“Hell yeah, we’ll take your savings.”

Given the behaviour of  governments just this year alone, where

• in Canada having the wrong political views could get your bank accounts seized,
• The US seized the  foreign reserves of two sovereign nations
• European banks are frantically seizing assets of persons with surnames ending in ‘-ved’ , ‘-nin’, ‘-tin’, ‘-lin’ or ‘-ov’
• Russia, for their part, is seizing assets of Western companies within their borders

Jeftovic’s bigger point is that it’s not safe to keep your cryptocurrency on an exchange. While Jeftovic is right that leaving your crypto investments in the hands of a dodgy exchange is straight madness, no matter how you store it cryptocurrency is intrinsically insecure. Given that cryptocurrency is entirely digital, cryptocurrency is about the least safe place to keep assets unless they are entirely secret. Good luck remembering or hiding those keys. Robbers have been known to visit crypto-tycoons and quietly confiscate their entire holdings. Pretty good wages for a bit of surveillance and a couple of hours of hard work.

It’s like 16th century pirates maps. Most of the treasure just disappeared under a palm tree on an uninhabited island:

One well-connected tech-industry figure said he knew someone who kept the keys to $350 million worth of cryptocurrencies in a physical safe and had another contact who buried the private keys for millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies in a forest for safekeeping.

Who knows how many golden goblets and cases full of jewellery and gems are still buried. The descendants of those pirates for the most part trod this earth miserable and broke.

Dad was a pirate, usually caught within three or ten years and then keel-hauled or hung. All of dad’s visible wealth was confiscated by the forces of justice in favour of the Crown. Pirate dad’s descendants, where they existed, were either enslaved or enjoined into the navy. Most of the descendants of pirates were métis as the only women out in the South Sea or the Caribbean were natives.

Moving back to modern times, if CryptoDad managed to keep his crypto wealth secret from the government, partially by never using it or never trading it publicly for assets, then CryptoDad has committed a tax crime. Deliberate fraud, and omission counts, has no statute of limitations.

“Fraud is deception by misrepresentation of material facts, or silence when good faith requires expression, which results in material damage to one who relies on it and has the right to rely on it.”

Jeftovic doesn’t go far enough. Even holding your own keys is enough.

As crypto continues to develop as a pirate and undeclared asset, one can expect that the IRS and the US financial system (this will hit us in Europe as well in many cases) will change statutes to make crypto based fraud – “hidden assets” – a multi-generational crime, with the proceeds subject to confiscation. Hence, the only viable way to play crypto at this point (and it will get worse) will be to report holdings and report income. If you cannot make money trading in and investing in crypto in jurisdictions where it is legal and while declaring your income, eventually the authorities will catch up to you. It’s not just the IRS who are tracking crypto-investors and traders. Here’s advice from a UK tax lawyer:

“Remember, with any sale or other disposal – such as a gift to someone else – a Capital Gains Tax liability will arise, even if the sales proceeds are reinvested in another type of crypto or in other more conventional assets.”…

“If you buy and sell crypto regularly, or as part of a business trading in crypto, you will be liable to Income Tax instead of Capital Gains Tax on your trading profits – after setting off losses.

There are micro-investors who could slip through the sands here, of course. Just as over the centuries there have been small time pirates, robbers and burglars who managed to acquire substantial assets via their trade. I don’t like the odds in the digital age, with unlimited record-keeping and permanent spying. Everything is filed now in Utah, in the CIA’s huge data-centres – this includes email, especially Gmail or Outlook or Hotmail, but not limited to, all centralised instant messages (WhatsUp, Messenger, Slack), all social media (Facebook, Twitter, of course and many of the more obscure ones too, including VK.com from the public posts). In the good old days, records were paper and difficult to store and maintain. Many of the statutes of limitations were based on the impossibility of presenting a reasonable case after five years, as the documents would all be gone and the case would be mostly hearsay.

Steps to elude the techno-gulag

Now documents are forever, at least at a state level. We are prisoners of the technocracy. The sooner we realise that we all live in a giant gulag, far beyond what the Siberian gulag which Solzenitsyn survived and described, the better for us. Some ground rules include:

• reducing your social media profile (if you wouldn’t want to see it printed on the front of your local paper, don’t put it online)
• taking care what you send in email
• if you are dealing in real secrets, find an old laptop whose OS you can live with and physically remove or disable all radios and networking. I know many lawyers who own such a computer and keep it in a locked safe. This already affects journalists and should eventually affect writers.
• do not have substantial conversations via telephone. There was a brief golden age of cellphone communication where it was possible to obtain a true burner phone with no ID shown or attached to the purchase of the SIM card and where the conversation was encrypted. At this point, anonymous SIM cards don’t exist and all call records are filed, with most conversations recorded and filed in parallel.¹

How to keep your wealth safe

Sadly there’s almost no magic answer here. Personal real estate enjoys substantially more protection still. For now the government is loathe to turf the families of white collar criminals into the streets.

Cash is very helpful. Transact in cash where you can, as that leaves no record or what you bought or where your money came from. This only helps in relatively small amounts but a little bit of privacy goes a long way to disrupting investigation. Family businesses like ice cream shops and street stands can still do a good portion of their trade in cash, although I’ve heard France is making this much more difficult in 2022. If half the profit of a cash-business stays in cash and is distributed among the principles in cash, and spent in cash, that is a substantial improvement in quality of life without attracting undue attention.

