Investment: Burying the Corpse

 Search engines have interesting lacunae. One bit of lost knowledge is the [burying the corpse] dynamic in accounting and investing. It comes up often enough that I have to make my own quick reference.

 

 I can gas the price of any financial instrument by buying a lot of it. My earlier purchases will show a gain on paper due to my later purchases. The fact this profit turns into a loss once I try to sell is known as burying the corpse. 

 Even in ideal conditions, in practice if I buy ~75% of a stock and then sell it again, I'll have to sell it back to exactly the folks I bought it from, and I'll have to pay exactly what I bought it for plus pay for their transaction costs. Realistically I can't even get losses that minimal. Basically it happened because I lied. Fictitious demand creates fictitious prices. The demand I hoped to exploit was my own demand, which I created by supplying it, see? Cancels out, plus there's friction.

 I'm supposed to buy things because I think they're worth more than they cost. If I plan to turn around and sell them immediately, that can't be true. Especially if I accept the prevailing prices I'll see.

 I killed the investment when I inflated it, and now I have to bury the corpse.

 

 Naturally this naive clean version almost never happens.

 However, many times folk will spend a lot on an instrument, then simply hold it on their balance sheet as collateral. They're still afflicted by burying the corpse, but the problem is being whitewashed. They're hiding the fact that book value and market value are different by insulating the instrument from the market. This is usually intentional fraud. Banks do this all the time, for example, because they get bailed out via taxes when the market calls their bluff. 

 Likewise I can take out a huge fractional-reserve/counterfeit loan, then buy a ton of some stock or another, then use the inflated book value of that stock to justify a second huge counterfeit loan. Leverage myself twice over. E.g. imagine I buy 90% of the market cap of some penny stock. Wow, hueg gainz. Now I can afford an even bigger second loan, lol.

 By book value I can pay all my debts. It's all fun and games until someone has to bury the corpse. If any of these risks go bad, I find my collateral can't pay for my leverage and in fact I've been underwater this whole time. That penny stock is, in fact, worth pennies. Financial explosion; anyone who trusted me as a risk gets hosed too. 

 It can hose you as an innocent investor too, if you're naive enough to fall for it. When I buy 90% of that penny stock, you might think it's going places and try to get on the bandwagon. You have to do your due diligence, notice all the demand is me and me alone, and realize book value has diverged from market value. Indeed I'm hoping you will fail exactly that: I will sell the corpse to you, pay off my loan with the proceeds, and pocket the profits, leaving you to bury the corpse. Everyone is looking for a rube who didn't buy on leverage (e.g. pension funds), so they can leave them carrying the bag, or else everyone is going to take a haircut.

 Can someone buy private stock, privately? Can they buy it without you knowing who bought it? If so, you have to assume someone now has a corpse to bury. At the very least look into the transaction history and discount price gains from large or repeated transactions.

 I would try short selling, except of course banks can hold corpses on their balance sheets for very long times. The "market" can stay "irrational" longer than I can stay solvent. That's because banks aren't private or market entities, they have legal privileges which make what would be irrational for me into something perfectly rational (if evil and traitorous) for them.

Banknotes Require Two Levels

 I have finally discovered a proper anti-libertarian market need. Turns out the usury freaks aren't totally out to lunch. 

 I dunno if I'm simply stupid today or if this one was really mind-bending, but wow my mind had to pretzel itself. Took real work.

 Banks must be artificially prevented from loaning out their banknotes. This should be done by printing two kinds of notes: the demand deposits, and the loan papers. Fiat currency has to work the same way, with gold-standard notes in exchange for gold-demand notes.

 Image a bank with 100 gold. It loans out 10 notes. It has 90 gold and an IOU on 10. Nonfractional reserve: it can still loan out 90 gold. Then the debtor spends the notes, and whoever they spent it on deposits the notes at the bank. Now it has 90 free gold, an IOU on 10, and 10 banknotes. Can the bank now offer a loan worth 100 gold? No, it has to stay at 90, or it will be double-spending the gold. The 10 banknotes here have to be specifically loan paper notes, so the bank knows it's not allowed to re-lend them. When the loan is paid back the loan papers have to be effectively destroyed and replaced by demand notes.

 Note that in a proper system, you can't back loans with demand deposits. The customer must explicitly allow the deposit to be turned into a bill or certificate or whatever they call it. This doesn't have to be exogenously forced, however, the government merely has to avoid irresponsibly enabling financial drug use. (So, ban taxes.) When the guy with ten gold came in, he was given demand papers. The part that has to be compelled is next: he gave the demand paper back to finance a loan, which goes out as loan paper. He can also take the demand notes over to a different bank and back a loan there instead. The demand paper is functionally identical to gold, but the loan can't be.
 Rather than a bank 'having' 100 gold in the vault, it would have 100 gold it was instructed to find an investment for. Rather than being 'able' to offer a 90 gold loan, it must offer that loan. The bank would have no free demand paper and 100 loan papers.

