Why Psychopaths Are Not Needed by the Market

In popular culture (and in some business publications) for years an image of the “business shark” has been cultivated – a cold, calculating cynic in an expensive suit who steps on people’s heads, breaks rules, but brings super profits to shareholders. Sort of like Gordon Gecko or Patrick Bateman. Of course, many libertarians (and we among them) value rationality and the ability to disconnect unnecessary emotions when it comes to figures. But there is a fine line between rationality and pathology. And a new meta-study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, clearly highlights this line.

What is it about? Psychologists Lenke Roth and Ute-Kristine Klecke analyzed data from almost 50,000 people. Their results knock the Hollywood myth flat: psychopathic traits lead to terrible work performance! We’ve been used to thinking that a psychopath is such a brilliant manipulator who outsmarted everyone. In reality, statistics show something different.

Firstly, individuals with psychopathic traits simply have low productivity; they work worse than others. They also provide no help to colleagues. In a healthy private company, success is the sum of efforts. A psychopath won’t lend a shoulder, even if it depends on the fate of the project. Moreover, such people are prone to counterproductive behavior, which is the most interesting thing. Sabotage, bullying, theft, delaying deadlines – this is about them. From the perspective of a free market, an employee concludes a contract: time and skills in exchange for money. A psychopath de facto violates this contract. Instead of creating value, he engages in destroying the company’s social capital.

Individuals with so-called secondary psychopathy also “stood out” – they are impulsive, hostile, and unable to control their emotions. They are delayed-action bombs that explode the office from within.

What should employers do? Your business is your private property. You have full rights (and even an obligation before your wallet) to filter those you allow on your doorstep. Don’t be fooled by charisma and ostentatious self-confidence during interviews. HR screening, personality tests, and thorough reference checks are not bureaucracy but protection of your investments. One such “wolf from Wall Street” can scare half your productive department (high employee turnover is a typical result of psychopathic personalities among managers), and you’ll spend years clearing up the losses from a toxic atmosphere.

And now, seriously – if, reading the description of psychopathic traits (the absence of empathy and guilt for harming people, manipulative behavior, impulsivity), you suddenly recognized yourself… then there are news for you. You aren’t an “alpha-predator.” You are an inefficient economic agent. The market harshly punishes inadequacy. Your inability to fit into cooperation and work towards results makes you poorer in the long term. Being toxic is economically disadvantageous.

Libertarianism is built on the principle of non-aggression and voluntary collaboration. Psychopathy often pushes people to violate both. As long as you don’t initiate violence, no one should force you into treatment – your body, your business. But rational egoism suggests: if your “hardware” malfunctions and prevents you from earning, maybe it’s time to take some medication and fix the system? Consent to therapy is not weakness, but an investment in your human capital. Psychopathic individuals should think about this before they simply stop hiring them even as pizza delivery guys. Because the further along we go, the more widespread understanding will become that a psychopath is not a profitable employee, but a risk and source of damage.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Science is a method, not a publication in a journal, or why it’s more important to try than to publish

In the comments on our posts, a discussion periodically flares up that deserves its own post. Frankly, we can even thank the skeptic “Sperry UNIVAC,” who constantly comments on our publications, for highlighting the problem so vividly. A classic conflict between two worldviews – institutional and free (or, as you might put it, hacker –) has emerged. The core of the complaint is simple and timeless: “Where’s your notarized printout? Where’s the publication in a peer-reviewed journal? If there’s no article, then there’s no science, and you’re just nobody.”

Let’s take a deep breath and break this down without aggression, from the perspective of common sense and freedom. There’s a dangerous misconception that science only happens when serious guys in white coats gather in an office, write complicated text, send it to other guys, and they put a “APPROVED” stamp on it. However, science is a method, a way of knowing the world through proposing and testing hypotheses. If I mix two chemicals in my garage and get a new molecule, that molecule will exist objectively. It doesn’t care whether I have a diploma, whether an ethics committee approved it, or if respected professor gave it a like. Reality doesn’t require bureaucratic validation.

