Nassim Nicholas Tantrum has gone from endorsing my book to obsessively insulting me in public without once making any reference to my work.
Why?
Because I refused to join him on his insane cowardly hysterical crusade to shut down the planet with his friends at the WEF.
I was typing him a private message politely explaining to him why his "Precautionary Principle" is such a dumb idea.
He responded by blocking me, insulting me in public & then flat-out lying about why he did it the very next day.
It was the biggest mistake of my career to associate with this lying fraud. We were distant friends when he volunteered to send my book to a publisher & write the foreword. He submit his foreword without reading the book, at the very last minute, when it was too late to change it
His embarrassingly idiotic & irrelevant foreword contradicts the main premise of the book. He still has no idea what bitcoin is or what the book says & he saw writing the foreword as a free option allowing him to take credit for being into bitcoin without having to learn bitcoin
He still knows absolutely nothing about bitcoin (or economics) and his views on bitcoin are purely an ignorant hysterical emotional reflection of his relationship with me.
His recent tantrums confirm this.
He likes to shit on bitcoiners for not understanding trading, and yet still cannot show us how his expertise in trading has allowed him to outperform what bitcoiners do: 200%/year over the last decade.
It'd be funny if there weren't so many people becoming poor listening to him.
Many Lebanese in hyperinflation are ignoring bitcoin because they think this 'world expert on risk' has a point about bitcoin more profound than him just being an inflamed mess
Their currency is collapsing & their risk expert is telling them the only working life raft has no use
The lira is down ~80% vs the dollar in 2 years. The dollar is down ~90% vs bitcoin in that time. Bitcoin allows you to send money internationally without needing your bankrupt banks.
I suggest you ignore his tantrums until he can offer you a better working solution.
This isn't new.
Mr "Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio" has made his career picking on people who show their portfolio, like @CliffordAsness, while always hiding his.
The only public record of his trading strategy working, is that it sells books. He pretends to be an entrepreneur & risk taker, but he's just another washed up trader recycling ideas he doesn't understand to sell to people who want to feel smart. allenfarrington.medium.com/a-tale-of-two-…
It's the same hypocrisy that allows him & his WEF friends to demand the entire planet shut down to protect him from a virus, when he cannot even stop eating the industrial sludge that's made him so vulnerable.
Totalitarians are losers who want to control others because they can't control themselves
Instead of cutting down on pasta, he wants to force healthy people to breathe from dirty cloth & lockdown, destroying billions of livelihoods while he keeps selling books from home
I lost every bit of respect for this liar in 2020. I apologize profusely to my readers for associating with him.
I'll never forgive myself for turning a blind eye to his many flaws & letting him write the foreword to a book he didn't read so he could pretend he knows bitcoin.
The new version of The Bitcoin Standard will be out in a few months and will have a new foreword from the great @michael_saylor, a man of his word, with actual skin in the game.
Update:
Instead of responding to this thread, the hysteric chose to prove it all correct by declaring bitcoin a failure & pivoting to shitcoins!
At least with his new shitcoin ventures we'll get to compare his portfolio to BTC!
Taleb spent a decade terrorizing people on Twitter to sell books.
Then he attacked bitcoin & bitcoiners asked him to show how his portfolio returns beat holding bitcoin, so he locked his profile like a coward & Twitter is now free of his dumb tantrums.
Everyone excited about an Argentina economic miracle is basing it on all sorts of government statistics except the most important statistics: money supply measures and public debt growth.
Under its new supposedly free-market Rothbardian president, Argentina's money supply in 2024 has increased at these astonishing rates:
M0: 209%
M1: 133%
M2: 93%
M3: 123%
To put these numbers in perspective, note that they dwarf the rates during the preceding years, during which Argentina thoroughly earned its reputation as one of the most dysfunctional fiat monetary basket cases in the world.
In the four years of 2020-2023, Argentina’s money supply measures grew at a compound annual growth rate of:
M0: 50%
M1: 77%
M2: 90%
M3: 86%
In Milei’s first six months in office, public debt grew from $370 billion to $442 billion, a staggering increase of 19.4%. Borrowing $72 billion in 6 months can make any economic statistics look good, but the problem of course is in the long-term consequences. It is possible to make short-term growth, poverty, unemployment, or inflation numbers look good by printing and borrowing money, thus transferring the cost of a short-term glow up to the future, where they are paid with exorbitant interest. Those of us who thought things could not possibly get worse might need to reconsider.
