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Is this China’s technology moment?

By Jesse Hirsh | January 14, 2021 | 0 Comments
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It can be difficult to get credible and accurate reports about what is happening in China, especially when it comes to technology (and the Chinese tech industry). However over the past couple of months there has been a notable shift in both Chinese government policy and the state of China’s technology companies

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Is 2021 an Echo of 1641?

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 13, 2021 | 0 Comments
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If you don’t discern any of these dynamics in the present, what are you choosing not to see? The reason why history rhymes is that humanity is still using Wetware 1.0 and so humans respond to scarcity, abundance and conflicts over them in the same manner. I am struck by similarities between the conflict-torn mid-1600s and the present: global climate change (The Little Ice Age in the 1600s), political upheavals and wars which intertwined civil and imperial conflicts.

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#AxisOfEasy 178: The Great Deplatforming

By Mark E. Jeftovic | January 12, 2021 | 5 Comments
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The SolarWinds shit-show keeps on shitting,
Singapore cops access COVID-19 tracing data for criminal investigations,
Use stupid passwords, win stupid prizes: ZyXel hardcodes backdoor, Nissan uses “admin” and more in Axis of Easy #178

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2021: If It Wasn’t For Bad Luck, We Wouldn’t Have No Luck At All

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 10, 2021 | 0 Comments
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If we have indeed begun a sustained “reversal of fortune”, it might be prudent to consider the possibility we’re only in the first inning of a sustained run of back luck. In our self-deluded hubris, we reckon we’ve moved beyond the influence of fortune, a.k.a. Lady Luck: our technologies are so powerful and our monetary policies so godlike that nothing as random as luck could ever crush our limitless expansion.

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The Tyranny Nobody Talks About

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 7, 2021 | 0 Comments
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All the tricks to hide our unaffordable cost structure have reached marginal returns. Reality is about to intrude. There is much talk of tyranny in the political realm, but little is said about the tyrannies in the economic realm, a primary one being the tyranny of high costs: high costs crush the economy from within and enslave those attempting to start enterprises or keep their businesses afloat.

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#AxisOfEasy 177: Ding Dong The Flash Is Dead

By Mark E. Jeftovic | January 5, 2021 | 2 Comments
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Adobe Flash is finally dead, dead, dead,
Magecart found in Shopify, WooCommerce,
Christmas Morning bombing disrupts AT&T network and more in this week’s Axis of Easy #177

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The Coming War on Wealth and the Wealthy

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 5, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve–thanks for perfecting ‘legalized looting’ and neofeudalism in America. The problem with pushing a pendulum to its maximum extreme on one end is that it will swing back to the other extreme minus a tiny bit of friction.

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Society as a Potemkin Village

By Jesse Hirsh | January 4, 2021 | 1 Comment
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If I were to create a word cloud of the thoughts I had this past year, a big (and recurring) phrase would be Potemkin Village or at least Potemkin. I tried throwing the phrase or name into Twitter to see what comes up and the results were far too many and sprawling to be of much use. Although this could also be a reflection of the algorithm’s inability to grasp the significance of the phrase.

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2020 Was a Snack, 2021 Is the Main Course

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 3, 2021 | 0 Comments
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One of the dishes at the banquet of consequences that will surprise a great many revelers is the systemic failure of the Federal Reserve’s one-size-fits-all “solution” to every spot of bother: print another trillion dollars and give it to rapacious financiers and corporations. Though 2020 is widely perceived as “the worst year ever,” it was only a snack.

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The Top 10%’s Bubble Is About to Burst

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 29, 2020 | 0 Comments
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When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real. A great many people are living in bubbles that are about to pop.

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Is the Internet too centralized?

By Jesse Hirsh | December 29, 2020 | 0 Comments
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The Internet was designed to be a decentralized communications network that could survive a catastrophic event such as a nuclear attack. In doing away with a centre, a network of networks could be resilient enough to manage if not transcend an isolated incident or a key node going offline.

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2020 the "Worst Year Ever"–You’re Joking, Right?

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 28, 2020 | 0 Comments
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So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous. Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.”

