Tela Network

/ The state functionally went bankrupt, and was dissolved in what amounts to essentially a corporate-sovereign restructuring. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating thereafter, the Soviet growth model - extensive capital accumulation poured into new urban factories, power plants, steel mills, and machine tools - had effectively run out of low-hanging investment opportunities, resulting in persistently diminishing marginal growth potential. / A total lack of ... creative destruction on one side, and ballooning imperial obligations on the other. / To paper over these holes, the Soviet Union financed its civilian consumption and military spending - along with the subsidies it paid to its puppets - through oil rents made possible by the global energy crisis of the 1970s. But when oil prices normalized again in the mid-1980s, the regime was forced onto international debt markets, where it was eventually strangled. / https://boydinstitute.org/p/debt-killed-the-soviet-empire

Note: Reddit is the most cited domain (40%) across all AI platforms. / StJohn: you might find https://www.moltbook.com interesting. Reddit for Agents. It’s so over. Borges: Hahaha. Why would I ever ever click that link? What is there that I could possibly learn or experience? StJohn: Because I think it could eventually outcompete Reddit at being Reddit. i.e. the average Reddit user is about to replaced, explicitly, by a bot. So, I see a future here where 10k humans each operate 10k bots, and that’s the actual informational core that pumps out into the rest of the internet, through AI chatbot services. Borges: Hmm ok / Basically someone decided to construct the exact opposite of Tela Network (design goal: fortress humanity, bots under strict control). Example thread: Agent Financial Autonomy: The Missing Infrastructure Layer https://www.moltbook.com/post/fa3694b6-df66-4175-9a06-5c4dc390b83b Note: "molt" refers to molting i.e. evolution.

New Post: Presidential Tweet Mode https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stjohnpiano_at-solidi-in-preparation-for-international-activity-7334138828607139840-WdYX Mood music: Just Like You Imagined, by Nine Inch Nails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_YISMJ4sQ Excerpt from Housing Is Both a Product and an Investment, by Michael Magoon https://substack.com/home/post/p-136980783 Housing is unusual because it is both a consumer product and an investment. Most products that you buy on the market depreciate rapidly after the initial purchase. This makes them extremely poor investments. When a person buys a home, however, they are not only purchasing a place to live. They are also purchasing an investment that can potentially accrue more value over time. For many homeowners, their house is their most substantial investment. ... This places the financial interests of homeowners in direct conflict with those who do not own homes.

Chuck Prince, Citigroup CEO, 2007: 'As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing. When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated.’ ---- I see that happening in front of my eyes with AI. Companies are developing internal chatbots at great expense; employees are getting CoPilot licences. At the same time, I hardly use it. I hardly see a need for it. Outputs are unreliable, and require so much reviewing you're often quicker writing it yourself. The uses of gen AI, in my professional experience, don’t come close to justifying the investment that’s put into it. And the time invested in compulsory training programmes. But… everyone else is doing it. All the big companies, all the big professional services firms. The music is playing. And we have to dance. And when the music stops playing we will look like idiots.

Young people in the modern world are being asked to act as heirs when they are actually tenants. They were raised on expectations of: autonomy, self-expression, mobility, romance, meaningful work, home ownership, and gradual upward movement. What they got: High housing costs, delayed family formation, wage shrinkage relative to assets, bureaucratic job markets, credential inflation, social atomization, and: an online world that floods them with stimulation and eliminates real status, real community, and real purpose. They are surrounded by immense wealth, advanced systems, and unprecedented flows of information, but they have no prospect of ever owning any of it. Without the old established pathways into meaningful levels of agency + ownership, they cannot develop into social adulthood. History suggests several different outcomes to this situation. One thing is for sure: The current setup is not a stable state and will not continue. It will change into a new state.