Home

Latest Issues of #AxisOfEasy

Conspiracy as a symptom of a post-literate society

By Jesse Hirsh | May 5, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

What if we’re approaching pervasive conspiracy culture wrong. Rather than being a symptom of a failing news system, or an acknowledgement of the fallacies of journalism, conspiracy culture is instead a symptom of a post-literate society.

Read it »

Covid Has Triggered The Next Great Financial Crisis

By Charles Hugh Smith | May 4, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

What’s left are the ‘fatal synergies’ of soaring debt and leverage, diminishing returns on stimulus, the substitution of credit for savings and the coming deflationary tsunami that pops all the speculative bubbles. Imagine a once modest but sturdy home built near a cliff to maximize the vistas.

Read it »

#AxisOfEasy 194: Canada’s Bill C-10 Lets CRTC Regulate User-Generated Content

By Mark E. Jeftovic | May 4, 2021 | 3 Comments
Posted in

New BIND vulnerabilities,
iOS 14.5 comes with new privacy alert pop-ups,
Google’s contact tracing app has privacy flaws … this and more in this week’s Axis of Easy # 194

Read it »

The Privacy Conundrum

By Jesse Hirsh | May 4, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

It’s clear that privacy is essential, but protecting our privacy can be legitimately confusing.
What if instead of fighting fire with fire we starting using water.
What if predictive privacy was the kind of water necessary to put out the fire that is contemporary surveillance based AI?

Read it »

Insights into Risk: Taleb and Tyson

By Charles Hugh Smith | May 2, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

Events that devastate the majority financially greatly enrich the few who bet on non-linear dynamics. I see the same question in forums, threads, articles and emails: what can I do to protect myself and my family from whatever lies ahead?

Read it »

Which Lifeboat Will You Choose?

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 30, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

I’m sure it’s no surprise that the next five years will be risky and challenging; to the degree that we will be reliant on those closest to us, we are sharing a virtual lifeboat. Consider a scenario in which we’re on a ship that’s sinking, and the lifeboats have been launched. Being some of the last still on board the doomed vessel, we can scan who’s in each lifeboat and choose which one we’ll clamber into.

Read it »

America Is Exceptionally…Kleptocratic: Wealth/Power Inequality and the Slide Into Disorder

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 29, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

The sheer weight of this outlandish asymmetry of wealth and power is pulling the nation into disorder. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t address a small elite owning most of the nation’s private wealth and using a sliver of that wealth to influence the federal government so their wealth and political power increase in a self-reinforcing feedback: as a result of their campaign contributions and lobbying, the elites’ wealth continues expanding, enhancing their political power to further expand their wealth, and so on.

Read it »

Automated Entrepreneurship

By Jesse Hirsh | April 28, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

As part of our ongoing work building the Automated Media Network, we’ve been researching GPT-3 based applications and services. In so doing, it has been an interesting exercise both in the biases embedded into GPT-3, as well as the biases reflected in how the companies are choosing to use this technology.

Read it »

Warning Light Flashing Red

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 27, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

When the warning light is flashing red, it’s prudent to have a capital preservation strategy in place. Not everyone has an IRA or 401K invested in the stock market, for those who do, the red warning light is flashing red:markets have reached historic extremes on numerous fronts.

Read it »

#AxisOfEasy 193: Gigantic Mystery Block Of Military IP Addresses Became Active On Inauguration Day

By Mark E. Jeftovic | April 27, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

Another Yet Another Chrome Zero-Day,
Bad auditing software sent UK postal workers to prison,
USPO running cyber-surveillance operation on social media posts and more in this week’s Axis of Easy # 193

Read it »

Where is the future of work? Everywhere!?

By Jesse Hirsh | April 26, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

The pandemic has empowered professionals to pursue a balance between life and work, leading many to move out of major cities to find refuge in rural communities. What does this shift mean for the future of work and the role of super cities?

Read it »

What’s Yours Is Now Mine: America’s Era of Accelerating Expropriation

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 26, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated. Expropriation: dispossessing the populace of property and property rights, via the legal and financial over-reach of monetary and political authorities.

Read it »

The People Have Lost Faith in the State, and the State Has Lost Faith in its People

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 23, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

This is how states and empires decay and slide into the dustbin of history. Democracy is fundamentally about advocacy: the people are free to advocate for their interests and form groups to represent their shared interests. In the broadest scope, the people are free to advocate for what they hold as the common good, policies and programs that benefit the entire populace rather than one special-interest group.

Read it »

Is systems change inevitable?