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The Most Hopeful Scenario for 2021

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 25, 2020 | 0 Comments
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Choose wisely, America, or the options for a positive outcome will vanish like mist in Death Valley on a clear July afternoon. From the point of view of evolution, the most hopeful scenario for 2021 is the sudden and complete collapse of everything that is obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic.

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Give Yourself a Gift Next Year: Agency

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 24, 2020 | 1 Comment
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We think we’re powerless because we don’t have wealth and power over others, but nothing could be further from the truth. To have agency is to have power over your own life and control of your assets, options and resources.

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Our Phantom Middle Class

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 23, 2020 | 0 Comments
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What happens when America finally admits its middle class is a phantom of feel-good fantasy? We may well find out in the next four years. Of the many things we cannot bring ourselves to admit, one of the most consequential is that our vaunted middle class is illusory, a phantom of our imagination rather than a reality.

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Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 21, 2020 | 0 Comments
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The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy. The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus.

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SolarWinds and the hypocrisy of cybersecurity

By Jesse Hirsh | December 21, 2020 | 0 Comments
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We’re in the midst of what may be the largest computer security incident in years, or decades, or maybe even to date. And while it is both severe and geopolitically important, it also illustrates the hypocrisy that surrounds cybersecurity.

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What Would Happen If the Fed Ceased to Exist?

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 18, 2020 | 0 Comments
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Extremes get more extreme until risk breaks out; then the reversal will be as extreme as the bubble expansion. What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist?

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When Social Capital Becomes More Valuable Than Financial Capital

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 17, 2020 | 0 Comments
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This devaluation of financial wealth–and its transformation to a dangerous liability– will reach extremes equal to the current extremes of wealth-income inequality. Financial capital–money–is the Ring that rules them all. But could this power fall from grace?

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Can 20 Years of Deflation Be Compressed into Two Years? We’re About to Find Out

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 16, 2020 | 0 Comments
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Extremes become more extreme right up until they reverse, a reversal no one believes possible here in the waning days of 2020. The absolutely last thing anyone expects is a collapse of all the asset bubbles, i.e. a deflation of assets that reverses the full 20 years of bubble-utopia since 2000.

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#AxisOfEasy 176: Anybody Who Hasn’t Been Hacked By STARBURST, Please Raise Your Hand

By Mark E. Jeftovic | December 15, 2020 | 6 Comments
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FireEye and US Treasuray Department hacked, Russia blamed
Solarwinds Hacked and was attack vector for all of the above and more
Google falls out of bed with Monday morning outage…check it out in Axis of Easy #176

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Future Tools: Open Source CRMs

By Jesse Hirsh | December 15, 2020 | 0 Comments
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Yesterday (Monday) I woke up and was anxious that I did not receive a copy of the newsletter. My concern was that if I didn’t get a copy, others didn’t. I checked substack and it showed the issue was sent out. Why had I not received it?

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One Little Problem with the "All-Electric" Auto Fleet: What Do We Do with all the "Waste" Gasoline?

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 14, 2020 | 0 Comments
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Regardless of what happens with vaccines and Covid-19, debt and energy–inextricably bound as debt funds consumption– will destabilize the global economy in a self-reinforcing feedback. Back in the early days of the oil industry (1880s and 1890s), the product that the industry could sell at a profit was kerosene for lighting and heating.

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New Audiobook, New Song, Renewed Focus

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 13, 2020 | 0 Comments
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There is no way a status quo that is completely dependent on the permanent expansion of these interlocking extremes, asymmetries and imbalances can unwind them all and retain its myriad parasitic elites. Thanks to my friend and colleague Mark Jeftovic, the audiobook of A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet is now available.Hands-free grokking is now accessible.

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Dreaming of a Christmas Without Stuff Nobody Wants or Needs

By Charles Hugh Smith | December 11, 2020 | 0 Comments
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Freeing ourselves of unwanted/unneeded gift-giving is not just heresy in a debt-funded consumerist economy–it is tantamount to treason. Did you see the new “gotta-have” coffee-pod flavors this Christmas? Crayfish, Spanish Moss, Pumpkin Spicy Radish and Jungle Rot. Yowza, it doesn’t get any better than this….

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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.