End EU now.
The ECB has signed contracts with Nexi, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Indra to build the network for a digital euro. The law that would allow a digital euro does not exist yet. The bank has also picked 36 payment firms for a pilot and is building an app. Banks will be able to link your online payments to your identity, and Lagarde wants authorities to get that data “upon request.” She once complained that democracy is “too much of a drag.” The ECB is behaving as though Parliament’s vote is a formality.
reclaimthenet.org/ecb-builds…
tekNico retweeted
My friend Ayako has translated American movies and TV shows into Japanese subtitles for 22 years.
Above her desk, taped to the wall, is a handwritten list.
"American sentences that do not exist in Japanese."
She let me copy it.
1. "I'm good."
Means yes. Means no. Means I'm full, I'm fine, I'm leaving, and please stop asking. She has translated it 31 different ways. She thinks she was right about half the time.
2. "Bless your heart."
She translated it as a blessing for six years. Then a woman from Alabama explained it to her, very sweetly. She had to go back and fix four movies.
3. "Hold my beer."
Japanese has no phrase for the moment right before a man does something stupid for a cheering crowd. She subtitled it "Someone please call an ambulance." Nobody has ever complained.
4. "Love you, bye."
American men say this to their fathers. On the phone. Fast. Like "see you later." In Japanese, "I love you" to your father is a deathbed sentence. The first time she subtitled it, the whole Japanese audience thought the father was dying.
He was asking about the Cowboys game.
5. "Come here."
An American sees someone crying, says two words, and opens his arms. In Japan, we ask "Are you okay?" and look very carefully at the floor.
6. "Proud of you, kid."
Japanese has the words. Japanese fathers just don't use them. Ayako has typed this line more than 400 times. She had heard it in her own house zero times.
Her father is 78. A retired machinist. The quietest man I know. He speaks maybe ten words of English.
Last spring, he went to see a movie she had translated. Alone. He didn't tell anyone.
That night, her phone rang.
He said it in English. Exactly the way the American dad said it on the screen.
"Proud of you, kid."
Then he hung up. Immediately. Before she could say a word.
Japanese fathers have not changed that much.
She sat on her kitchen floor for an hour.
He didn't say it in English because he forgot the Japanese.
He said it in English because in English, it was allowed.
America, you think you're just talking. Love you, bye. Come here. Proud of you.
You've been handing the whole world words we didn't know we were allowed to say.
Some of us are finally using them.
tekNico retweeted
Worth a read: Nicholas Carlini asks if a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
Also: @hyperbolic_labs raised a $30M Series A in SF. And @yugabyte is hiring a Staff Engineer on the SQL Engine team in Sunnyvale.
theconsensus.dev/g/2026/11/0…
How they got there: ❤️
teapawt.net/boringbattlecry/status…
tekNico retweeted
Elon Musk founded a company that gives a voice to the speechless and sight to the blind.
And there’s a political party in the United States full of people who want to imprison him for his political ideology.
This bullshit cleanly sweeps away whatever little motivation to use the so-called "OpenAI" models.
The power-monger Italian siblings were already out of the question, of course. Same goes for Google and Meta.
Grok or Gab if needed, otherwise local it is.
Fuck off Sam.
sam: local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources
“a lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data centre
but from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time
you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment
somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that”
> Inflation is taxation with superior public relations.
Taxation is theft.
Inflation is robbery, assault and battery.
War is the tool that keeps you compliant.
War is the health of the state, and every treasury minister in history has known it.
Governments that could never justify a peacetime income tax extracted one the moment artillery started firing. Britain imposed its first income tax in 1799, not through principled fiscal debate, but because William Pitt needed to fight Napoleon. The tax was supposed to expire at Waterloo. It came back in 1842 and never left. The people paid for one war and funded a permanent bureaucracy.
The pattern repeats with mechanical consistency. Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, and within two years the new institution was monetizing war debt on an industrial scale. The inflation tax is the craftiest version of this theft because you never receive a bill. The purchasing power simply drains from your savings while politicians point at commodity markets and shrug.
Weimar Germany printed to fund World War One reparations. The Continental Congress printed Continentals to fund the Revolution until "not worth a Continental" became a folk saying about government paper. Rome clipped coins for centuries of military expansion, debasing the denarius from nearly pure silver to a bronze coin with a silver wash.
Every episode follows the same logic. Direct taxes provoke visible resistance. Printing money diffuses the pain across every currency holder, spreading the theft thin enough that most victims never identify the thief. Inflation is taxation with superior public relations.