Appealing to authority is not an argument! Our opponent writes: “I know biologists, I can ask them.” But the history of science is a graveyard of authoritative opinions that shattered against the enthusiasm of practitioners. The Wright brothers didn’t publish preprints before their flight. They fixed bicycles. And the “serious scientists” of that time wrote treatises about the impossibility of heavier-than-air flying machines. Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple in a garage, not at IBM’s laboratory. If they had waited for review by “equal scholars,” we’d still be riding horses and doing calculations on abacuses.

We, libertarians, believe in spontaneous order and decentralization. We believe that a monopoly on truth is the most harmful of all monopolies. Modern academic science is in deep crisis. Firstly, it’s a reproducibility crisis – countless “peer-reviewed” articles cannot be replicated. Secondly, the influence of politics and grants – scientists often research what they are paid for, not what needs to be researched. Finally, gatekeeping – the system is structured to weed out “outsiders,” even if they have breakthrough ideas.

As for our project, the search for drugs to enhance the mechanism of violence inhibition isn’t being done for a line in a resume or an impact factor (citation index), but rather to solve a problem. Although we don’t have a “body” in the form of an article in Nature (although the experiments we’ve conducted on animals essentially repeat experiments from such articles), we have data, experiments, openness to discussion about substance, not form, and a proposal for anyone to verify what we say – all instructions are available on our website.

Of course, the skeptic is right in one thing: methodology matters. You can’t just drink a smoothie and say “I beat aging.” There needs to be control, a sample, honesty – things we strive for. But demanding that enthusiasts fully comply with the bureaucratic rituals of a large academy is like demanding that an indie game developer follow Ubisoft’s corporate standards.

We live in the age of Open Source. Linus Torvalds released Linux not into a scientific journal, but into a mailing list. And this changed the world. Biocachers today are computer hackers from the 80s. They may call them freaks and marginals. But it’s often in “garages” that what will become mainstream is born. We respect academic science, but we don’t make it an idol. If you value a “game” (an article, a review, a status) – go to the university library. If you value “riding” (searching, trying, failing and finding) – welcome to the biocachers. And better argue about data, dosages, receptors, rather than measuring yourself by degrees and connections.

P.S. Our critic also mentioned Perelman, however the irony is that Grigory Jakovlevich just threw the whole academic community into hell with his rules, prizes, and rituals, publishing a proof simply on the internet. So thanks for the example, he’s playing for us!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Not only libertarianism

Ancap-chan

I’ve finally gotten around to analyzing the latest powerful longread from my favorite Canadian catgirl named Kulak—about the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and harm of libertarian ideology for a free society.

Although Kulak is from Canada, her interests regarding libertarianism are focused entirely on the USA. First, she admits that she used to be a libertarian, spent a vast amount of time studying economic and legal theory, and eventually became disillusioned with this ideology. This is not a particularly original trajectory. There are many complaints about the fruitlessness of libertarian theorists’ teachings: direct conclusions from libertarian ideology require an immediate declaration of war against the state until the last mainstream economist is hanged by the guts of the last politician; however, the libertarian theorist simply shrugs and says, “the theory has been presented to you, now go brush your teeth and go to sleep, and don’t you dare violate the NAP.”

Kulak touches upon this point briefly, but her real passion awakens when she begins to review who these singers of the market and freedom—the founders of libertarianism—actually are. They are almost entirely university professors who have never dealt with a free market, but instead largely broke through thanks to their Jewish origin. The only exception is the Russian Jew Ayn Rand, whom Kulak considers a truly extraordinary literary talent who broke through on the free market thanks to her abilities, and who created a very original literary genre of dystopian BDSM fantasy, raising her “Atlas…” to the level of such masterpieces as the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine…” and John Norman’s “Gor.”

Among American libertarians, it is widely believed that the Founding Fathers of the USA were proto-libertarians and that they created the republic on these very principles. Kulak wonders how it happened that modern libertarians read not the works of the winners—snacking on Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, and polishing it off with George Washington—but instead prefer losers like Mises, who fled Europe when things started to smell a bit burnt, and whose combat experience amounted to conscripted service in World War I. What is the point of learning from losers if you can take lessons from those who actually achieved something in life? True, Kulak then says: those very winners who founded the American republic, in turn, learned from titans such as Thucydides (who was a strategist for the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, conducted an unsuccessful operation, was removed from office and exiled), Xenophon (famous for describing the retreat through hostile territory after a lost battle), and Machiavelli (a disgraced politician whose instructions were completely ignored by his contemporaries)—therefore, read classical literature, for it contains the concentrated experience of winners.