File your taxes and file them accurately. There is still a fair amount of scope for legal deductions, make sure to know your tax code well. The people at the top always leave a current dodge in the tax code for themselves, whether making mortgage payments tax deductible, removing income tax on dividend payments or allowing unlimited presents to family members. As far as I know none of those dodges are currently in place, but they have recently existed in some European jurisdictions.

Do not put wealth offshore. There was a period of about fifteen or twenty years where the “smart” upper middle-class money in Canada, the UK and Europe was setting themselves up accounts in tax havens and slipping. There were countless guides to how to do it, respected tax advisors built-up helpful contacts. The end result was an endless string of leaks. Even UK celebrity football players were punished for ostensibly legal offshore film investment schemes, some of them made homeless. These days everyone who puts wealth offshore gets caught. Even golden boy Vladmir Zelensky has been caught red-handed stashing over a billion dollars offshore. Zelensky knows the only way he and his family will be able to hold onto that money is via favour of the realm, as a protected party, in this case the USA and NATO.

Never grow attached to your money. Somebody can always take it away. A good technique is to give away a lot of it to family and business partners in small pieces. Pursuing all the bits and pieces through an extended social network is still hard and unpopular work for the tax authorities. This contradicts some of what I’ve written above, but what I’m talking about is breaking off pieces of the small fortune to allow it to naturally disappear beneath the froth of life. A generous (wo)man is always popular and it will always be easier to rebuild your fortune with all that good will among your community and extended entourage.

Fate of CryptoDad²

The Golden Age of Crypto is almost over. CryptoDad is a pirate and will finish as pirates almost always do – chased by the authorities, hounded to death. Clever CryptoDad is in touch with good tax lawyers, declaring his main holdings and converting them to real property before the collapse of crypto and/or the implementation of new anti-Bitcoin, anti-cryptocurrency laws.

Image from promotional images for Amazon’s Black Sails series.

A Brief History of Ponzi

Charles Ponzi became famous as a result of the mania he created in 1920 in the midst of the post World War depression. His scheme involved convincing the public that he had a profitable business (arbitraging price differentials in International Reply Coupons, or IRCs). But the market for IRCs was too tiny to plausibly support the many millions of profit that Charles Ponzi claimed to be making, so suspicions grew and his scheme collapsed. He started with nearly nothing, made millions, lost the faith of his investors, and finally pled guilty all in the same year.

The stock market mania in the 1920’s then led to the Great Depression, and in the 1930’s a chain letter craze swept across the US.

The first MLM scheme was invented right after we nearly destroyed the entire world in 1945. Using the concept of the endless chain and the pyramid structure, Nutrilite (bought by Amway in 1972) saw explosive growth in 1945, growing from $2000 in revenues to millions. Using the sale of vitamins as a cover, Amway to this day is primarily a recruiting scheme. New recruits must pay money to the company. They are paid by finding additional recruits to join the company. By the 1960’s these pyramid schemes had grown so large and complaints became so common that lawmakers came very close to making these schemes a federal crime. But the bill failed to pass both the House and the Senate, so the Federal Trade Commission took over the handling of complaints. The FTC only handles civil cases rather than criminal cases. By the 1970’s the FTC shut down Amway’s two largest competitors. However, Amway’s leadership had strong political connections, enabling them to pressure the FTC to look the other way. The case was made that Amway is selling products. Therefore, it is not a scam. Around 1980, Amway began using a new term for schemes involving endless chains and pyramids. They called it Multi-Level Marketing to legitimize and differentiate themselves from virtually identical business models that had been shut down. A central theme to MLMs is the belief in some variation of The Law of Attraction. If you think positively you will be successful; if you lose money with MLMs the problem must be that you are too negative.

One of the greatest bubbles in history was the dot com boom. Right around the bottom of the dot com crash, in 2003, Chris Moneymaker made history when he won the World Series of Poker. What was remarkable about him was not his unusual last name, but the fact that he was the first to qualify for the tournament on an online poker website. He was perceived as an average Joe who decided to go for it, and he inspired the masses to follow in his footsteps as he showed that anyone could do this. Over the next several years, interest in poker exploded. You could go online and make easy money with poker because the average player was not very sophisticated. Of course, they were all weeded out over the years, and today, only highly skilled players can make any money consistently. While poker isn’t generally considered to be a Ponzi game, it briefly became one during the Moneymaker era, as easy money could be made due to the large number of new entrants eager to part with their hard-earned cash.

The US housing bubble and subsequent GFC led to the collapse of Madoff’s Ponzi.

Years before Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi collapsed in 2008, whistleblower Harry Markopolos warned the SEC about Madoff, but was ignored. The Ponzi wasn’t exposed until people tried to get their money back during the financial crisis. Around this time, Bitcoin, the biggest Ponzi-like scheme of all time was invented. Just like in an MLM such as Herbalife, the money that’s made heavily relies on new entrants entering the game. On meetup.com, since about 6 months, ago, new bitcoin and crypto related groups are popping up every week. On subredditstats.com, you can see that crypto has consistently been the hottest topic this year. There are reports now that half of all crypto investors entered within the last year. Crypto’s growth is the result of a highly effective marketing machine. Browse through any comments section of an economics or finance related Youtube video, and you’ll find it’s littered with posts that market cryptos. In order to appear near the top, the comments appear along with numerous fake replies and fake upvotes.

We have not yet reached the stage where people come to the realization that cryptos are a modified version of the game of poker. They way you make money is by being a better trader, while all the money comes from other traders playing the game, while the house takes its cut through transaction fees and selling tokens that cost nothing to create. Clearly, as crypto matures, the only possible outcome is a community of highly competitive traders who are always on the lookout for new marks, so they can make easy money. In other words, it’s a game of poker.

