility of individuals by resorting to impersonal bureaucracy and legislature, they never question equality of individuals before law, and so on. However, we already are very close to the end-result of following those implicit premises to their logical conclusions, into madness and evil.

What the right-wing apologists are saying now is that they would like secularism and separation of rule from person, but that’s how we got the slaughterhouse that was the French revolution. They say that nationalism is preferable to globalism and internationalism, but nationalism resulted in two world wars of the 20th century, and internationalism and globalism were thought of as remedies for the evils and extremes of nationalism. They ridicule the leftist gender bullshit and extreme egalitarianism, but all those things were the result of accepting the assumption that Hitler was wrong in the core aspects of his politics, and that he was defeated in the second world war because he was wrong, not because he had weaker military and less resources. You can’t be both virgin and fucked. Hitler came to power as a remedy for the leftist madness of the Weimar republic, which was very similar to what we are having today. What the right-wingers of today are tiptoeing around is the fact that Hitler was more right than he was wrong. He was wrong about solving problems with genocide. He was wrong saying that the Germans are a superior race, and then in the same breath saying they need help competing with the Jews in a meritocratic society. He, too, tried to have it both ways – if the Germans are superior, then you don’t need genocide, racial laws, and segregation of the “inferior races”. If you consistently implement meritocracy, the superior ones will win, however the results might not be neatly aligned across racial and national lines, which is why Hitler couldn’t allow it; the results would contradict his ideology. He was right about opposing degeneracy in art, culture and science. He was right saying that the nature and the environment must be protected. He was right stating that the races and people are different and that there are superior and inferior ones, he just couldn’t bear to act as if this was actually a fact and introduce completely meritocratic laws. He was right stating that the genetically defective humans should not reproduce and that human reproduction should conform to eugenic guidelines, he just forgot that implementing eugenics without regard to compassion and love would produce a dysgenic human race. He was wrong about many things, but he was also right about enough things that he ought not be dismissed out of hand without carefully considering his arguments, and he was certainly not wrong enough to be used as a standard for evil and wrongness. However, if there’s something both left and right of today’s politics agree on, it’s that Hitler was evil and that the “good guys” won the second world war. Also, they agree that the right side won the French revolution, and that all basic precepts of secularism are valid. This is why the political right of today is unable to offer solutions that don’t consist of performing a rollback to some already tried and failed state. They have no original, new, radical solutions. Nothing that hasn’t already been tried, and nothing that hasn’t already failed so badly that it produced the main-stream politics of today as an attempted solution.

It’s interesting how the Jews act as if Hitler was more right than he was wrong; they accept the fact that there are races of different value, they just think they are the superior race. They accept the fact that a superior race can use genocide and violence against inferior races and peoples that threaten it, and they use those measures against the Arabs. Basically, the only thing they have against Hitler is that he was on the opposite side and a threat, but they accept his basic assumptions and methods. If they can do this, and they would in theory have every right to assume he was wrong about everything and accept him as the etalon of evil, where opposite of Hitler is good, there is obviously something quite not right about the European right-wing in their willingness to accept the assumptions that Israel, despite all reasons for the opposite, was unwilling to accept. That’s why Israel is, in my opinion, a spiritually much healthier society than Europe. They, at least, are ready to accept the premise that they are the best, that they are worthy, that they have the right to assume supremacy and rule over others, and if something is different from them, it’s probably because it’s worse. If a civilization is unwilling to accept those premises, it ceases to defend its right to exist and to fight others for supremacy and, even existence. If a civilization, or a person, approaches life from a position of cynicism and scepticism towards oneself, it is by definition degenerate and in the process of extinction. If you don’t think you’re the best, you are basically calling others with less scruples to wipe you out and take your place. That’s how things work. You can’t have a healthy, or even sane society if you are unwilling to accept the fact that the same fair rules must apply to everyone, and that those who succeeded under those rules deserved to succeed, and those who didn’t most likely deserved to fail. And you also can’t have a sane and functional society if you are unwilling to inspect those who failed and determine which ones failed due to no fault of their own and help them as a community, and which ones failed because they are no good, and allow them to suffer the consequences of their poor choices and serve as a reminder to others.