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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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Feb 18 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The US military may be weaker than many think.

This detailed post by a retired colonel reviews everything from ground forces to air defenses, and concludes that the US military is overmatched against a peer like Russia — especially in its backyard.
smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl… Image
All the observable parts of the American state are failing. That may include the military, and in more places than Afghanistan. And that means updating our mental models.
Well, it’s not the same country.

The WW2 America could make a B-24 bomber in ~60 minutes [1]. Whereas 2022 America needs 20 years to reopen a bathroom.

[1] pbs.org/kenburns/the-w…
[2] mercurynews.com/2022/02/02/bar…
Here’s a detailed response by @tsprings11 to Nightingale’s essay.
medium.com/@troyspringer/…

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 20
Thesis: the assembly line trained people for the top-down mass politics of the 1900s.

Today's workplace is network-based. With the crucial exception of China, which still builds things, any viable political ideology will scale up what people are doing on their devices.
Put another way: you don't get communism, fascism, or mid-century democratic capitalism without mass production. Top-down politics pantomimed the assembly line. Centralized states told the masses what to do.

See for example:
Today, the West has deindustrialized, while China has industrialized.

Millions of its people are still conditioned to work together en masse in factories. The scenes below are still common.

This may be why it's capable of doing things like the 1950s US, but the 2020s US is not. ImageImageImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 17
Three kinds of DAOs

Autonomous DAO — a group that interacts with a truly self-running smart contract with no admin keys and no CEO

Bureaucratic DAO — a mess of politics

CEO DAO — a single clear leader
Yes, I’m well aware that the A in DAO in theory already stands for “autonomous”, but today’s DAOs mostly aren’t autonomous — so the distinction is worth making.
A non-obvious point is that a single decision maker in a CEO DAO may protect user rights more reliably than the groupthink of a bureaucrat DAO.

No decision makers (autonomous) or one decision maker (CEO) can both be better than a group of decisionmakers (bureaucratic).
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 17
The truckers didn’t have a way to win.
But the Canadian state found 3 ways to lose.

First, they couldn’t censor social, so they lost the narrative.

Second, they went after the money because they lost hard power.

Third, they don’t control hard money, so they’ll lose there too.
We will see how things pan out. Much can change.

But this fits with the thesis that the Counter-Decentralization will fail in the West but succeed in the East.

There was a big push by the Western establishment for retroactive censorship — but it may prove too little, too late.
A state that loses social lacks soft power. No narrative, no obedience.

A state that loses AI lacks hard power. No surveillance, no drones.

And a state that loses BTC/web3 lacks hard money. No seizures, no freezes.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 14
The defining scarce resource of each decade?

2000s bandwidth
2010s attention
2020s blockspace
2030s loyalty
First, get people online.
Then, connect the world.
Next, observe that these new connections cause new conflicts by obviating old borders we didn't know existed.
Add crypto to restore digital rule of law.
Finally, rebundle society after the coming unbundling.
Provable patriotism

When something becomes highly abundant, its scarce complement becomes valuable. Given infinite peanut butter, people want jelly.

So, when we enhance technological exit to the nth power, the systems that arise will be those that engender genuine loyalty.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 6
The primary censorship tactic used today is to single out one actor, then pile so much cost on them that they buckle. In other words, the mechanism used against ostensibly free speech is to increase the cost of speech.
But this tactic doesn’t work against a sufficiently decentralized blockchain. The cost of censoring or reversing a single transaction now soars into the billions, and is technically hard to boot.

A fickle mob wants only to impose costs, not bear them. They won’t pay to censor.
This is why moving functionality on-chain changes the game, and why our first priority to protect civil liberties must be technological decentralization.

From the slippery slope to the crypto cliff.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 5
There's a simple explanation.

For the purely verbal, crypto appears too technical. What's all this about zero knowledge?

For the mainly technical, crypto looks unnecessarily verbal. What's all this about the state?

We usually hear from the former. That post is from the latter.
You can understand gradient descent without understanding history, but you can’t understand Bitcoin without understanding history.
Note that this doesn't mean modern ML/AI isn't important. I spent years doing it, it's awesome.

It's more that "AI ethics" is a bolt-on to AI. The CCP has their own notion of AI ethics, for example!

But in web3 & especially in BTC, the social is inseparable from the technical.
Read 5 tweets

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