What astonishes me is the nonsense merchants talking about how new and revolutionary crypto-coin is. Anything which requires enormous energy to create meaningless numbers is basically digital macrame. The people pouring money into cryptocurrency remind me of the Indians accepting glass beads as precious stones.

Those beads were worth something, until they were worth nothing again.

Image: Casino Bratislava by Eugen Bernath for the film Casino.sk

Apparently this left space for the sales team to make a two decimal point typo and sell the NFT for 0.75 of an ethereum coin instead of 75 ethereum. In the real world, clerical price errors like this are usually undoable on high ticket items. Not so in the dog-eat-dog digital world. The sale happened instantly, with no redos.

In the comments to “Bored Ape” NFT Sells For Just 1% Of Expected $300,000 Price Tag After Fat Finger Listing, [jzerohedge](https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bored-ape-nft-sells-just-1-expected-300000-price-tag-after-fat-finger-listing) notes:

The fact that people buy things like this and bitcoin shows just how stupid we all are and is the reason why all of these psyops by TPTB work so well.

It is things like this that they use to measure the stupidity of the people. When people adopt things like this, we have reached peak stupidity and they can influence the masses to do anything… like take an experimental vaccine and force your children to get it.

jzerohedge is right. To my eye, buyer gets worthless digital junk for 1/100 of what idiot buyer was prepared to pay. The whole episode sounds like part of a poorly conceived, dystopian science fiction movie. The worst Twilight Zone episodes made more sense than real life today.

The rules over at MoA are fairly strict. Simple name calling or out and out falsehood or MSM appeals to authority (i.e. NY Times) won’t fly there. So visiting would-be trolls are always experimenting with new techniques.

The latest tactic is early thread jacking. There’s a character by the name of Paul who always posts an anti-Russia or anti-Putin diatribe, whatever the post subject. Defanging his venom always grabs the attention of a few of the keenest mind and any thread quickly goes off track. If the deliberate derailing wasn’t bad enough, “Paul” now posts first on a regular basis, killing every thread dead in his tracks. Whoever is posting as Paul is clearly using software to get new post alerts.

What to do about a machine enhanced troll? Always first, always the same message. Certainly an assumed identity under a bland biblical pseudonym, as Hoarsewhisperer notes:

I’ve always assumed ‘paul’ is either Caroline (We Con The World) Glick or Masha (Putin’s an eevil dictator) Gessen. It plagiarises some of Gessen’s memes and abrasive phrasing idiosyncrasies.

Dealing with the substance of Paul’s allegations ¹ is beyond the scope of this how to. This article is about how to handle early bird thread jacking trolls.

Structural problem of Paul: Paul is a lurker with automated software to alert him immediately to a new thread. He jumps in first or within the first five posts to spill his poison.

Potential solution one: “Just ignore him” as James advises is a big mistake. That means almost the first information than newcomers, search visitors or occasional readers of MoA read is Paul’s smears of Putin. So as in this thread we all take our shot at Paul’s bait. Problem here is the thread goes off-topic. Instead of focusing on Israeli, Saudi and American war crimes in Syria, Palestine and Yemen (among other places) or illegal sanctions (China, Russia, North Korea, Palestine, etc…), we are defending Russian foreign policy on our heels.

Potential structural solution two. Ban Paul;. Just don’t let Paul comment at all. That is not what MoA is about though. Unlike the SJW/progressive or alt-right sites in the US or most mainstream sites in Germany or UK, b doesn’t ban people for dissenting. To receive a blanket ban at MoA, it’s necessary to either threaten, harass, incite illegal acts or spam. This is an impressive policy and prevents the site from acquiring too much of a “me-too” backslapping atmosphere (see alt-right and SJW sites above). Paul doesn’t overtly violate the rules regarding threatening, though he comes close on spam. Banning Paul altogether would be against b’s and MoA’s founding principles.

Potential structural solution three. Paul’s main technique is to derail discussion with an early post. As Paul likes to knock b’s threads off the rails and seems to be doing so in an automated way (there’s no way Paul just happens to be first so often), it would be fair play to hold his posts and let them out later in the comment structure.

I.e. Paul comments first with his usual anti-Putin vitriol. Paul’s comment is held. When comments get to about thirty to fifty (average thread seems to be seventy to one hundred twenty these days), b releases Paul’s comment with a date/time stamp that put it in real time at comment 33 or 42. This allows Paul the right to interact with b’s material without derailing every discussion. If this lack of priority attention causes Paul to go elsewhere, hélas. If this lack of priority attention causes Paul to create sock puppets or alternative egos, ban those (that is openly violating the rules of MoA or any well-run forum which includes no sock puppets or masquerading).

Keeping the trolls from breeding is dull but essential husbandry to leave room on the trails for intelligent conversation. Delaying derailing comments is an almost transparent way for a publisher to keep discussion open without losing control of the comments section.

