1/ After a long hiatus, last month we finally visited my home town of #Bruges. I was moved by its beauty, and inspired by its traditional architecture and highly functional urbanism.
2/ Nearly all of Bruges' construction has gone through a darwinian grind, where only that what's firm, functional, and beautiful survives. Even the floor & street pavement reflects that.
3/ Nearly everything that stands is built out of simple bricks baked from clay — incredibly versatile, durable, and repair-friendly. Featured here is the Church of Our Lady, 13th-15th C, with 115m the third tallest brickwork tower in the world.
4/ The city lives and breathes history. On the excavation site, a digging archeologist told us they were already finding skeletons from the 12th century. On the 15th C Gentpoort, a plaque reads "Through this gate in September 1944, the Germans left the city."
5/ During the night, the traditional architecture, with its simple organic curves, shines even more.
6/ Getting around on foot is incredibly easy. If you live / stay downtown, you'll find four or five supermarkets within a ten minute walk.
7/ A few more photos. The first one is the Jan van Eyck Square, where my great-grandmother ran a newspaper store for over five decades. Behind the bronze statue is where my grandparents had their first kiss, in the early 1950s.
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1/ Incrementum just dropped their MONSTER gold report. As always it has a treasure trove of global macro charts. It is remarkably friendly to bitcoin, too! A selection:
2/ Clearly the invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent financial sanctions, marked a new era for central banks—who are now buying gold much more aggressively:
3/ But it's already since 2015 that central banks around the world have been decreasing their exposure to the US dollar:
1/ Our report from last April predicted “for bitcoin to trade in a range of $22k to $42k, until a new multi-year bull market pushes it well north of $120k.” Now that bitcoin trades at $42k, let’s review our analysis & recommendations in a summary thread.
2/ We’ve been publishing our bitcoin reports since 2012, each time in periods of significant undervaluation. Last April, with the bitcoin price at $26k—60% below the 2021 all-time high—we once again felt the time was ripe.
People find bitcoin when they're ready: "... and then I realized that bitcoin, unlike ethereum, has this finite supply that is slowly coming to an end over time. ... I did purchase a little position." HT @MikeStillBTC
@MikeStillBTC Speaker is @kevinrose, his friend/interviewer @tferriss is sitting on the left. Kevin is the founder of reddit precursor Digg and is known to have been massively bullish on ETH and NFTs for years. Imo this is how the switch to bitcoin begins—one influencer at a time.
For people who've been feeding off of Silicon Valley's horn of plenty, it's been really hard to step outside of their widget-building bubble. Some knew about bitcoin early, but never really "got" it. (E.g. Kevin's an angel at trueventures.com.)
1/ Midjourney has introduced "/describe", which will allow for much more interplay between AI text and AI image tools. Basically you upload a picture to MJ and it'll respond with 4 prompts, each describing the picture and allowing you to recreate similar images.
2/ I was excited to try it with my own work. So the first image is a drawing of mine, the others are variations created by running the /describe prompts. I'm pretty impressed.
3/ The AI can be quite easily deceived. For example here, the color pink in my drawing made the AI believe it was dealing with a flamingo. The simple remedy was to change the word for "swan".
I love the lively fractional reserve banking versus full reserve banking debates. For so long these were relegated to obscure conferences and internet forums. Here is @BobMurphyEcon with a short take on fractional reserve free banking as defended by Selgin & co.
@BobMurphyEcon My personal position is that Fractional Reserve Free Banking is the lawless, libertinist take. "Let's allow fraud because it makes the economic machine run faster." And that full reserve banking is not utopian; it existed on many occasions, often in the most prosperous nations.