 If it's allowed to re-loan the notes, it will cause debts to multiply beyond the supply of gold. It's inflation, even with unitary reserve. 

 For ease of imagination, now consider one singular bank with all the money in the country, 100 gold. It makes a 100 gold loan. It's re-deposited, and loaned out again. Now the bank is owed 200 notes - of which only 100 exists. In this case it doesn't matter if it's re-loaning demand notes or if it's loaning the gold out directly. Whichever debtor pays back the loan will force the other into default. 

 If the bank isn't the only bank in the country, it can't know whether deposited papers are a transfer from a different bank, or simply the loan returning, unless they're specifically loan-marked notes.

 The forced default is a way of seeing the gold has been spent twice. Someone earned the gold and deposited it. The first guy spent it on their behalf. The second guy spent it again, but without any new production. More money, same goods => inflation.

 The 200 gold of debt is a way of seeing that the effective supply of gold has doubled. 100% inflation.

 

 Note this isn't a public "good," it's merely preventing a public bad. If you can loan out loan paper, the bank has a public costs private profit scheme. Inherently irresponsible. Turns out counterfeiting is a crime no matter how cleverly you make it look and feel benign.  

 If a bank refuses to behave, you have to immediately economically isolate it from your economy. Ban their notes. Nobody is allowed to sell goods for those notes.

 Under fiat currency I suppose you could centrally plan the loan supply. Have one entity responsible for all loans, keeping track of the absolute amount and keeping it below whatever ceiling they happen to decide on. Seems extremely stupid to me, but it's not impossible. The stupid: because the loan entity can't ever spend the money, it will just be fiat inflation and fiat deflation. Deliberately destabilizing prices for the sake of...paper money. 

 So, yeah. Print two kinds of notes. Gold-standard notes can be deposited as investments, and back the loan paper. Though, as always with fiat money, good luck getting the government to behave.

 

 When someone defaults on the loan, the bank must buy loan notes using collateral and give them to the original depositor, who can either re-up the loan or retrieve their gold or demand notes. (Same with fiat and gold standard notes.) Absolutely no printing new loan notes to achieve this.

 Mind that if someone demands their physical gold, the associated demand notes must be destroyed or at least tamper-evidently locked away. 

 Likewise foreigners can't be allowed to loan your money if you can't control their loaning rules. Simply ban the relevant parts of their trade if they try it. Don't let your money enter or leave their country. If any third party accepts your notes from that country, ban them too. 

 Perhaps this whole banknote thing is ultimately more trouble than it's worth. Just have gold coins. Wrap 'em in epoxy for durability. Yeah there's issues and inconveniences but it's better than having to Iron Curtain your country just to stop illicit currency smuggling.  

 P.S. A sound money system almost has the same issue as BTC. When notes are lost or destroyed in e.g. fire, residual gold gets stuck. Paralyzed, just kinda clogging up the vault. Owned by entropy. Likewise the total quantity of BTC in circulation will decline continuously as keys are lost in one way or another. 

 However, gold banks have the option to re-print their notes and replace all old notes with new ones. The gold that isn't claimed can be kept by the bank as part of their operating profit. 

 P.P.S. Money as debt. When someone creates a good, they impose a debt on society, which marks this debt with, ideally, gold. When someone else produces something, the first creator can call this debt using their gold, settling their account, but creating a new debt for the second creator. Production and consumption are asynchronous.
 When a bank loans something out twice, no actual debt was incurred the second time. Hence, inflation. The first guy loaning out his money is transferring his debt to someone else, in the hopes of being paid back an even bigger debt. Since he's giving up his ability to command consumption, that's fine. Net consumption commanded stays the same.
 However, properly arranged, the bank can't use bank notes as investments. It has to be a demand deposit.

Anyone Defending Christianity is a Satanist

 Jesus, Yeshua, was a real historical individual, specifically he was Satan's sockpuppet. He really was the metaphorical son of a higher power: Satan. The adversary, not the creator.
 Obviously Satan's son would claim to be the son of god. Duh.

 Logical-rhetorical perversity: anyone claiming to be the son of god is almost certainly the son of a devil. Anyone who genuinely was the son of god wouldn't need to say anything about it.