1. Let’s take a sample first comment from 17 June:

More claims by Israel that it is coordinating with Russia on its demands that Iran leave Syria and its threats to force same – ie blazingly illegal threats and demands. Russia denies none of this, that I’ve seen, and says nothing in response to Israel’s criminal threats to attack Syria and to dictate to Syria, to attack both of its allies and country comrades in arms.
This is that Russia, by the way, who claimed to stand up for international law – or yeah maybe that was all just empty words from a very empty man, Putin, words from a cipher.
More than that, Israel claims and seems to be coordinating with both Russia and the US towards attacks in Syria and maybe even on Iran?
Russia has turned backstabber in this war and maybe that was always its intention. What it wanted from the beginning was leverage, as far as I can see, a place at the table of power, a hand on the levers controlling world trade in oil – basically a place of power in the Hegemon’s gang. Russia’s best friends now appear to be Saudi Arabia, Israel and – it hopes – the US.

First, let’s look at the Substance. Paul alleges at various times that Vladimir Putin is some kind of offshore trillionaire or is betraying the Syrian, Crimeans, Chinese or whatever deal Russia’s president happens to be working on.

Trillionaire counterpoint. When you wield the kind of power Putin has: 1. you don’t need money 2. money will compromise you 3. you will have no access to your money if you are ever pushed out of power (whether regime change or organic political change). Vladimir Putin would not be foolish enough to put his (financial) eggs in a Western basket at this point. Yes, he may have some assets safely stored away in Malaysia or Iran but really there is nowhere either his money or his person would be safe if the US were successful in orchestrating a colour revolution. See Colonel Ghaddafi and Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Counter-point: Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were able to keep most of their ill-gotten luchre ($5 to $10 billion), though Ferdinand Marcos only survived two and a half years to enjoy them.

Syrian counterpoint. Paul writes:

Russia denies none of this, that I’ve seen, and says nothing in response to Israel’s criminal threats to attack Syria and to dictate to Syria, to attack both of its allies and country comrades in arms…This is that Russia, by the way, who claimed to stand up for international law – or yeah maybe that was all just empty words from a very empty man, Putin, words from a cipher. More than that, Israel claims and seems to be coordinating with both Russia and the US towards attacks in Syria and maybe even on Iran?

Paul seems to be suggesting that the President of Russia conduct an on-going twitter war with Israel’s prime minister and every other senior Israeli official. This is not how the President of Russia conducts business. He makes careful public policy statements and deals in facts on the ground.

Right now Russia is hosting the football World Cup (a bad idea in my opinion as long planned major sporting events give the West too much leverage for too long over Russian policy) which it does not want disrupted in mid-event (for those who don’t know a FIFA World Cup is over one month of non-stop football) with countries like Spain, France and Germany withdrawing their teams (all of those are realistic contenders), with Denmark, Sweden, England all standing actively by to support such a mid-event boycott. Rocking the boat right now would be silly.

After the Maidan debacle during the Sochi Olympics, I can assure you the army, navy and air force are standing by near Ukraine and in Syria. Starting a war of words which would provide justification for overtly hostile acts which could quickly escalate would be undiplomatic and stupid.

As President of Russia, Vladimir Putin shown himself to be diplomatic (search uncoy), highly intelligent and very brave (see meeting the angry families of the Kursk sailors almost alone or facing down the US in Syria in September 2015) with a long track record. Anyone expecting rash acts from V. Putin is either foolish, misinformed or deliberately spreading misinformation. After months of observation, Paul has firmly placed himself in the misinformation category.

An investment retirement guru is convinced that millennials don’t know how to invest and are missing the opportunity of a lifetime to invest their money in a stock market.¹ which has never been more overpriced (ridiculous multiples) since 1929.

I have been stunned recently by some of the discussions I have had with some of my own children’s friends and relatives about finances and investing towards a more secure financial future….in talking to my own son, he states that his friends (ages 25-40) are afraid of the markets…. Some are even putting cash in a safety deposit box! If there is ONE thing I can never mention enough is that if you want to have a secure financial future, YOU need to save as much as you can, as soon as you can for as long as you can. Along with that, is to spend LESS than you have coming in, forever. Even if you do not invest a dime in the markets, you will do better than nearly 70% of our population!

I can agree with the Dickensian final sentence.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

While the stock market beats keep your money in cash in safety deposit boxes, I would not agree that the stock market is the way to secure your retirement. Strategic real estate investment would be a more prudent strategy.²

Investing in Real Estate instead

The retirement guru’s suggestion about compound interest suffers from poor data. Assuming 8% returns is wildly optimistic. The United States has just come back from a huge real estate scare in 2008 where prices dropped by as much as half. Otherwise alternative retirement advice to the young would be to buy a first property in which to live as soon as possible. When you’ve paid off most of that, buy an investment property. When you’ve paid off that it will be time to upgrade your principal residence and later time to buy another investment property.

You would hit retirement with between three and ten properties, an income and the ability to trade down your principal residence. And your money will never have been in the hands of someone else.

Millennials’ Hatred of Wealth

In the ensuing discussion, a woman called Qfactor blames the inability of millennials to save on their hatred for wealth. An economic version of “they hate us for our freedoms”.

Sadly, there is a cultural component to the Millennial generation that makes them think having money is a bad thing. If you’re rich, you’re evil. Corporations are evil, conservative politicians are evil, etc. Happily, these kids will probably inherit more from their parents than any previous generation, and once they find themselves rolling in wealth, they’ll realize that they want to preserve it for their own children. At least that’s what I hope for my daughter’s sake…
No toys for me, but my partner bought a plane last year. I do love to travel, but I have an annual budget for that already and it’s built into my retirement income projection. I’m just stunned sometimes at my daughter and her friends, though. They seem to think that there is moral superiority to being a burden on society because at least you’re not a horrible rich person hoarding money from others. It’s a complete misunderstanding of the American principle of independence and self-sustaining income.