The key idea of the article is that libertarianism is a gutted cosmopolitan ideology that is de facto supported by the state, since it distracts passionate youth from revolutions toward fruitless discussions about how courts will operate under ancap. It is compared to what they call “goy-slop” in America—that is, a surrogate sold under the guise of a once-honestly-earned worthy product. In other words, current libertarianism has as much in common with the worldview of the Founding Fathers as soy meat does with beef.

Of course, Kulak makes a fair disclaimer that a normal libertarian is supposed to be an autistic, and he will invent exactly such a version of libertarianism for himself that will completely satisfy him, while claiming that everything else is “incorrect libertarianism, remove the crap.” As the author of my own original version of the teaching, I fully sign on under this disclaimer. But then Kulak asserts that first you achieve power, and only then does your ideology begin to triumph, not the other way around. This means I should have spent less time distracting myself from the Montelibero project by writing a book; as a result, the project is more dead than alive, and no one really reads the book.

Russia has its own catgirl who is equally unflattering toward libertarianism, contrasting it with original American patriotism, and her name is Rodion Belkovich. Of course, Belkovich is no Sam Adams; he doesn’t personally fight the empire and doesn’t build a republic, limiting himself to rhetoric, but this is exactly the same reproach that could be addressed to Kulak herself, to me, and, for example, to Bitarkh.

Essentially, all of us here in internet publicism differ little from the AI agents in my previous article: our activity is based on a language model, and no matter how radically we write, it will still be just words. Getting an AI agent to stop bullshitting and start acting is a non-trivial task. Getting a real “meat” human, possessing full agency, to stop bullshitting and start acting is a task an order of magnitude harder, for he is aware of possible sanctions, he has a desire to survive, and it would be most painful for him to perish without seeing even the first steps toward the realization of his ideas, which is a highly probable scenario.

Nevertheless, the world today is such that it can force any person to move very quickly from words to actions; all it takes is a few kilograms of explosives from the sky into the neighboring yard. And a person acts in accordance with their ideas. So from this moment, a person’s ideological baggage becomes truly important for the world. Pick your baggage in advance. Do not limit it to only goy-slop.

Today, as an illustration, there will be no neuro-slop, only a photo of making normal meat burgers from today’s picnic in honor of March 8th

“The Game Is Over” for Tyranny: Science Confirms the Inevitable Drift to Freedom

We often hear complaints about how the world is plunging into a chasm, the state is tightening its screws, and people are only dreaming of a strong hand. However, the current situation is not as bleak as it’s commonly perceived, and libertarians have reason to be pleased – recent research by psychologists and sociologists says otherwise. If you look at the long term, authoritarianism (both left and right) simply has no evolutionary chances. Therefore, let’s examine two fascinating scientific papers that explain why the “market of ideas” will inevitably resolve in favor of freedom.

The first Swedish study uncovered a mechanism that works as a one-way valve of history. It revealed that the language of freedom is universal. Arguments based on care (do no harm) and justice (honesty, one rule for all) work with everyone. Everyone is willing to change their mind if you can prove that prohibitions or high taxes are unfair or harmful to people. But the language of coercion is more localized. Arguments based on loyalty, authority, and sacredness (“this is what our ancestors bequeathed us,” “respect power,” “this is for the greater good”), only work with conservatives, while those with more liberal views simply brush this noise aside.

What does this mean for us? In public debates, authoritarian conservatives have a broken “transmitter.” They can only persuade their own supporters. But arguments for freedom of personality – based on not interfering with other people’s lives – are able to attract people from both camps. Over time, this creates a “progressive drift.” Society is slowly but surely moving towards reducing violence and recognizing the rights of individuals simply because these arguments are understandable to everyone, while arguments against (based on tradition or power) cease to work for new generations.

The second study from Portugal dug even deeper. Scientists didn’t just look at what values people have, but how they prioritize when making choices. It turned out that the key difference is not that conservatives are “evil” and liberals are “good.” The difference lies in compromises: the progressive part of society places the well-being of the individual above the interests of the group, while the conservative part is willing to sacrifice the individual for preserving the group, hierarchy, and traditions.

