Sometimes people get a better sense of inflation in terms of how long it will take their money to have half the value. This method of expression gets more useful as rates go higher. 1200% inflation means nothing but 'money loses halve its value every 3 months' is very meaningful.

To calculate a half-life (H, in years) from an annualized inflation rate (r, expressed as a decimal)

H = log(2) / log(r+1)

100% inflation is 1.00 as a decimal gives H=1. Makes sense. 100% inflation means prices double in a year so money is worth half in a year.

20% inflation is 0.20 as a decimal gives H = 3.8. At 20% inflation cash will lose half of its value in less than 4 years.

Wolfram Alpha can calculate values here.

For western states appearances are functional. Clean cars, bright uniforms, and tidy buildings give an appearance that they are different from the third world junta. The orderly appearances make use of the broken windows effect, where the existence of order makes occasional disorder more actionable.

This can be used in the opposite direction as well. Merely finding ways to make an organization appear disordered will invite others to disorder them.

IBC (Infinite Banking Concept) is the brainchild of Nelson Nash and promoted by Carlos Lara and Robert Murphy.

Rooted in Austrian Economics, it is a practical approach to opt out of the corrupt banking system and take control of your personal and business finances; essentially, become your own banker.

It is not meant for everyday expenses but as an alternative to bank loans for big-ticket items (e.g. cars, homes) where you will be stuck in an unforgiving payback schedule and milked dry through interest.

The optimal vehicle that makes this possible is none other than the humble Whole Life policy. Check your assumptions at the door. You will find that this is far more accessible and beneficial than you think -- especially if you are young.

I know that you will have a million questions and objections, so please listen to podcast episodes, part one and part two for a fuller understanding.

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Net Neutrality is gone. Now let's end local state-sponsored ISP monopolies.

Let's kick this into high gear: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoNetNeutrality/comments/7jv5hs/alright_my_dudes_time_to_get_to_work_cracks/

Studying change as a topic in its own right could provide useful guidance to we who are so interested in producing a very necessary kind of change to improve the lives of the entire world.

To this end, looking at the nature of change itself could provide clues about new directions for activism.

There are two kinds of change that I was thinking about this morning, as I watched a man sweep up some plants, and thought back to my own efforts to remove just a single bush from where I like to park at home. It can be extremely difficult to kill just a single bush, and even then, I did not remove the roots and a year later the root is still there, as strong and stubborn as ever, mocking me. I was able to kill the bush, but its remnants are still in my way, because the amount of effort required to remove the stump and root is gigantic compared to the benefits I would obtain.

Some kinds of change are very hard to accomplish, or are not worth the effort. Trees are hardy because they must be, because nature makes them so in order to survive the onslaught of weather, animals, and time.

This is uphill change, trying to use your own miniscule amount of force against something much stronger than you are, forcing you to chip away at it laboriously.

But this got me thinking about other kinds of change, catastrophic change and how easy it seems.

Some kinds of change happen in an instant and can reshape entire landscapes in the blink of an eye. Some kinds of change require just the smallest thing to go wrong and the whole is destroyed. What is the nature of this kind of change, and how can we identify it?

I think of something like a dam bursting. The water flowing out of a sudden will destroy everything it can downstream, even killing some people if it can. Forget about my bush, a huge flood can uproot entire forests in a few minutes.

And all it takes to bring the dam down is a small concentrated amount of force in exactly the right place, because the dam is holding back a much larger amount of force that the small amount of force is able to set-free.

This is the nature of rapid, catastrophic change. This is downhill change.

Another example of this comes to mind that happened recently, of a person going on their first plane ride who threw some coins into the engine as they were boarding 'for good luck.' Clearly not understanding how an engine worked and why this could potentially destroy the engine.

Why might it destroy the engine? Because of tight tolerances and the rapid spinning. Plane engines need clearance to spin and work, and something getting inside like that could destroy it. In this case, the forces the engine generates can be thrown out of balance and destroyed by an unexpected input it is not designed to deal with.

All catastrophic, rapid change seems to have this attribute, of destabilizing a system which is holding back a more powerful force. And all slow, uphill change seems to have the opposite characteristic, of a large amount of force being directed at a system which is designed to absorb that kind of or amount of force.

Indeed, were I just using my own hands and nails, I would never be able to get that bush out. I chopped at it with an axe. But, had I instead poured gasoline over it, added some dry kindling, and set it on fire, I would've gotten rid of it via rapid change, using the chemical-energy inside the bush itself to destroy itself, and I could've sat back and roasted marshmallows and enjoyed the show.

I only did not do that because we're within city limits and the bush is curbside :P and such is frowned upon.

So let's bring this back to our topic, how can we transmute these lessons into the political sphere, the realm of political action.