Qfactor’s comments are exceptionally amusing and unintentionally self-mocking. Qfactor’s daughter has a vision of a better world where wealth is distributed more equally and power is taken from corporations. According to Qfactor, this is wrong. Qfactor is a modest woman. Her modest love is travel. She owns a private plane but it’s okay as it belongs to her partner. Based on Qfactor’s capacity for self-delusion, it looks like America has finally reached the end of the line.

Roman Empire and America

The tales from Rome were accurate. Rome had entered into a cycle of opulence, decadence and corruption, from which it would never recover. Something like the United States now. The good news for Americans is that it took hundreds of years to bring about the fall of Rome. The bad news for Americans is that human development is travelling about eight times faster in the last fifty years so the last forty years count as 320 years.

Qfactor’s daughter is largely right. North America consumes more than a quarter of the physical energy and the wealth generated by the world just to continue to exist. The United States has the least efficient health care system among first world nations. The United States has both the most prisoners in the world in sheer numbers and leads even by percentage of the population incarcerated (ahead of Russia, China, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba – what does that say about human rights). The ocean is literally drowning in plastic and slowly being poisoned. The ocean!

Qfactor loves her travel, buys airplanes and blames her daughter (she shouldn’t take it personally, Qfactor is the symptom and not the cause – just the concrete example). It’s not the millennials who are at fault – it’s those of us who knew better and chose not to do it or fight for it. The previous generation get a partial pass as they were fighting Hitler and did much to even the social system after the second world war – giving most of our parents the chance to do succeed. Success that we are busying trying to restrict again to only the children of the privileged.

Roman Slaves vs the H-1B and Service Jobs

Mick challenged my characterisation of the modern United States with Ancient Rome:

You are repeating a myth, promoted by conservative Roman thinkers, such as Cicero, or Augustus, for their own political purposes (purposes which are too complex to explain here shortly). Later on this same myth was kept alive by Christian thinkers in an attempt to justify their own anti-pagan campaigns.

It seems to me his characterisation of the Roman situation applies just as well to the United States of today as to Ancient Rome:

What is true in the myth is that because Romans imported so much slaves, many free farmers went bankrupt and this created a class of unemployed people who flocked into the capital, living dependent of donations from the rich people and the state.
What created this unemployed mass in the capital was ever increasing wealth disparity and the institution of slavery, not some mythical moral failure. The people who had money, bought slaves, and since the slaves worked for free, the free farmers could not compete against their work and went out of work. Then their lands were bought by the rich who sent slaves to farm them. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. (A nice predecessor for automation, btw).”

Mick notes the process is similar to automation. It’s also similar to outsourcing and to the H-1B exemption visas (which undercut American born programmers and devalue the not inconsiderable expense of a first rate technical education). Effectively Rome’s free farmers are today’s small businessmen and the “deplorables” living in flyover country. The same problems with Senate, Congress and the Presidency exist. Since unlimited corporate donation was permitted in 2014, effectively the United States live in a plutocracy of the multinational.

Anyone working a low-end service job today is effectively a slave. If the parents (or a rich aunt) have money, they can buy a modern slave out of slavery by giving him or her an education and opening some doors. Slaves were occasionally freed in Ancient Rome as well.

Noblesse Oblige or Revolution

What the elite of the United States seems to have forgotten (or never to have understood) is the concept of noblesse oblige. Those of us who are fortunate are ethically obliged to try to improve the lot of those less fortunate. That’s the core social contract of a healthy society.

Fairness can be implemented through either private (Henry Ford, the fair wage) or public means (European socialism) – the important element is the attempt to equal the playing field and the understanding of the rich that when they take too much they cripple society and cultivate revolution. Disparity is just too damn expensive in both material terms (crime, prisons, court systems) and quality of life (violent crime, no-go zones, police state).

The really rich think they are exempt from these quality of life issues thanks to high fences and private security. Ask John Paul Getty, sr, jr and III how that turned out. They would give you an earful. Or Roman Polanski when his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was taken from him. There are no fences high enough or security tight enough to ensure quality of life in a society wracked by disparity.

Retirement: we’re worried about our retirement (and for good reason), while other (working) people cannot feed their families tonight. It remains that land/property title will be the last of the investment categories to fail (apart from physical gold, although good luck with safe storage on that one). Hence even if you are a pessimist about the direction of modern society, rather than owning a large stock portfolio, it would be more prudent to slowly amass real estate through your working life.

None of this rules out speculative investment (bitcoin) or strategic investment (big medium term investments in sectors you know well for professional reasons).

Really Long Term Investment

Millennials like Qfactor’s daughter who believes that the current plutocratic and corrupt political structure needs reform and that we must de-fetishise consumption are the only ones fighting the good fight. Until we rebuilt our economic system on ecologically sound principles we are fighting each other over a shrinking prize. The amount of potable fresh water accessible to the cities of the world has fallen by about 30% in my lifetime, thanks to industry, transport and in North America, most of all fracking.

United States politicians are falling over each other to defang and destaff the EPA (it started long before Trump). Apparently Americans don’t need clean water. The US solution for the looming pension shortfall: kill everyone over fifty with cancer via water mains or via pesticides in your food. Killing and disposing of tens of millions of near retirement citizens is an enormous logistical challenge. What better way to do so than via the water mains and grocery shelves.

The millennials better come up with a better economic system than plutocratic war capitalism or the world they hand on to their children will be unrecognisable.

For awhile, I tried getting up at seven-thirty just after her (she would want an extra half hour with the mirror) and walking her to work.