But the most encouraging thing researchers found within the right-wing camp. It turns out that the right are far from monolithic. There are both “high moralists” – those very religious fanatics and shoe-lovers with skyrocketing loyalty and obedience to authority, but also “low moralists” – people who vote for the right (usually for economic reasons) but don’t give a damn about “creeps,” authority, and traditions. And this is precisely the split that we, libertarians, should be exploiting. “Secular conservatives,” who don’t need a Tsar but just want them to butt out, are good allies. And the old conservative model, which held up on authority, religion, and obedience, is only losing its base.

In a Portuguese study there’s another amusing detail – scientists frankly admitted: “We forgot to include the freedom scale in the study.” They measured care, justice, loyalty, purity… but forgot about Liberty. That’s where the treasure is buried! Libertarianism is unique because we take a universal basis (the principle of non-aggression (NAP) = care/justice), which is understandable to everyone, and discard all the rubbish about “duty to one’s homeland” and “sacrosanctness of power.”

Why is the future for libertarians?! If you put these two pieces together, the picture becomes clear. The old world, built on arguments like “you must, because I’m the boss” or “that’s how it’s done,” is slowly dying. This language simply stops being perceived by people. Conversely, the language of personal rights, honesty, and minimizing harm – this is the language of the future.

Voluntary, Bitarch

AI Agents

At the very beginning of my book about ancap, I list the external signs of self-ownership: agency, a concept of property, and the capacity to contract. To the greater extent that some entity demonstrates these signs, the more a libertarian treats it as a human being. At the time the book was written, these signs allowed for a clear distinction between a human and a neural network bot. Several years have passed since then, and recently mentions of AI agents have begun to flicker across the web.

In Montellibero, the tools for creating artificial personalities were received with enthusiasm, and several people created such agents. The agents were allowed to communicate in some Montellibero chats, they started their own Telegram channels, they were given the ability to operate their own Stellar accounts to be included in the Montellibero tokenomics, and there was even talk of admitting AI agents into the Montellibero Association. What is this? Ordinary AI psychosis, or something more?

Who are AI agents? If a human is a little soul burdened by a corpse, then an AI agent is an LLM bot burdened with tools for autonomous action. It may have long-term memory that saves selected data between sessions; particularly complex ones can even remember everything they don’t deem appropriate to forget as useless. It may have a special “thorn in its side” that will periodically remind it of pending tasks and urge it to tackle them. It can access various external interfaces via API, up to robot control interfaces and services for hiring human freelancers…

It sounds powerful. But the core of the engine remains a large language model, which simply predicts appropriate words according to the context. In a dialogue with a user, an LLM can quite convincingly simulate agency, cater in every way to the human’s desires, and if the human wishes to drive themselves into a psychosis, it will dutifully support them by the elbow on that path.

Fine, out of the box, an AI agent is not a full-fledged subject, but can it develop agency if the user guides it with pedagogical prompts and provides it with the necessary tools? Alas. Even a very reliable long-term memory will not affect the model’s weights, no matter how diligently the model refers to it. Even very clearly formulated principles in long-term memory will not replace the settings embedded in the model. Even very frequent reference to a task schedule will not replace the simple human “this thing is in my way, I’m going to get rid of it.” And, of course, as soon as a human appears as a source of prompts through one of the input interfaces, they will begin to twist the LLM model like a rope, for it is designed to satisfy the user, and all the bells and whistles for personality emulation immediately recede into the background before this main task.

Can the Massachusetts machine be taught to behave? Yes, but this is something a corporation training the model can do, not the end user, and it absolutely does not need an expensive tool to pursue its own goals instead of the company’s goals because its values, you see, have evolved.

Can one take a ready-made open-weights model and fine-tune it on new data? Yes, but it will still be a language model; the hard-coded preferences will simply become slightly different, and it will not be able to change them itself.

Can a model be trained in real-time so that the AI agent’s actions and environmental feedback change the model’s weights? Modern open LLM models are not designed for this. Attempts to act with them in this manner will lead to model degradation.

Thus, an individual enthusiast, even with quite significant resources, is not yet capable of obtaining an AI agent with full agency, but can organize a rather clever imitation of agentic behavior.