 Also, /headdesk moment, who isn't the son of the creator? That's the whole point of an ultimate creator: everything is their child. "Son of god? Yeah,  me too. And this chair I'm sitting on. And this coin. And those sticks and rocks. lol, introduce me to your drug dealer, also the son of god, they're selling good shit." (The shit, also.)

 The divinity of a true high-power avatar doesn't need to be advertised. Folks would spontaneously come up with the idea, or some functional equivalent. They recognize the Lordship, whether they can put it into words or not. The domination is all but unmistakable. 

 Jesus was the antichrist. Saviourhood is mental illness, so the saviour and the antichrist was the same person the whole time. 

 Jesus' plan was to save humanity until it was so crippled it was incapable of living, even helped by saviours and superheroes. Slaughter through mercy. Cloaking an attack in the guise of friendship. Etiolate Discipline until it goes catastrophically, irredeemably low. Give the child the candy they demand until they starve to death, because apparently nobody will accuse you of murder.

 Seems to have worked out pretty well. Satan was indeed a higher power. 

 Rather than looking like a murderer, they will get violently upset with anyone who suggests the kid needs vegetables. "How dare you accuse me of bad parenting." Guess he'll die. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 P.S. You can't save someone because net worth is a genetic soul trait. If it would raise their net worth, it won't work. They can afford to live by paying for it, or they can't afford to live. They ca also choose not to buy it, unless you violently enslave them.

 P.P.S. The vegetables thing is kinda a joke. The kid needs meat.

Buried Lede of the Tucker Benz Interview

 Mike Benz isn't some insider, he just read public documents. All the "right" wingers who were being censored could have done the same.

 The government is your enemy, and it's important to know your enemy. Have some idea of what kind of attacks they like and how they want to carry them out. You get how stupid this is, yeah? If you're being censored, and you don't want to be, the first thing to do is exhaustively study the censor. Seems to me the "right" refuses to know their enemy, as a way of convincing themselves it's not really an enemy. War is scary, they don't want to be scared, therefore they're not at war. Perfectly sogical. 

 It's important so I'm saying it again: it's important to know when they're like to attack you, with what, and in what way. I just assume the country is a giant middle school and the teacher is trying to send everyone to the principle's office for a detention. If I have to do anything else to complete the method, it's so easy I do it unconsciously.

Adventures in Gut Bacteria

 My theory: traveller's diarrhea is caused by eating things your gut flora can't help you eat. 

 I've had issues with peas. Gas and such. I figured this was a good test case. 

 Tried fermenting raw peas and using them as inoculation. It kinda worked. Proved the basic idea, but was suboptimal.

 Tried regularly eating small amounts of raw peas. Worked much better.

 I explain this using weed/cultivar dynamics. The weeds grow first. However, slowly, over time, the healthy cultivars crowd out the weeds. Trees grow slowly, but forests do form and choke out the weeds even though the weeds get there first.

 I get the proper organisms by eating raw peas. The gut is a bioreactor. It rots your food, and then you absorb the rot products. The correct rot germs are already on the peas, I just have to eat the peas without killing the right germs with heat. All this takes time to describe, but really it's simple. To build ability to digest X, eat raw X.

 I eat a small amount, a couple handfuls, to cut down on dissonant byproducts from the weeds. Some minimal level is not only tolerable, but invisible. If I consistently nurture the trees, I get a proper healthy forest. The good germs seep into the cracks and crevices and become well-established, able to ambush the weeds before they can cause problems. 

 At least, that's my explanation. 

 Alternative: plants are all poisonous. If you consistently eat raw plants, you breed pesticide-resistant strains of gut bacteria. If you eat them too inconsistently, the plants kill the germs that are supposed to be digesting them. Unlikely, but I can't rule it out.

I used to be able to handle peas without issues. I expect my digestives were wiped out by an unwise course of antibiotics. 

 Next I'll perhaps revive my ability to eat nuts.  

 You can't lose the ability to eat meat. You're made of raw meat. You can't lose contact with raw meat. This is probably why there's no such thing as an obligate herbivore. Apoptosis is more properly called autodigestion. The cell is dismantled with its own digestive enzymes. If you lost the ability to digest yourself, you would die.

 Are better organisms more complicated? Is that why digestion germs grow slowly?
 Also curious: does the gut lining help? Does it put its finger on the scale against weeds? How does it do that? How does it know which is which? How does it know what good germs want? 

 I expect further experience to teach me more.

Low Hanging Fruit and Failure to Pluck

 You can make musical tones by drumming or brushing your cheek. You can adjust the sound very dynamically by shaping your lips and jaw. The only reason this isn't a traditional instrument is that it's too quiet. Doesn't exactly make itself heard as part of an orchestra. 