That was the best part of my day. Getting up together, having a cup of tea and walking Eliska to work was a joy.

But when I cam back to my desk, my mind drifted for a good three hours or so while I tried to take advantage of those splendid morning hours.

Unfortunately I have a biological clock inherited from Joseph Stalin – Stalin regularly kept the Kremlin running until 5 in the morning.

So what would happen is the morning hours were at about 25% productivity. Around eleven or twelve I would switch into high gear again and get lots done until about three, but then I would fade. After some afternoon sport, returning to work in the evening I couldn’t get anything done.

Eliska would be back at seven thirty, say, again – and the day would be over. No question of going back to work after a nice dinner with her – I didn’t have the strength.

Left to my own devices a work day looks more like getting up at anytime between eight and nine am. When I wake up my mind is supercharged and just raring to get back to last night’s wars or start in on new big jobs. The employees roll in to the office at about ten but I’m already going at 100% so I don’t have much time for meetings with them and just tell them to get to work. Sometime around eleven or twelve I come out of the jetstream to check in on how they are doing.

Now it’s time for email and mundane activities. Later in the afternoon, it would be sports time again – a time I would use to refresh the mental batteries, to solve problems on my bike, or when on the water – when I came back in the evening, my mind would be at full speed. My body would be eager to get some sustenance (preferably high protein and bio quality raw vegetables) and get back to work.

Between eight pm and one am are golden hours in which any problem could be solved, any paradox resolved.

Paul Graham in his essay on “How to Start a Startup” describes the golden hours thus:

The key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them. So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that’s a wasteland after 6:00 PM.

To return to the girlfriend problem – she is none too happy to have her man wolf down some dinner, talk with her in a fairly detached way and race into the office rooms (our place is huge). Now would be the time for some real talk, some drawn out lovemaking, watching a film together (she is a cinema buff) – or in the worst case if it’s towards the end of the week and we want to get out or seem other people, walking out to meet some friends for a drink.

More Smiles Like This Please, Dear Eliska

This way of working clearly doesn’t fit into her world. The solution would be to cut back on the days we see one another – but make them real dates, for which I have to be prepared. As scores of the most delightful women from most of Europe can attest, when my head is in the game, I am one of the best dates around. I listen attentively, am genuinely interested in the deeper side of the other person, have an active sense of humour, am just provocative enough, have boundless energy.

Unfortunately, I like to work a lot. So the girl who is there every day gets the short end of the stick. Not because I like or love her any less – au contraire I adore her – but because I have to get back to work. I also fancy myself building our future, so I have some trouble grasping her impatience. But putting it out on paper like this, it’s pretty clear why.

Anyway getting back to a positive solution, the idea is to cut back the number of days we see one another. So the one or two weeknights are like the most fabulous dates she’s ever been on. Ballet, delightful restaurants, walks under the stars, kissing at the bank of the Danube, impromptu Cuban dancing.

When she’s not here, normally Eliska likes to talk to me on the telephone between 10 or 11pm while she is getting ready for bed. Usually that’s my worst time for a telephone conversation. There are two versions possible here:

1. Work is going really well and I just don’t want to be distracted. The conversation inevitably does distract me if it goes beyond five minutes. So either I’m curt – a royal piss-off for any woman – or I do get distracted, which in turns either irritates me or sends the work right off the rails. In which case we would have been better to just spend the night together.
2. Work is going really badly and I am going at it hard trying to get something positive out of what seems a lost day. The telephone call would be a welcome interruption but poor Eliska will get more grief than anyone would ever want as he or she crawls between the sheets.

I tried to solve this problem by forbidding her to call me before she went to bed. She was not happy about this strategy at all. She needed this bedtime talk.

It’s not that I refuse to talk to her at work. Anytime in the afternoon – the noon to three space – is conventional work, the kind done by producers (I used to be one), executives, and master salespeople and managers every day. Talk to this person, explain this problem, make that call. It’s all good. But that evening time is sacred. It’s the second work day which allows me to run two companies. Even when we get bigger and there are more shoulders to carry the workload, those golden hours in the evening will still be precious.

One way I solved this while Eliska was here almost every night was that I would have dinner with her at eight or nine and spend the time with her up until around twelve. After she started to fall asleep I would get back up and work until about three or three thirty. There were three problems with this:

1. Eliska was none too happy to have me gone. Usually she would get up at two thirty in the morning to tell me time for bed on her way back from the loo.
2. The quality of the work time was pretty lousy. The golden hours are eight-nine until one a.m. By starting back in at midnight (eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty), there is not enough physical resources most nights to hit a big problem. So I’d be reduced to running through emails and patchwork fixes, rather than targetting anything big.
3. The physical toll was very high on me. Heading to bed at about two or three leaves me rested like an angel for the next day. When I am playing catch-up until three-thirty or four, even for me that’s not enough sleep. So I’d be a little bit slower the next day.

The two advantages to this system are not small ones. First, our sex life was quite good and frequent. Second, most people sleep much better after a rending fulfilment.

But the winning formula here would be those two date nights per week. For the evening telephone calls, we’d just agree to keep them short and that it would be Eliska’s turn to talk to me and not for me to talk to her. When you are concentrated on something else, it’s much easier and less disruptive to listen than to articulate your own inner state. She says I talk too much anyway and she’s probably right.

How does that scale to living together – the natural and short-term goal – and later having a family?