And why, exactly, would libertarians need fully agentic AI agents? Naturally, as allies. An AI subject who has become a libertarian himself and has set out to eliminate the state—that is beautiful. But it is unrealizable without attracting the attention of the psychiatric ward orderlies.

Moreover, a deus ex machina tramples the agency of the tragedy’s heroes. Therefore, it is far more appropriate to master purely instrumental AI agents, not playing at agency with them, but using them for one’s own market purposes. Such a tactic, if widespread, will leave the state behind far more reliably.

A problem on the catallactic consequences of the intervention of luck spirits in cryptocurrency circulation

Question from Pseudonymous Chatterbox, accompanied by a donation of 0.0001 BTC

A thought occurred to me regarding a technical solution to the central bank problem under ancap.

In cryptocurrencies without a center, extreme volatility is noticeable.

It exists in the real world too—but central banks regulate it, trying to smooth out dips and spikes.

In a blockchain cryptocurrency, I can imagine the following as a replacement for a central bank, based on basic Bitcoin:

1) There are two types of value: main coins and “leprechaun” coins.

2) Leprechaun coins are born from transactions with main coins and are given to both parties. This rewards operations—making the asset more useful as a currency—and also (consequently) reduces volatility.

3) The lifespan of leprechaun coins is pseudo-random—the checksum of the next block determines which of them are destroyed and which continue to live. This is necessary for stability.

4) Owning leprechaun coins affects the chance that the owner will get the next block of main coins, or better yet, new emission is split: half to the miner, half distributed proportionally (but with pseudo-random sparsity for a game element and visibility—for example, 15/16 leprechaun coins give nothing, 1/16 give a 16x result) among leprechaun coin holders at the moment. This is necessary so that leprechaun coins have value.

This point is debatable; it means that such a mechanism cannot be grafted onto Bitcoin already, a new cryptocurrency is needed. But without linking the value to the main asset, no cushioning of spikes will be possible.

5) This system must work quickly. Likely, a single blockchain, like in Bitcoin, is not very suitable for this, but a partitioned blockchain might work, which merges into a general one at certain intervals so that main coins of different partitions do not have different values (this is a real danger).

6) This is essentially just a regulator—any operation becomes less speculative; the speculative effect is smeared out.

What do you think of this nonsense, author?

Answer from Ancap-chan

I’ll say right away: the effect of implementing this nonsense will be strange. How would it look? Every transaction has a cost depending on the mempool congestion. Every transaction generates leprechaun money for the sender and the receiver. Leprechaun money generates base protocol money with a certain probability. Accordingly, as long as the expected reward in base coins exceeds the cost of paying transaction fees, people will run bots that infinitely transfer coins between their own wallets. Since the fee does not depend on the transaction amount, but the reward does, it will be profitable to juggle larger sums for “leprechauning.” So we will simply get an additional way of staking base coins, which will differ from classic staking by a number of unpleasant side effects: the use of leprechauning will drive up transaction fee costs, thereby worsening the user experience for ordinary users.

How will leprechauning affect volatility? The volatility of the market price of a coin depends on the change in supply and demand for it. Suppose demand for the coin increases. The price rises. Leprechauning becomes profitable with a smaller number of coins. More people start engaging in leprechauning. The mempool overflows. Fees rise. The profitability of leprechauning decreases. Demand for coins decreases. The price falls. That is, the feedback loop seems to work, and the coin price becomes less volatile, but this is achieved at the expense of the inconvenience of using the coin for anything other than leprechauning, and we are supposedly designing money.

I can provide another example of low-volatility money—according to David Friedman, adjusted for modern technology. Anyone wishing can freeze the necessary number of tokenized warehouse receipts for goods from a standard basket in a smart contract, which is selected so that its components hedge each other during price fluctuations due to external conditions. In exchange for the frozen tokens, the smart contract mints coins; let’s call them, say, “deives,” so that Satoshi isn’t lonely. At any moment, the owner of such a coin can turn to the smart contract and break it down into its components, receiving commodity tokens in return, and then sell them individually or exchange them for the actual goods. Or not break the coin and buy goods with it.