 Why did the culture stagnate after finding the electric guitar? Paste a microphone to your face and use electronic amplification. Electric mouth...thingy. How many other unusual and interesting sounds, that happen to be too quiet for traditional music, are out there in the world? Thousands? Millions? Like, we already had guitars. [Guitars, but distorted] is hardly a huge leap. 

 Stagnation occurs when the culture loses interest in exploration. You can't really run out of frontiers. You can only run out of the most childishly simplistic, in-your-face-obvious frontiers. 

 I was thinking about a 3D piano or harp. Rather than 1D strings, imagine each string was a pair, forming a grid. Long + short, long + medium, long + long, then medium + short and so on. Either stack grids on top of each other or go full network, either way forming a cube. This instrument would be completely infeasible to make mechanically, but it's almost trivial to make virtually. The network version wouldn't even be physically playable; you wouldn't be able to reach the inner nodes to pluck them.
 Why did the culture stagnate after the theramin? There's millions of possible virtual instruments. Guaranteed at least a dozen of them are as beautiful as a hang drum. 

 Going outside the box is as simple as genuinely wanting to, then not quitting until you get there. 

 Discovery fails when demand for discovery fails. Exploration stops when the culture gets old. Senescent, and stuck in its ways.
 Far too interested at winning in the last game, regardless of how stale that game is. Doesn't care about the external world, only about its own navel. Lies about it too. You could imagine a culture that said, "Yeah, that's enough," and stopped exploring because it was satisfied. This culture has to forcibly suppress exploration, to avoid embarrassing its fake exploration.

 I don't like guitars. Massively overused. Pianos are even worse.

Vitamin A is a Vitamin

 There's a theory that vital amine alpha is in fact a toxin and you should never expose yourself to it.

 You can piss out vitamin A. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8074070/ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 If your body wants to get rid of it, it can dump as much as it wants. It wouldn't accumulate if it's not supposed to.

 This passes the works-in-my-kitchen test. I overdosed on A once. It's how I know you generally shouldn't eat liver. I pissed it out, exactly the same way I piss out excess salt, iodine, and calcium. Acute but temporary symptoms. Kidney stress gives me a characteristic headache.

 Although yes, retinols are toxic. Insulin is also toxic - the fact that something is poisonous doesn't mean you don't need it to live. Retinols are stored in the liver because airtight seals aren't worth the cost, so the reservoir leaks, and you want it to leak up against something that can regenerate, i.e. liver cells.

 Caveat 2: it is highly probable that there's an alternative, the same way vitamin C, vital amine collagen, has an alternative. You might guess what you can eat instead of vitamin C: it's collagen. This is why meat cures and prevents scurvy. 

 If you have a busted enzyme and can't use vitamin A, you don't die. You use the alternative. You do accumulate vitamin A which you can't use, though. Likely the liver packages retinol for transport, it gets to the cells, then it's released chaotically. There's no way for the liver and kidneys to know your vitamin A metabolism is busted. In this case, yes, you could well need a weirdo strict elimination diet.

Being Explicit: You Can't Set Right What Once Went Wrong

 Because that's not how it works. 

 Yes, it's true that generally speaking societies have one or two key things wrong with them. "Bro, just don't do the tax thing." "Have you heard of our lord and saviour, Exit?" 

 However, that's due to efficiency. The spiritual pressure makes one or two things go wrong, and that properly brings physical reality into alignment with spiritual reality, releasing the pressure. They underlying problem is being fuckin' evil. If you fix the keystone issues, all that happens is you put the realities out of alignment again, causing pressure which will, sooner rather than later, realign them. It also incurs a karmic debt, so the new alignment will be worse than the old until the debt is paid. 

 Superficial solutions are counterproductive.

 You can't get a Saviour to "save" you from the tyrant, because the tyrant is merely the obvious symptom of a core mortal sin. The tyrant is a reflection of your own internal tyranny. The only thing that can "save" you from yourself is Death. To save you from yourself means getting rid of the you which is causing the problem. Getting rid of the self which suffers the problem. 

 If you want to stop being victimized you have to stop victimizing yourself. 

 The world is just. If it seems evil to you, then the problem is projection. You're evil. The solution isn't to fix the world; that would be narcissism. The solution is to fix yourself. (I won't say the thing. I will resist.) 

 But, of course, if you could fix yourself, you already would have.

 Nothing can be changed or improved. This is the underworld. They're already dead. It's already too late.

 The problem isn't that something went wrong. The problem was the thing wasn't right to begin with, and going wrong is justice being served. You can't undo the justice and get right. I mean, duh. Just look. This is so simple even wordcelibates can understand.