By Jesse Hirsh | April 22, 2021 | 1 Comment
Posted in

In yesterday’s issue we looked at the twenty year projections prepared by the US intelligence community for the incoming Biden administration. In particular highlighting the political nature of these trend reports, that they also act as road maps to desired futures.

Read it »

The Only Way to Get Ahead Now Is Crazy-Risky Speculation

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 21, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

It’s all so pathetic, isn’t it? The only way left to get ahead in America is to leverage up the riskiest gambles. It’s painfully obvious that the only way left to get ahead in America is crazy-risky speculation, but nobody seems to even notice this stark and stunning reality.

Read it »

#AxisOfEasy 192: Another Supply Chain Breach: Codecov Hacked – Damage Unknown

By Mark E. Jeftovic | April 20, 2021 | 5 Comments
Posted in

Facebook’s ad system lets companies spin both directions,
Big Tech’s fingerprints all over new privacy laws in US,
Amazon is trying to strongarm Ecobee into sharing user data ..this and more in this week’s Axis of Easy #192

Read it »

“What do we do about these fucking idiots?”

By Jesse Hirsh | April 19, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

This past weekend the province of Ontario entered a crisis that combined an escalating pandemic with an increasingly fed up public. Fed up, not just with the pandemic, but the utter incompetence of our leadership.

Read it »

America’s Fatal Synergies

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 18, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

America’s financial system and state are themselves the problems, yet neither system is capable of recognizing this or unwinding their fatal synergies. why do some systems/states emerge from crises stronger while similar systems/states collapse?

Read it »

If You Don’t See Any Risk, Ask Who Will "Buy the Dip" in a Freefall?

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 17, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

Nobody thinks a euphoric rally could ever go bidless, but as Greenspan belatedly admitted, liquidity is not guaranteed. The current market melt-up is taken as nearly risk-free because the Fed has our back, i.e. the Federal Reserve will intervene long before any market decline does any damage.

Read it »

What’s Taboo? Everything Except Greed

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 15, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

OK, now I get it. Take a couple tabs of Euphorestra and Hopium, and stick to talking about making money in the market. Greed won’t offend anyone. So I started to tell my buddy about my new screenplay idea: “There’s a global pandemic, and when they rush a bunch of vaccines to market, then….”

Read it »

The Middle Class Has Finally Been Suckered into the Casino

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 14, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

The Fed’s casino isn’t just rigged; it’s criminally unstable. The decay of America’s middle class has been well documented and many commentators have explored the causal factors. The bottom line is that this decay isn’t random; the income of the middle class isn’t going to suddenly increase at 15 times the growth rate of the income of the top 0.1%. (see chart below)

Read it »

When AI is just a puppet

By Jesse Hirsh | April 14, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

The mythology of technology is powerful, but also kind of superficial. It usually doesn’t take much to move past the marketing and vapour ware to understand whether a tool is useful or not. With AI this has been a bit more challenging, as the opaqueness of the tech often makes it difficult for us to scrutinize or understand what is taking place behind the scenes. Similarly the language and hype around AI deliberately hides or downplays the role of humans in making these automated systems work.

Read it »

#AxisOfEasy 191: Canada Wants To Censor Insults Against Politicians, Implement Internet Killswitch

By Mark E. Jeftovic | April 13, 2021 | 4 Comments
Posted in

New easyDNS Network Status Page is now live,
Amazon warehouse workers vote against union (suspect much can prove nothing),
New attack can lock you out of WhatsApp and more in this week’s Axis of Easy # 191

Read it »

Buy the tech you need now if you can

By Jesse Hirsh | April 13, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

Ever since the pandemic hit early last year, supply chains have been stressed, and consumer demand has exhibited herd characteristics. In response to the crisis, and perhaps as a result of our increased time at home and on social media, demand is often exceeding supply when it comes to items that a lot of people all of a sudden really need.

Read it »

The "Helicopter Parent" Fed and the Fatal Crash of Risk

By Charles Hugh Smith | April 12, 2021 | 0 Comments
Posted in

All the risks generated by gambling with trillions of borrowed and leveraged dollars didn’t actually vanish; they were transferred by the Fed to the entire system. The Federal Reserve is the nation’s Helicopter Parent, saving everyone from the consequences of their actions.

Read it »

Contributors

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark is the co-founder of easyDNS and the editor-in-chief of #AxisOfEasy. He is the author of Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS (Packt UK, 2018) and Unassailable: Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks & Cancel Culture. 

The Canadian Bitcoiners

The Canadian Bitcoiners

Joey Tweets and Len the Lengend are the hosts of The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast, and you may recognize them as the voices (and faces) behing the AxisOfEasy Podcast. CanadianBitcoiners.com

Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith is the author of numerous books and writes from OfTwoMinds.com.