participant-3927, 3:19 PM, June 9
Biography of Thomas Sowell
participant-3927, 3:20 PM, June 9
To complement my article Waiting for Godot
participant-3927, 8:19 PM, June 10
The latest Stossel video on woke right (New Right) again proves that it’s time to exit
participant-3927, 5:11 PM, June 11
There are a lot of second-handers, who don’t stop understand things fully, and gain superficial understanding, then go on their own tangents.
participant-3927, 5:13 PM, June 11
Insurance companies are one of the greatest inventions of capitalism. With medical insurance, there’s always money for expensive medical procedures which occur rarely, and the doctors get paid well. At the same time, the insurance premium is very low. Of course – this is true only in laissez-faire free market. The more regulation, the higher the insurance cost.
participant-4603, 6:10 PM, June 11
I would’ve never guessed he’s ever heard of Ayn Rand before
participant-4603, 6:11 PM, June 11
good point
participant-3927, 6:59 PM, June 11
I have finally released a new version of Crosspass that allows to send images.
participant-3927, 3:13 AM, June 12
Hi
participant-4603, 3:20 AM, June 12
I’m thinking the group got our first bot…
participant-3927, 3:20 AM, June 12
We are now bot worthy
participant-3927, 5:23 PM, June 12
participant-3927, 5:28 PM, June 12
This photo is the view from the Point Roberts open ocean side (the Lighthouse Park) – there’s land closeby, these are islands. Theoretically, it can be a place to grow into far future.
participant-3927, 1:41 AM, June 13
Continuing showcasing people who refused to accept the status quo, here’s an interesting story about the invention of diapers. It was invented by a woman who was frustrated with taking care of her infant. Women have been trained from childhood to accept the chores of being a mother as unquestionable. Before emancipation, they have been limited to being housewives, leaving all innovation to men. But Marian Donovan didn’t care about the shackles of tradition, and selfishly decided to change things.
Another interesting thing about it is that she got a patent, which is what allowed her to pursue taking these diapers to market, after having many established companies refuse to do it. Without the patent system, the diapers wouldn’t exist. (They didn’t exist for thousands of years. Taking a product to market is a lot of work, and expense. Without a guarantee to sell it, no one would take the chance. Marion ended up selling the patent for a million dollars, which was a lot of money in the fifties.) https://www.invent.org/blog/inventors/marion-donovan-diaper
participant-4233, 2:21 AM, June 13
**🪙 VBI – Voluntary Basic Income
**VBI is monetary policy reimagined:
Communities mint and distribute their own local currencies.
VBI rewards participation, contribution, and presence — not just existence.
It creates an economic floor for everyone, without taxation or redistribution.
Issuance is bottom-up, programmable, and transparent.
“VBI doesn’t trickle down — it spirals up.”
**❄️ ICE – Imposing Costs on Externalities
**ICE is fiscal policy with a behavioral twist:
It places programmable friction (fees, throttles, limits) on harmful or extractive behaviors.
Examples: spam, pollution, speculation, monopolization, overuse of common resources.
ICE is not meant to raise revenue — it’s a thermostat, shaping economic behavior.
It slows harmful velocity so that VBI can fuel healthy growth.
“We’re not funding VBI with taxes. We issue VBI — and put toxic transactions on ICE.”
**🔁 Together: Thermodynamic Economics
Activity Type
Tool
Effect
**Extraction, pollution
ICE
Slowed, disincentivized
Contribution, cooperation
VBI
Accelerated, rewarded
“We cool the waste. We heat the community.”
Like Boris I am thinking to coin a word: “Commonetarism”. Hehe
participant-3927, 2:26 AM, June 13
[ChatGPT] In 1950:
• Most women were housewives, especially those who were married.
• Working women were often single, childless, or from lower-income households.
• Women like Marion Donovan, who invented, patented, and marketed a product, were very rare and went against the grain of what society expected from women at the time.
participant-3927, 8:43 PM, June 13
There are case studies of Tangiers, Hong Kong, and British islands.
participant-4603, 10:46 PM, June 13
Thank you, with much more on the way slowly but surely.
This is the first Telegram group where any of this has been mentioned, so thanks again.
Tangier is an interesting case study and I’d say if anything might even be corroborative of how they had achieved statehood and/or adopted the principles Ayn Rand identified and championed; that Tangier today could be the international hub it once was.
Danzig and Fiume are also interesting examples, but Tangier shone brightest.
participant-367, 9:48 AM, June 14
What an interesting website, thank you! Who is the author?
I would recommend that they use micro-markup in the page code. For example, there is no micro-markup on the page https://www.startupstates.ch/faq.html: I could not find any itemtype or JSON-LD (____@participant-8810), nor any signs of the FAQ structure or schema.org, or other semantic markup formats. To promote the site in search engines, especially to encourage ChatGPT and similar tools to start referring to it, micro-markup needs to be added.
participant-3927, 12:32 PM, June 14
Andrew J. Starr is the author of
participant-4603, 3:32 PM, June 14
Is that how the search engines index?
participant-367, 5:07 PM, June 14
They too, but ChatGpt and other AIs especially love this.
participant-4603, 6:39 PM, June 14
I appreciate the tip because I would not have thought to have updated the HTML if you hadn’t said what you did, so I’m going to go ahead and take care of that soon, so it is much appreciated. I love helpful suggestions. I think it’s great!
participant-4603, 10:00 PM, June 14
Try it now, I think I made the successful updates or upgrades.
It’s interesting because it made many of the file sizes smaller, but it also made the FAQ bigger.
participant-3927, 7:06 PM, June 15
I’m going to say something against what everyone seem happily repeating, that “Israel is not at war with the Iranian people.” Iti is the same mistake when its’ claimed that Israel is fighting Hamas, not Gaza. No – one cannot win a war like this. Israel is indeed at war with people of Gaza, and also at war with people of Iran (not just its theocratic regime).
participant-3927, 7:07 PM, June 15
There are certainly a lot of good people in Iran who are against the regime, and we know this after the 2022 demonstrations by women against wearing the hijab – in fact, the women won, now many women there don’t wear it, while it’s technically illegal.
participant-3927, 7:09 PM, June 15
But what is the chance of a revolution in Iran now, even while the top leadership is gone? I asked a friend of mine, who escaped Iran in the 90s. He thinks there’s zero chance of the revolution, and if anything, Israel’s attack has united the Iranians.
participant-3927, 7:11 PM, June 15
Another Iranian who escaped Iran just a few years ago, said (today) that he hopes Israel’s attack will make the revolution closer by 10 years. This tells me: there’s not going to be any immediate revolution happening.
participant-3927, 7:14 PM, June 15
And if it’s not going to happen now, it means, that as it stands today, the vast majority supports the regime in which the Islamic religion is mixed with government; and, that spreading Islam by force is legitimate. The regime, in other words, is chosen by the people, and they are all guilty.
participant-3927, 7:20 PM, June 15
Netanyahu says Israel is fighting to free the Iranian peolpe, and that Israel hopes that the Iranian people will use this opportunity to overthrow the regime. This evades the fact that Iran and its population is the enemy of Israel. No one fights a war like this, and it can’t be won like this.