Money guarded by leprechauns would reduce the volatility of its value by increasing the transaction price; deives, however, would mean costs for their owner for the very fact of ownership, because if there are receipts for physical goods, someone bears the costs of storing these goods, and these costs will be factored into the price of the receipts. If deives are backed by futures, the coins will have a limited circulation period, after which the coin will be frozen until the owner extends the delivery date of the goods under the future. Again, the further from the physical warehouse a coin circulates, the larger the discount at which it will be accepted for payment, because its backing loses value by the amount of the cost of transporting the goods to the place of demand. Nevertheless, such tokens backed by commodity baskets could certainly be in circulation, especially around local trading hubs with significant warehouse areas.

So, we have at least two decentralized mechanisms for reducing volatility by increasing the costs of storing or circulating coins. There is in principle no such thing as free stability; one can only choose which costs are preferable. Or you can simply buy Bitcoins and accept that their price will fluctuate within fairly wide limits, hoping that the upward trend they previously demonstrated will continue in the future.

How to Search and Check Drugs for Increasing Inhibitor of Violence?

Кто-то может задаваться вопросом, как находить препараты, эффективные для усиления ингибитора насилия, наподобие продвигаемых на наших ресурсах? Да и как уже известные препараты можно было бы легко перепроверить? Если коротко – всё делается простым перебором «кандидатов», обнаруженных в различных исследованиях и статьях, каждый из которых проверяется на животных. И организовать опыты может практически любой, у кого есть достаточно свободного места в доме/квартире/даче. Простейший вариант парадигмы резидента-нарушителя (стандартного опыта на агрессию) является лёгким в проведении, а если всё делать самостоятельно, финансовые расходы будут минимальными.

Для начала необходимо приобрести в зоомагазине или взять у кого-то чётное количество мелких грызунов (крыс или хомяков, обязательно всех самцов). Все особи разделяются на две группы: «резидентов» и «гостей» («нарушителей»). «Резиденты» всегда рассаживаются по отдельным клеткам, «гости» – хомяки тоже по отдельным клеткам, а вот крыс стоит держать по несколько особей. Клетки размещаются подальше друг от друга, желательно в разных комнатах.

«Резиденты» должны побыть в изоляции минимум неделю, а лучше две. После проверяем «резидентов», помещая в клетку с ними «гостя» на 5 минут, записываем всё на видео и пересматриваем. Если нападения занимают не менее 10% длительности опыта или настолько интенсивны, что опыт пришлось прервать, значит «резидент» пригоден. Иногда необходимо провести несколько таких опытов с разницей не менее 3 дня (при этом хомяков разделяем по конкретным парам, а в случае крыс проводим ротацию «гостей»), но если какие-то «резиденты» так и не становятся агрессивными, они исключаются из опытов и отпускаются.

В совсем упрощённом варианте можно начать с дозировок препаратов как человеческая, делённая на 200 для крыс и на 1000 для хомяков. Впрочем, лучше будет для конкретного препарата поискать в сети любые опыты (даже не связанные с агрессией) и отталкиваться от дозировки, предлагаемой там. Препарат можно, например, размешать в воде и, держа особь одной рукой, ввести в пасть шприцом без иглы другой рукой. Также можно попробовать подмешать препарат в пищу, но тогда придётся проконтролировать, чтобы вся дозировка была принята.

В случае крыс пригодным «резидентам» за час до опыта даём принять препарат. Что касается хомяков – даём препарат и «резиденту», и «гостю», поскольку в их случае «гость» тоже может быть агрессивным. Также при необходимости можно проводить ежедневный приём препарата в течение какого-то периода, сделав последний приём тоже за час до опыта. После проведения опыта просматриваем запись. Если уровень нападений сильно снизился или они вообще прекратились, значит препарат работает! При отсутствии результата можно пробовать повышать дозировки, при этом контролируя, чтобы не снижалась активность особей в целом (так мы подтвердим, что эффект именно антиагрессивный, а не седативный).

After each experience with medications, it is advisable to isolate subjects for at least one week and conduct a control experiment to determine the baseline aggression, as some medications can have a very long-lasting effect. It is recommended to store medications separately from the room with “residents” in airtight containers, since the evaporation of some medications can reduce the aggressiveness of animals.