War simply gives the state permission to accelerate what it does in peacetime, only faster and without public consent. When you hear the words "emergency powers," you know you are about to be robbed.
"Instead of gamma radiation annihilating the universe, we're getting seventeen metric gigatons of YEARNING."
I love the whole "Malfoid" thing, I really do. And i'm not even the target audience. I've enjoyed writing it, and its totally unleashed my muse.
I've been thinking about why the whole Malfoid fanfiction phenomenon is doing so ridiculously well, and I think I've figured something out.
Men are absolutely STARVING for good romance. Plenty of women, too, I guess.
Not pornography. Not harems. Not some elaborate sexual power fantasy. Romance.
Two people who who are confused by their feelings, who make mistakes, who struggle to understand one another, and who slowly, awkwardly, sometimes painfully fall in love.
You know. That thing human beings have been doing to each other for thousands of years. In story form.
Somewhere along the way, the publishing industry decided that men don't like romance. (teapawt.net/ShamashAran/status/210…) The alternatives everyone's been offered for the past couple of decades have been, to put it delicately, a radioactive dumpster fire.
On one side, you've got male-oriented harem fantasies where every woman within a fifty-mile radius is aching for a sexual encounter, in graphicly written detail.
On the other, you've got the darker corners of romantasy, where the height of romantic fulfillment involves being kidnapped, abused (physically, mentally, or both) or literally raped by a seven-foot-tall monster with the emotional maturity of a malfunctioning garbage disposal.
I'm sitting here thinking: CAN TWO PEOPLE JUST FALL IN LOVE WITHOUT SOMEBODY GETTING RAPED OR DEVELOPING A HAREM?
Apparently that's too much to ask.
This brings me back to Malfoid. Here's a huge set of stories written by many different folks, about two fundamentally decent people, raised in very different worlds, struggling with their feelings, their prejudices, their loyalties, and their expectations. Neither is perfect. Neither always knows what they're doing. Sometimes they're absolute idiots.
They have something, and we get to watch it develop in story form.
The romance isn't about sexual conquest or domination. It's about vulnerability, trust, affection, and the terrifying realization that another human being has become extraordinarily important to you.
And people are eating it up. Which brings me to my theory.
Malfoid has caused a false vacuum decay in the quantum field of romantic literature.
For decades, we've been trapped in a metastable state where the publishing industry insists that men don't want romance, and male readers have been conditioned to believe there isn't any romance worth reading. Now, comes along comes a wholesome little love story about two emotionally constipated school-age British wizards, and suddenly the entire field collapses into a new, lower-energy vacuum state.
The resulting energy release is absolutely catastrophic. Instead of gamma radiation annihilating the universe, we're getting seventeen metric gigatons of YEARNING.
Turns out men didn't hate romance.
They just wanted something worth falling in love with.
I didn't sign shit. Taxation is theft and slavery.
Lysander Spooner committed the unforgivable act of taking the state's own logic and following it to its conclusion: anarchism.
Born in 1808 in Athol, Massachusetts, Spooner spent his adult life attacking government monopoly with the fury of a man who had personally been robbed. In 1844 he launched the American Letter Mail Company to break the Post Office's stranglehold on mail delivery. His rates undercut the federal monopoly immediately. Within two years Congress passed legislation explicitly banning private competition, because the Post Office could not compete on price and quality and survive.
That episode tells you everything. When the state wins, it wins by outlawing the competition.
Spooner's 1870 work "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority" demolished the consent doctrine underpinning every modern government. A contract signed by men long dead binds you to nothing. You never signed the Constitution. Your grandfather never signed it. The men who ratified it in 1788 had no authority to mortgage your liberty to a federal government in perpetuity. Spooner made this argument with the rigor of a lawyer, which he was, having studied law under John Davis and Charles Allen in Worcester.
His natural law theory drew property rights from human labor directly, bypassing the state entirely. Production precedes the state. Rights precede legislation. Governments confiscate rights.
Free market thinkers inherited Spooner's anti-monopoly logic and applied it to every sector the state subsequently captured.
tekNico retweeted
Want to have your mind blown?
In 1971, the median household income was $9,030, or 220 ounces of gold.
In 2025, it was $87,460, or just 25 ounces of gold.
Your paycheck went up 10x.
Measured in gold, it fell 88%.
To earn what the median household earned in 1971, you’d need about $890,000 per year today.
That’s what fiat debasement looks like.