I suggest to you that engagement with the political process in the form of trying to get candidates elected and change law piece by piece from within the system is tantamount of hacking away at the bush. The system itself is designed to foil rapid-change and force compromise. What's more, the two major parties control the electoral process in real terms and will not give up this duopoly on power, and have incentive to use dirty tricks to keep this status quo going. See Bernie Sanders 2016 and how he had the nomination pulled out from under him by a decision of party elites, not the people's choice.

The simple fact is that you can spend your entire life trying to significantly change one law, and still not accomplish it, like a certain someone I remember talking about his goal to improve public schooling, he thought he'd have it licked in a few years, and how badly he failed to have much impact at all 20 years later.

So where, in the political realm, do we find a large amount of energy looking for an escape, or which can be diverted from its planned course.

Surely we must look at public opinion as the water behind the dam, and the dam itself could be many things, but we should perhaps generalize it as the public's opinion that their interests are being looked after by the political sphere.

Now, we know this to be false. The political-sphere is rent-seeking on its control of the law to a very, very high degree. And it has dodged public opinion being turned against it by propagandizing the general public to accept its decisions.

However, that boiling discontent remains, because though the public cannot put its finger on how things have gone wrong, they have begun to sense that things are beginning to get worse for everyone, and the political system has begun to break down.

If this bubble of opinion is not burst, then what is in store for the US is similar to the decline that Venezuela has been put through, only slower, where things will get worse and worse economically, but the elites will refuse to stop rent-seeking, and this will turn general powerless society inward against the powerful elites and their allies who live well by their control of the government, and civil war in some form becomes inevitable.

For Venezuela it took about 15 years. For the US, it could take 50 years, a long slow draining economic decline.

How could we burst that damn and prevent a slow-decline? Hard to say. The USSR faced a similar slow decline since the 50's, and the burst came when the propaganda mechanism broke-down with Glastnost and Perestroika, attempts at reforming the system accidentally destabilized it totally. It was abandoned from above, the Soviet elites themselves lost faith in the system, because they could see that the capitalist system was objectively superior.

That is a hard act to follow, unless we built ancap free cities and showed what they can result in.

But there are other possibilities. The US has another unique dam built up, surrounding the US dollar. There are trillions of dollars held in reserve by world-governments, in central banks around the world. This constitutes a huge amount of water behind the dam of faith in the dollar.

The dollar could be, at some point, abandoned by the world and made virtually worthless.

Thus, it is an act of political defiance to withdraw from the fiat currency system and invest in cryptocurrency, or to transact in crypto. That doesn't burst the dam, but it helps make it possible, and insulates you from the burst. The burst could actually be created by enough people streaming into crypto and out of fiat, enough to delegitimize fiat. That is one possible scenario, and the main one the governments of the world want to avoid.

What is another dam-burster we can consider? How about an Article 5 convention. I've had my mind changed on this recently, but in a way you might not expect.

Previously I was against the idea of an article-5 people's convention to change the Constitution. But then it was pointed out that should such a thing occur, the left states have a lot few left-majority states than right-majority states. Now, this doesn't help us directly, as the right is not in favor of our structural-changes either.

But I suggest that in a scenario where an article-5 convention process actually gets off the ground, the result would be a gigantic political deadlock which both republic and democrat would perceive as an existential threat to their very existence!

The result would be a cold-civil war, where the foundational political questions of our society would be at issue. This can only redound to the benefit of libertarians, because the most likely outcome is actually a political separation of left and right states into separate countries.

And if things started going down that path, there would likely be enough libertarians to demand a separate territory for ourselves as well.

Once the assumption of union is off the table, there is a lot of room for alternative political views, such as our libertarian one, to simply demand our own independent territory in New Hampshire or wherever, and little they can do to stop it.

So, the assumption of union is a dam that can burst.

And we can also fight ideas on this score. Both the belief in the perfection of democracy (guffaw!) and the belief in the necessity of a monopolistic central authority, i.e.: the state in order to have a stable society--both of these beliefs can be attacked directly by simply pointing out the facts, and living them out.

My own choice is to attack the belief in the need for democracy and centralized law-production using enclavism to try out other systems and show that other ways are viable.

Tactically migrate away from periodic self-destruction of ‘’states’’ until we reached critical mass. Envisage crisis and use that to secure and maintain wealth over crisis.

This is a good thing to do no matter what you do, unless you want to exploit crisis and have to be in the premises.

There’s 'general chipping away at the state tactics' with one end pushing market solutions and the other pulling away the state solution to make room.

This one’s not about general chipping away. This one is about setting up a foundation. One that can at least project the good of western values into the future. To extend the time we have. Or at most that can become permanently anarcho-capitalist and powerful.

Here we go:

When an civilization and empire fall, there is weakness. There is a transition between the fall and what rises out of it. It is precisely in this transition that intelligent positioning can yield the above foundations on the other side. One can study how the fall of the roman empire transitioned into feudalism and pay attention to those that have turned out powerful on the other side of the transformation, or rebirth.

This is simply a mind opener, to look at this transition period as an opportunity to emerge as a power establishment on the other side.