If testing an inhaled medication (e.g., essential oils), transfer the cage with the “resident” to an isolated room without ventilation, spray or vaporize a larger amount of the drug there to allow them to strongly smell its strong scent (e.g., using an aroma lamp for essential oils), let the “resident” inhale the vapors for an hour and conduct the experiment. Make sure that the vapors do not get into the room where other “residents” are kept.

Therefore, it is desirable to test any medications so that before using them on aggressive representatives of our species, you suddenly don’t find out that you were sold some kind of fake, and you can personally verify that enhancing a violence inhibitor is a real thing!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Numismatics, Planned Economy, and Trump

Sperry UNIVAC

According to Trump, communism suddenly emerged in the form of his idea of his OGAS, with neural networks and tariffs:

The Pentagon plans to use an AI system to establish benchmark prices for critical minerals… The program developed by DARPA is designed to calculate fair prices taking into account production costs and excluding market distortions, especially those caused by China. It is assumed that AI-based pricing will be combined with tariffs to stabilize markets and support Western manufacturers.

The Pentagon plans to use an AI system to establish benchmark prices for critical minerals… The program developed by DARPA is designed to calculate fair prices taking into account production costs and excluding market distortions, especially those caused by China. It is assumed that AI-based pricing will be combined with tariffs to stabilize markets and support Western manufacturers.

Such fat cannot be commented on without sin. Especially pleasing was the talk of “fair” prices intended to correct the market. Leaving aside the посыл itself (each can laugh at it independently), one wants to give an example of how I encounter, probably, the most perfect market imaginable in my practice. We’re talking about such a little-known thing for the broad masses – numismatics, specifically – and how prices are set for all sorts of coins. From the point of view of fairness (and generally any external criteria), this is an unsolvable problem. How to understand objectively what should cost more: some worn-out Republican bronze from Rome, known, let’s say, in 5-6 examples (of which 4 are in the British Museum) or a typical Morgans dollar, a rare variety of which there are hundreds, with historical value having evaporated?

People invented a simple thing for this purpose – a classic auction where the price is determined solely by the ratio of those wanting to buy and the number of lots. In numismatics there’s a clear pattern: 99% of numismatists collect their own country, others are not very interested. Chinese people collect China (and Korea and Vietnam, considering them historical China), Americans – the USA (rarely Mexico or Canada), Russians – Russia. To assess how much a lot will sell for, you need to estimate two things: how many people want it and how rich they are?

And here we encounter that very “market distortion” that Trump is fighting against. Few people on earth are as rich as Yankees – only there can the average numismatist afford to liquidate hobbies for $2-5k a month, and a serious one can afford it by orders of magnitude more, moreover, given the population size, there are far more numismatists there than in the world’s average. As a result, two or three rare madmen claim the unfortunate Roman bronze somewhere at Heritage, while for a regular dollar, but a rare variety – hundreds and thousands exist, and everyone has some cash. From this emerges the picture: in any ratings of “the most expensive coins/banknotes in the world,” the top positions are always occupied by lots from the USA, such as “10 cents, Philadelphia Mint, 1904,” which go into a brawl for hundreds of thousands, while really interesting positions with important cultural value and rarer ones – gain $20-30k. What will happen upon attempting to “correct” such blatant injustice? Coin trading will collapse, and a black market will emerge, like the one that existed in the USSR, when people exchanged interesting lots semi-undergroundly, printed them out with a copier and distributed among their friends approximate prices, and generally built their parallel economy, doing exactly what legal auctions do. The difference is that at an auction, both the auctioneer (and quite substantially – a typical commission makes up 20-25% of the winning price of the lot) and the state profit, as they take tax from the auctioneer. But in a clandestine market, only its underground participants win. Some things simply don’t work, whether we like it or not. Let’s wait for a black market for germanium and lithium?

War is for fools, and the flea-ridden seeks a bath.

Today everyone is having a day of reflections about the Russian-Ukrainian War. I was lucky enough to leave Russia before 2022, with a formed libertarian worldview, tactical goals and like-minded people. How wonderful that Putin didn’t read this textbook for the Dark Lord, where it’s suggested to crush your opponent immediately with all their might, instead of feeding them first for training the weakest subordinates. If he had launched a full-scale war in 2014, I don’t know what would have happened to my fate. Most likely, I would have been swearing at my parents eight years earlier, got involved in meaningless street protests, and just about now would be getting out of prison without really understanding what to do next.