Remember that in his election campaign, Milei specifically campaigned on a platform of abolishing the central bank, even saying that that was non-negotiable. Yet as soon as he went into office, all such talk was ignored, and replaced with elaborate stories about how shutting down the central bank would be very politically unpopular. In this, Milei has fully adopted the same statist rhetoric that is always used to justify inflation by governments: the short-term pain of stopping inflation would be so bad, that it's better to continue down the path of inflation and ignore the long-term consequences. The reality is that the Argentine central bank is bankrupt, and the sooner this reality is acknowledged, the quicker it can be overcome. Trying to save the central bank can only be done by piling up debt obligations that will make the future problems even worse. In this, Milei is no different from all his predecessors who sought short-term relief at the expense of the future.
Milei has also refused to default on the public debt, which would have been the Rothbardian solution to finally free his countrymen from eternal debt slavery to pay for the consumption binges of their previous presidents. A default on foreign debt, and a shuttering of the central bank would have caused a few months of painful adjustment, after which the Argentine economy would recover on a solid footing, without even the possibility of a government being able to create inflation or saddle the population with debt. Foreign currency and bitcoin would likely dominate such an economy, and the state would necessarily be limited by the fact that it cannot print money.
By not shutting down the central bank and letting it ramp up its money printing, Milei is sowing the seeds for currency crises in Argentina’s future. By not defaulting and hiring the same bankers who brought calamity to the country in the previous administrations, it seems Milei is eager to get another IMF bailout, which will saddle Argentinians with generational debt slavery and more fiscal crises in the future. Unsurprisingly, he is raising taxes significantly, illustrating that his understanding of Austrian economics is no deeper than the regurgitation of cliches on TV. To increase taxes in order to facilitate more government borrowing is a crime against the people of Argentina to benefit the international banking cartels and the IMF criminals. It is a tyrannical recipe advanced by the Keynesians at the IMF, and has no relation whatsoever to what any real economist worth his salt would advocate.
A lot has been made about Milei reducing the budget deficit, but this is not that important. Argentina’s problem was not that it had a big budget deficit, as its budget deficit has usually been pretty low, under 4% of GDP, the same range as European countries with no major inflation and fiscal problems. The problems have always been in money supply increase and in public debt, both of which have accelerated under Milei in an unprecedented way.
The cherry on top is that Milei has shipped off the little remaining gold Argentina has to London, in search of some yield. Pawning off a politically neutral monetary asset free of counterparty risk in search of a few quick bucks does not inspire confidence. In his book The Ascent of Money, historian Niall Ferguson details how Argentina’s economic problems began when president General Juan Domingo Peron visited the central bank in 1946 and was astonished at how much gold was sitting there. Argentina had more than 1,000 tons of gold at that time, and Peron and his successors would not resist the temptation to finance their spending by running down the gold reserves that should have been backing the people’s money. The past 8 decades of calamity were the predictable consequence. After billions of percentage points in inflation and countless defaults, Argentina’s gold reserves today are no more than 61 tons. By shipping off the last monetary reserve of the future in exchange for a quick buck to allow him to keep paying off debt so he can get another IMF loan, Milei has completed Peron’s inflationary legacy to its logical end. Argentina now has no money of its own, only an ever-growing pile of liabilities from foreign banks replete with political and economic risks. Rothbard must be turning in his grave every time this Peronist invokes him to justify his actions.
This data is astonishing and flies in the face of the hype. But unless someone can show me why this data is wrong, then, for all of his libertarian and free market rhetoric, Milei is a vintage Latin American populist inflationist, buying short-term popularity with long-term inflation and debt, essentially no different from every Argentine leader since Peron. All that his free market rhetoric seems to have achieved is to trick poor Argentines into trusting their broken central bank again instead of trying to find a working alternative like Bitcoin. His anti-socialist rhetoric is nice to listen to, and his hysterical antics, relentless emotional crying, and triumphant theatrics may be amusing to some, but fate usually serves its cruelest dishes to those who celebrate before victory.
