For decades, the conventional wisdom about Silicon Valley was that it leaned progressive. And by many measures (like donations by Big Tech employees to political candidates), the industry has been aligned with the Democratic politics that dominate the San Francisco Bay Area. But contrarian alternate worldviews held by prominent voices like Elon Musk and Sam […]

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Online propagandists and populist candidates have set their sights on a new enemy: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). These currencies differ from private-sector cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in that they are state-sanctioned and operated. Newly-expressed concerns over CBDCs augment long-running populist disdain for the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Opponents of CBDCs cite the potential […]

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The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank demonstrated in clear terms that financial reality is a shared hallucination. And financial reality, a useful social construct, goes a long way to shaping our physical reality. For the businesses threatened by a potential meltdown of the bank, a cashflow freeze meant the difference between real people getting […]

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Many of us are familiar with the phenomenon of “dorm room philosophy” and its derivative field, “dorm room economics.” Often, it is rooted in the clunky prose of Ayn Rand and the simple, common-sense decrees of Austrian economics, along with the limited life experience common to all young people — particularly young men. Rand’s “objectivism” […]

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War, beyond being just a struggle for territory, is a process. Long-running wars, in particular, have the potential to transform geopolitics, and this is playing out in Putin’s war in Ukraine. Sanctions initially intended to isolate Russia have created a bifurcated world where the G7 nations have shunned the slavic state, while other nations are […]

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