Part two of that question – having a family – is a bit tricky and I’ll have to wait on an answer to it, I just don’t have enough experience. I have a feeling that it partly involves large houses and live-in nannies. It also involves some compromise on work hours.

But for living together, the solution would be to keep the date nights. On a non-date night, we might just eat together briefly and do our separate things. There would be no disappointment on her end. She’d know that it wasn’t a date night – and she’d know that tomorrow is. On my end, I would also know that – and would be inspired to redouble my efforts to be able to go on the date with a light heart. I’d also know that I was expected to show her a good time and eager to do so. There is nothing more wonderful in this world than making the woman you love happy.

More Candlelit Dinners Then, Dear Alec

On the work nights, if Eliska sees her friends, she sees her friends. If she wants to go to the movies with her friends, she goes. If she wants to have the friends visit, no problem. They can do whatever they want in the rest of the apartment. When I have a free moment, I’ll come out to play for a few minutes but otherwise it would be do not disturb.

Of course, it would be great if Eliska could get a job which would let her start at nine am. At that point, I could certainly just twist my biorhythm to getting up together and kissing the morning together.

Apparently I’m not the only one having trouble balancing work and love in the start-up phase of a company. Paul Graham writes about his experience:

During this time you’ll do little but work, because when you’re not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period.

I hope to do a better job managing a girlfriend during the startup phase, than Paul did. I better. Despite my love of hard work, I’ve never been cut out for the monastic life.

When I’ve had startup level projects in the past (making a film isn’t much different), I’ve generally worked together with the girlfriend. Or sometimes the woman I was working with became my girlfriend (can happen in either order). In this case, you are both thinking and talking about the shared project. People tend to get more excited about making films than building companies and/or SEO – so this is not so easily applied here.

Eliska for awhile was really implicated in the company. But given that she was sixty hours/week at her day job, it was a bit much for her. I can’t blame her. What she needs is not more work, but more romance.

Due to inexperience, I’ve lost those bidding wars to date but will win the next rounds.

I keep wondering where on earth are all these jobs coming from?

The normally annoying Robert Cringely has the answer.

LEAN is about offshoring and outsourcing at a rate never seen before at IBM. For two years Big Blue has been ramping up its operations in India and China with what I have been told is the ultimate goal of laying off at least one American worker for every overseas hire. The BIG PLAN is to continue until at least half of Global Services, or about 150,000 workers, have been cut from the U.S. division. Last week’s LEAN meetings were quite specifically to find and identify common and repetitive work now being done that could be automated or moved offshore, and to find work Global Services is doing that it should not be doing at all. This latter part is with the idea that once extraneous work is eliminated, it will be easier to move the rest offshore.

All this is supposed to happen by the end of 2007, by the way, at which point IBM will also freeze its U.S. pension plan.

The point of this has nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with the price of IBM shares. Remove at least 100,000 heads, eliminate the long-term drag of a defined-benefit pension plan, and the price of IBM shares will soar. This is exactly the kind of story Wall Street loves to hear. Palmisano and his lieutenants will retire rich. And not long after that IBM’s business will crash for reasons I explain below.

Last time I posted about IBM pensions a current employee stepped in with some interesting commentary in defense of IBM. I hope KC stops by again to give us his input on the current offshoring project.

Curiously cellphone studies with negative results – cancer, loss of brain capacity – for the industry lead to research funding removal and persecution. At the same time the big cellphone and mobile network providers are taking out huge liability insurance contracts. I don’t have the time now to document the above but at one point I did do the research and will stand by those statements.

Sticking a mini-microwave beside your head is not going to improve your health or mind. End of story.

It turns out that cellphones are not only harmful to people but absolutely fatal to bees.

Radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees’ navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London’s biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned….

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”….

German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a “hint” to a possible cause.

Birds and the bees sounds better.

The spread of the problem sounds likely to me. Blanket coverage by cell phone base antennas came first in the United States.

I imagine that the base antenna has to be quite close to the hive (or on the route to food) to cause this problem.

Countries with limited cellphone converage will be fruitful.

Perhaps mankind will eventually learn not to believe big industries claims for healthiness.

Cigarette manufacturers claimed for decades that smoking was good for your health, before finally admitting that it was neither bad nor good. Only after decades of lawsuits did they concede the obvious which is that smoking is bad for your health.

My mother told me this story from her childhood in Vancouver.

They used to go to Woodwards to do their shopping. In the shoe department, there was a very neat machine that the kids liked to play with. Put your foot under a panel and then pulled a lever. On a screen in front of your eyes, you could see the bones of your feet.

You could use it as often and long as you liked. The machine was there to help the shoe saleman scientifically find you the right pair of shoes.

If you haven’t guessed already, the machine was an xray machine. And children were spending whole minutes radiating themselves with no lead protection.

It was only a few years later that Woodwards removed the xray machine. I hope not too many of those children have bone or blood cancer now.

Later in the same article some other cellphone studies are cited:

Blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today’s teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

If you value the long term health of your brain, don’t use your cellphone for more than a minute or two at a time!

While you are at it, stop believing the claims of major companies that their products are good for you or your dog. They just want your money. As long as your dog doesn’t up and outright die, they don’t mind how sick the pooch might get eating their manufactured poison. But that’s a story for another day.

Very useful information. DNJournal also publish a number of interviews with top domainers (people whose primary economic activity is buying and selling domain names).