On a personal note, I found Milei’s recent attacks on Hans-Hermann Hoppe to be ridiculous. Hoppe was absolutely correct: Milei has not shut down the central bank or defaulted, which would have been the correct course of action for anyone who understands economics and is interested in the wellbeing of the Argentine people, rather than power. Milei simply insulted Hoppe and called him an idiot who doesn’t understand economics. And yet, rather than offer an actual economic argument for keeping the central bank, Milei offered a political argument, straight from the Keynesian textbook--the same argument used by every socialist and Keynesian political leader in history: inflation is needed now, in the short term, because the political costs of stopping it would be too devastating.
To pretend that this is some deep insight into economics is ridiculous; it’s simply a political strategy argument for Milei to remain in power. Putting aside the matter of whether Milei and his fellow socialists and Keynesians are correct, it is ridiculous for Milei to call Hoppe ignorant of economics for not understanding the most elementary and moronic political argument for central banking. The insinuation that Hoppe doesn’t understand economics because he’s an academic whereas Milei is a real world leader achieving results on the ground is also nonsensical. Hoppe--or any random 16 year old--could also achieve everything Milei has achieved in Argentina if allowed to saddle the country with $72 billion of debt in six months and double the money supply in a year.
It would have been far more instructive for Milei to explain why he himself spent his entire electoral campaign saying that closing the central bank was essential and non-negotiable. Was Milei also an idiot who didn't understand economics then? Or is he just another lying opportunist inflationist politician like the ones he made his name attacking?
Israel is too PR savvy to just kill 2 million Gazans. Instead, they're systematically destroying all essential infrastructure to create a humanitarian crisis where disease & starvation will kill many of them & force neighboring countries to take the rest as refugees
#GazaGenocide
It will only take a few terror attacks or false flags from the West Bank to do the same thing to the 3m Palestinians there. This has been Zionism from day 1: PR-optimized ethnic cleansing to acquire as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible.
There's been practically no serious effort by Israel to target Hamas or its leadership with the carpet bombing of Gaza. The goal is to flatten all buildings & turn Gaza, already one of the most densely populated parts of the world, into destitute tents. edition.cnn.com/2023/10/25/mid…
When was the last time you found yourself supporting the complete destruction of the lives of 2.2 million people because you've been manipulated into believing in collective guilt like a criminal moron?
"Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings"
You have to be a complete retard if you think the systematic destruction of Gaza is about targeting Hamas, which this Israeli government has worked hard to support over the years. This is just Israel's national sport: ethnic cleansing
~50% of Gaza's population is under 18.
~75% were unborn/too young to vote in the last election in 2006.
Do they all deserve to have their lives destroyed over that vote?
How would YOU like to be held personally responsible for everything your government does, forever?
This serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most interesting and original recent works in political philosophy: Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein's The State in the Third Millennium.
Prince Hans-Adam proposes self-determination & the right of secession as the basis for political organization, as opposed to the fiction of popular managerial oversight over government.
Apple users don't get to tell the CEO & engineers what to do; they simply decide to buy or not buy. Since Apple can't force them to buy their stuff, the only way they can sell it is by making it good enough for people to willingly buy it.
Bitcoin fixes renewables by bankrupting all fiat governments that subsidize electricity from intermittent sources, forcing TV-watching virtue-signallers to come to terms with thermodynamic reality: a choice of hydrocarbons vs cold, darkness, poverty, primitiveness, & early death
Wind & solar are unpredictable & intermittent, so no sane engineer would ever connect them to an electric grid, whose entire point is to provide reliable power regardless of weather. Only fiat makes this insanity possible.
When sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow, the cost of electricity from solar & wind is infinite. Modern technology, from fridges to baby incubators, relies on steady power, which means solar & wind require backups for their entire capacity, which makes them entirely superflous
There is no inflation if you accept you are poorer!
#TheFiatStandard
"British households and businesses “need to accept” they are poorer and stop seeking pay increases and pushing prices higher, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, has said." theguardian.com/business/2023/…
See #TheFiatStandard hashtag for countless stories leading to the BoE's conclusion that you can fix inflation by learning to have fun staying poor