Homeless
Sunday Ramble
Back at the keyboard again on a Sunday evening to click the keys. I truly missed it last weekend. A whirlwind business trip to Miami to meet with investors and hire a CFO kept me more than occupied. Four nights later, two of those red-eye flights, and I made it back to Peru with a fever to thank for my efforts. Lesson learned — move slower and don’t try to get everything done at once. That seems to be a lesson I have a hard time teaching myself. Especially since I’ve had almost a decade gap between operating at this pace. The old bod doesn’t seem to have the go-juice it once did. Accepting that, along with the grey in my muzzle, has been easier said than done.
Landing in Miami last Sunday morn, I was expecting to check into a hotel and get a few hours of sleep before throwing myself into the fray. Unfortunately, sleep was not to be — the hotel reservation had a snafu. So instead, I headed out for breakfast, walking six blocks and crossing no less than eight homeless people sleeping in blankets on the concrete, not to mention another 10-15 that I didn’t directly cross. The juxtaposition was shocking. Just 12 hours before, I’d been walking through the city square of Tarapoto, where, at most, there are two homeless people lying curbside amongst a population of 200k where the average person makes around $500 a month. Then in downtown Miami, walking between skyscrapers, knowing that the average person makes nearly 10x what the Peruvian does, yet I see more homeless in the wealthiest part of town. How can that be?
Our lead investor filled in the dots for me over the following days. It’s an ugly realization to make, and I tried to deny it, but the further I get from experience in Miami, the more accurate it seems to me. See, the US was founded by individuals looking for business liberty more than anything else. Of course, we can delude ourselves about romantic ideals, but beneath the warm and fuzzy facade of the American ideals, there’s been a steely-cold truth that profiting comes first and foremost. So much so that the current state of the US is not a surprise — it’s is just the logical extension of prioritizing money-making over life. When you think about American history, the “pursuit of profit” makes more sense than the “pursuit of happiness.”
The homeless are the refuse from that chilly, in-humane pursuit of profit above all else. You can tell what I’m saying is true because of how the homeless are treated in the US, which is different from other cultures. In the US, homeless people are ignored. People walk by pretending they are not there. Over and over again, the homeless are given the signal that they are less than human — that they don’t even exist. In Tarapoto, people passing by either find something to offer the homeless or have a visible pang of guilt walking by and ignoring them. Even though they live on the street, there is still the sense that they are part of the community — not exiled from it.
Even if my thesis here is wildly off base, I can no longer experience the homeless culture in the US without feeling creeped out. Not because of the homeless, but because of how they’re treated. I don’t have a solution or how to get people off the streets, though I’m certain separating money and state will help in the long run, but recognizing the homeless as human beings is a good starting point. Who knows, maybe humanizing the homeless will even help end the prolific homelessness problem the US faces.
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Bitcoin humor.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Weekly Range: $27k - $42k
Things went from worse to worser for the bulls in the two weeks since I last published an update. The FEDs desire to raise interest rates spooked the macro markets, causing sell-offs across the board, including Bitcoin. After opening the week at $43k, we closed just over $36k. It’s not a pretty picture here for the bulls either, as there has not been a capitulation to suggest the fear has reached a climax, nor have we got a sense that things are stabilizing in the macro markets. I anticipate seeing more volatility in the next week or so before we see Bitcoin attempt to consolidate and pivot. Even if this does wind up being the bottom, the odds of us moving up quickly from here are pretty low after the 51% pullback from $69k. This is a great time to be patient and consider cost averaging into the market.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: Can Bitcoin be the foundation for a censorship-resistant internet?
A: Yes.
Bitcoin is the most powerful, decentralized, and censorship-resistant network on the planet. The Lightning Network, built on top of Bitcoin, allows those censorship-resistant properties to expand beyond monetary transactions. Impervious, the first internet browser constructed to run on top of the Lightning Network will launch in the next couple of months. That’s right, in the not-so-distant future, you may be using a Bitcoin-based browser to surf the web.
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