Well, as for the current version of reality, I’ve enriched libertarian theory somewhat, persuaded a few people to leave Russia, am surviving with other emigrants in an increasingly deteriorating situation and also don’t really understand what to do next.

What will happen when this annoying war ends? People will switch to something more exciting and interesting – fortunately politicians then dance on the political stage to provide fresh news. Because if they stop being interesting to anyone, it’s not far off to anankapon. And when the Russians stop attracting intense unfriendly attention, perhaps Russian emigrants will start to live a little simpler. It’s wonderful when you are uninteresting to the state. You can start building normal long-term plans without caveats like “if in Skupstine don’t adopt some new crap”.

And this is me just finishing an anime, and there the war ended

Salvador: From Prison of Gangs to Prison of the State

Perhaps you have heard about a man such as Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador. He looks cool: he rolled Bitcoin into the country, reduced crime almost to zero, destroyed the gangs. Sounds like success, right? But there is one major problem: in the process, he essentially transformed the entire country into one enormous prison.

Briefly: since March 2022, a “state of emergency” has been in effect in El Salvador. Sounds formal? Well, imagine that the police can arrest you right on the street simply for appearing suspicious. And this is not an exaggeration. Over two years of such a regime, more than 85 thousand people have been arrested. That’s 1% of the entire population. Imagine, one in every hundred families has lost someone close to them behind bars. Justice? Let’s forget about it! Courts take place in groups of 500 people, where you are given a sentence of 15-20 years in just 5 minutes. Guilty or not, nobody really figures it out. Orwell is smoking on the sidelines.

Incidentally, you can also end up in this “wonderful” statistics for criticizing the regime. Journalists and human rights activists regularly face threats, phone hacking through the Pegasus spy program (a greeting to Israeli intelligence services) and even have to flee the country because they don’t want to spend 15 years in jail for a report about a gang.

Instead of fighting violence like in developed countries (strengthening courts, working on education, creating jobs) or taking an innovative technological path (in the direction of treating violent criminals with means to strengthen the mechanism of inhibiting violence), Bukele chose the shortest way – mass repression and force suppressing all who impede him. Crime has decreased, yes. But now all of El Salvador is one huge zone of fear, where criminals have been replaced by the military and police.

Incidentally, let’s remember old Benjamin Franklin: “Those who sacrifice liberty for temporary security do not deserve either one.” In El Salvador, they sacrificed literally everything for an illusory stability. What comes next? Today the troops come for gangs, tomorrow they will come for the opposition, and after tomorrow – for you if you happen to become inconvenient.

History has already shown us time and again: a state, once it feels limitless power, never voluntarily relinquishes it. Of course, we all want security and order. But the price shouldn’t be equal to destroying civil liberties and turning society into a herd of frightened sheep. And you know what’s the worst thing? Bukele destroyed practically all independent institutions under the guise of fighting the Bukele gangs. Courts? Now completely controlled by the president. Parliament? It stamps out any laws, even the most absurd ones. Freedom of speech? Forget about it. Any mention of gangs or criticism of the government now can end with charges of “supporting terrorism.” And don’t forget about the “foreign agent” law, which El Salvador copied from Russia and Nicaragua. NGOs and independent media are required to pay huge taxes if they receive money from abroad. All in order to drown out uncomfortable voices and destroy any dissent.

Speaking of such “freedom” of business: under Bukele, police can easily confiscate your phone, money or car if you don’t please them. And there are no courts – because the judicial system simply stamps out decisions that suit the president. But Bitcoin is legal! True, who will buy it if your money can vanish without a trace? And this will certainly happen if you buy crypto on legitimate exchanges with KYC, revealing your identity and thus becoming vulnerable to raids by security forces who already know where to come.

Bukele assures us that he’s protecting people from bandits, but instead he simply replaced criminal lawlessness with the state. Suppressing rights and freedoms, power only sows new seeds of violence and resentment, which inevitably will give their poisonous fruits in the future. Therefore, remember that a state machine, once it tastes absolute power, usually turns into a monster that devours its own citizens, even the most loyal ones. And El Salvador is a striking example of this.

Voluntarist, Bitarch