● 08.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 17/08/2023: The Velocity of Credit and Gemini Participation

Posted in News Roundup at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• In a broken society, pretty much all axioms repeated over and over by ‘experts’, are falsehoods. Diversifying your investments is one of them. Diversifying your investments, or efforts, is just plain dumb. You should focus on what you understand – or love doing – instead.

• The only thing diversification accomplishes is that you only lose about as much as the rest of the sheeple — be it time or money.

• How can that be true? Wouldn’t anyone notice by now? Well, a few of us did. But the reason diversification looks good is yet another consequence of our broken economy: inflation. Inflation, unlike what they tell you, is not greedy businesses gouging poor customers. It is a simple monetary phenomenon: when money is being debased by a corrupt government, all assets prices rise in ever-increasing _nominal_ terms. The numbers are higher, but not the actual value. So you get more ‘money’ from your investments, but it buys less then what you started with. Where does that stolen money go? The State gives it to some billionaire via a bailout or through some ‘program’ that looks good on paper. Capital-ism.

• /o I wasn’t clear on this point: why not a skirt or a kilt? That would do the job, but I love the simplicity of a one-piece dress instead of dealing with a skirt or kilt that is falling off, maybe a belt, and a shirt that needs to be dealt with. Do I tuck it in? Do I roll up my sleeves? It’s just too complicated.

• My only qualm is skirts’ tendency to “imprint” (as an American I think only in firearm terms) part of the male anatomy while walking. This can of course be mitigated by wearing undergarments that offer more support, though your mileage may vary.

• Ordinarily I dislike Mondays because I have to work, and the week looms long ahead of me. This Monday was a good Monday because I’m on vacation.

• Weather wise it wasn’t so nice: it rained off and on earlier in the day, going from sunny and hot and muggy, to rainy and dark and muggy, over and over and over again. I went out later in the afternoon after it had cleared up, but it was terribly, terribly muggy.

Banking

• At any given time, much of the monetary value present in an economy is based on credit. Businesses are given loans from banks and venture capitalists to fund major projects; consumers take out loans to make large investments such as buying a house or attending university, or apply for lines of credit to fund daily expenses between paychecks; banks borrow against the balances their customers have in savings and checking accounts to lend money; and the government spends money on credit of future tax revenue and using bonds.

• In a booming economy, much of this credit is constantly in motion. Banks, businesses, consumers and governments all carry loan balances. Consumers pay money to banks and businesses, who use the money to pay off loans of their own to each other, the government, and back to the consumers in the form of reseeding savings accounts and paying wages. Balance sheets are constantly changing and updating who owes money to whom.

Technology and Free Software

• svhop is a new piece of software. Its name stands for: simple virtual hosts for oneliner protocols. If you have a super-server and multiple server programs – that speak, for example, the gemini protocol – designed to run under that super-server, svhop lets you dispatch incoming requests to different server programs depending on the hostname in the request.

• A super-server is a program that sits between the server program and the client. It handles incoming connections and for every connection, it invokes the actual server. This server program then doesn’t need to know about IP addresses or ports, it doesn’t need to do TCP nor potentially TLS; the server program itself just reads the request from its standard input and sends a response to its standard output.

• i heard of v and i had a go.

• after the necessary “hello me” i decided to rewrite one of my raku scripts in v.

• i sometimes want to apply the golden-ratio (phi) to dimensions; my script in raku does that.

• Someone on Bubble got really rude, just because I told him yesterday, that I “wanted” to visit his capsule aka I’ve showed interest in that person.

• [...]

• No, it doesn’t imply self-hosting. I’ve never said so and even if, it wouldn’t be an elephant in the room. It takes five mins to register a domain and ten more to setup an Ubuntu server with a gemini server of your choice.

Internet/Gemini

• I read somewhere about someone apparently not having a capsule.

• I think I missed out on an Official description of what a capsule is. Posts here and there have me imagining a proper capsule implies self-hosting – something I’m uninterested in for (I think) it requiring setting up a domain, paying “infinity minus one” attention to security mania, and whatever else.

• That seems akin to how simply wanting to play/sing a few songs in public requires transporting equipment from the house/garage to the vehicle, driving to a venue, transporting the equipment from the vehicle to a stage, setting up the equipment, testing for setup errors, and *finally* doing the playing/singing part – and then, of course, having to get all the equipment (Beatles reference coming..) back to where it once belonged.

• So I recently saw a cool post about a guy saying he wants to wear a dress, because it makes sense in a practical way. And I agree, it does make sense. However, after his post, the Gemini Space exploded with people responding, and made me wonder…

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