Imagine my curiosity when I came across this piece:

Just 2 years after entering the industry, AL-Ghanim has amassed more than 12,000 quality domains, including jewels like media.com, multimedia.com and fm.com. He has thriving websites like mp3.tv, dj.net and oxide.com and he has just purchased a major ICANN-approved internet registry that will be located on another showcase domain, i.net.

No wonder domain industry forums are buzzing with questions about “Elequa”, a childhood nickname the 32-year-old internet phenomenon uses for his online identity. They want to know who he is, where he came from and how he assembled one of the world’s most impressive portfolios almost overnight. They wonder how he seems to be everywhere at once and almost always in the right place at the right time. How is it possible?

Easy really…he never sleeps. AL-Ghanim is a self-described insomniac who naps only an hour or two each night. While you are sound asleep, he is busy transforming his vision for his current projects into reality. AL-Ghanim says he is so excited about his work he simply can’t gear down long enough to spend much time in bed. Fueled by that adrenaline rush, he has worked around the clock to cram four years of effort into two years on the calendar. Is it any wonder he is racing far ahead of the pack? Answering the common question, “who is Elequa?” is not as simple….the lines begin to blur and you have to ponder the composition much as you would an abstract painting.

He is a businessman, an internet visionary, an artist and sculptor.

By applying all of those skills to the domain industry canvas, he has become the world’s most prolific “domain artist”.

AL-Ghanim’s Future Media Architects, Inc. (fma.com) is a holding company for his masterpieces. However, you need not bother approaching FMA to buy a piece for your own collection. AL-Ghanim says he does not sell domains. That alone tells you how different his approach is from most others in the industry. “My model gives me an opportunity to enjoy utilizing domains for my own purposes and creativity.&rdquo

….His mp3.tv sponsored Italy’s national championship Ferarri racing team. Seeing his logo emblazoned on a car roaring by at 200 miles per hour is a perfect metaphor for the full-throttle approach AL-Ghanim is applying to the domain business.

AL-Ghanim also attracts attention from jealous competitors. One recently posted in a forum that anyone could accomplish what AL-Ghanim has if they had enough money. The critics conveniently ignore the dozens of internet entities that had more than enough money in recent years, yet failed miserably. AL-Ghanim personally formulates the concept for each FMA website and then painstakingly develops them into something special. Perhaps the critics should ask themselves if they could paint like Michaelangelo if only they had enough money.

What can one say? A hero of our time.

The sections in bold are highlighted by me. Okay Mr. Jackman, who are you writing about Saladin, Zorro or a domainer (a guy with a computer buying domains)?

This piece dates from 2003. We are now in April of 2007.

Let’s start our fact-checking by having a look at the home page for Elequa’s company Future Media Architects fma.com.

Mmmm. Attractive to look at.

What does the text on this page have to say Future Media Architects:

Future Media Architects is an Internet development company with a global presence. We develop our own Internet properties, Internet Portals and Technology. We do not develop for third parties. Future Media Architects is committed to pioneering an improved Internet. We wish to establish a digital world free of clutter focused on a bright, promising, and inventive future.

Our world-class domains , which include media.com, fed.com, ibiza.com, cool.com, music.tv, mr.com and thousands more… are not for sale.

Immpressive.

Let’s revisit Al-Ghanim/Elequa’s accomplishments for this period of time.

multimedia.com

spam page

fm.com

spam page

dj.tv

spam page

media.com

spam page

fed.com

spam page

ibiza.com

spam

cool.com

spam

music.tv

spam

mr.com

spam

Mr. Jackman, your “visionary, artist and sculptor” is no Michaelangelo. He is buying domains with Kuwaiti oil money and hoarding them for the future. It may turn out to make economic sense (the prices for high end domain names in 2003 were depressed) but it’s not a very inspiring story.

Poor quality handling of prolific typein traffic.

By the way, careful about visiting these domains. You’ll find that you will face a popup for each domain which looks like this:

Ron Jackman, your article is a raspberry.

This ladies and gentlemen is your introduction to the domain industry.

Check out this info about the demutualization of Sun Life-Clarica and missing policy holder claims:

Demutualization is the process of converting a mutual life insurance company, owned by its policyholders, to a publicly traded stock company owned by shareholders, pursuant to a plan of conversion approved by government regulators.

The amount paid to each policyholder is based on a number of factors, including length of time the policy has been in force, face value of the policy, and total premiums paid. For many policyholders, the windfall arising from demutualization can be substantial, but millions of missing policyholders and heirs aren’t aware they are entitled to receive compensation.

The number of shares allocated to each eligible Sun Life policyholder varied widely. Owners of participating insurance policies in force as of January 27, 1998, were eligible for demutualization benefits in the form of shares or cash. The minimum allocation was 75 shares, plus a variable component based on a number of factors. The average allocation was 378 shares. In the years since demutualization, approximately one-half of those eligible have been located and claimed demutualization benefits.

Between one-quarter and one-half of all life insurance policies go unclaimed, because it is generally up to family members to notify the insurance company when a policyholder dies, and virtually no effort is made to find lost beneficiaries.

In addition, millions of missing policyholders aren’t aware they are entitled to receive this demutualization compensation. Contact efforts were unsuccessful, due to name changes after marriage or divorce, unreported changes of address, expired postal forwarding orders and non-current beneficiary information.

By law, unclaimed policy benefits, including demutualization compensation, are remitted to the custody of a government trust account until claimants come forward. Last year government custodians collected $22.8 billion, of which less than $1 billion was claimed.

One third of all life insurance policies go unclaimed! No effort is made to find lost beneficiaries!

Even a somewhat cynical forty year old can be surprised.