The original, easily readable version is here, but I have to wonder if ComplianceBot is not going to stop by and flag my document. Below is more "backup".

How Mike got a Job (or Skorphing, or A Frightening Flow State)

By: Mike

I could. I could speculate. There is money to be made there. I could regularly “cash out” and have a big tax bill I guess and a big bank account I hope.

That to me does not sound terribly fun. It assumes that your primary motivation is to acquire money (you the reader. Not Mike.) There is nothing wrong with that. But that does not motivate me. And not because I’m a hippy snob with an important message for you. It is a module that has been missing from my brain since birth. I think. Now, that doesn’t stop people from making great big leaps of logic and assumption to come of with pretty much any old conclusion.

There is the idea of creating tools to jigger around the tokens. That sounds more fun, but I can imagine myself saying “why” after 6 months or so of all-in hard-core. All the things. I do have a habit of flaming out. I suspect that’s because I don’t have a real long term goal in particular.

“That’s. Whoa, Mike. That’s heavy stuff that you’re laying on me!” Well, it is as honest and genuine as I can muster. Do you think I make up unflattering things to say about myself for fun? The goal is to acknowledge, mount, and dominate. So, maybe that’s what this here writing is about. Maybe what the fuck is it all about is what it’s about. That’s ok. That sounds productive.

I sure would like to find meaning and wotnot. I think I had “meaning” ripped out from under me at some point recently. A great big mind fuck. That, I don’t want to get into. But starting out from scratch, as a childless 50yo to find some “meaning” to it all is like four potatoes. For me at least.

As I write, I remember fond memories of writing. Ah, fond memories. I do not recall being particularly encouraged in this, nor much of anything else, that wasn’t on the list of The Five Officially Awesome Achievements. So, had to get back to my “studies” doing things that would maybe win me some kind of approval or something. For you self-sure parents out there, here is a tip: do not play mind games with your kids. It is disadvantageous to your offspring.

Anywho. I get to wondering if it’s all about “finding happiness”. I kind of doubt it. For that is a treadmill of happy despair.

It’s definitely in part at least “about” enjoying the moment, being comfortable in your own skin, being tote’s chill. I know this is (exactly two of those things) completely obvious, but I bet a good zero percent of humans (for example) are actually able to practice this perfectly. No one is, see. You always have a judgmental gremlin sitting around the corner in your mind, who is going to pop up when you least expect it and knee system one in the balls. However you get it, you have them. I think you do. I can’t ever prove such a thing so maybe just take my word for it?

If you have been subject to the serious kind of what most people would call “bullying”, that goes on and on and makes existings a living nightmare for some fellow human beings, and there are unlimited sources (humans) for this… then you probably have mental scars still that flair up on occasion. Need some salve. That shit sucks. I think in some Kirt Vonnagut book I remember reading a reference to some Brothers Karamazov allegory about “trying not to picture a blue-eyed bear”¹ I got the point right away: it’s hard to not think of certain things sometimes. Sometimes it’s because they’re kind of seared in and your job is to seek a lifetime of tips and hacks to not go back (to the Mormon Trailer Commune or whatever your terrible thing was).

Anyway, eventually the hacks seem to start to gain traction. I think so, at least. And way too late in life, you become your own person.²

Soo…

I think I get legitimate joy out of some of the crypto mumbo jumbo. Its possibility to free humanity, kinda sorta. Is pretty compelling. I think I also lul myself into thinking, “eh, it’s all handled and this shit is going to stick, and I just need to play it cool and then can fuck off forever.”

You don’t have to be cursed with a fortune to face the crisis of “what do I do with my life?” You could also just find a few clever ways of making money, have no “savings” to speak of, but you are clever enough. You know where there’s a sweet spring hidden deep in the woods. I guess maybe the hope is you find one just big enough to suckle off of and just have a yacht or airplane (with pilot wearing chimp suit), and not go crazy. If you discover a thing that represents a big distortion that others haven’t recognized, you face a few problems.

Folks are going to want to snatch your secret away from you so you have the problem of “keeping a secret”

A large distortion is something that’s more noticeable than a small distortion. Even if you keep your secret, you’ll spend all your time hoping no one recognizes this 29k foot mountain in this 9000-dimensional space. Might work.

So scouting around for that kind of thing seems like a good idea, if only for survival. Put your cheetah skin thong on and grab your spear. We need to survive!

And just like hunting, I suspect it can be enjoyable. Very mike specific -- you could tell your wife: I’m going to take ⅓ of our savings and do slightly reckless but likely profitable stuff. Let me do my best. I’ll give 20% of the gains to the Humane Society. If I do, you have to leave me alone about “having a job” -- come to think of it, this might be a game that others can play.

Maybe you could look into dapps that are 100% charity mumbo jumbo: Here are a few fun tools, have fun! Earn for cherty!! So you’re waky DiFi shenanigans that make you millions helps out charity X. Good luck everybody. Here’s the leaderboard. Maybe lots of folks are looking for meaning. If you can use your cryptoflex to make yourself rich, maybe you can play superhero and help out your favorite charity, without having to ask the IRS for permissions. Just put your tokens in the festive charity collection bin (automatically, via a contract), “gobless”

So, being a person who just makes the gizmos that make that possible, and doesn’t expect to be paid anything (occasional job offer would be nice) means you get what you get. It’s a charity thing.

The IRS cannot put its thumbs on the scale. The NRA cannot put its thumbs on the scale. The [RA]SPCA cannot put their thumbs on the scale!!

No paperwork, no forms, no waiting for the clerk, no piles of donation receipts at tax time -- Your money, as much and whenever you want, but easily, goes to the charity’s address. With a big thank you posted on their leaderboard.

Maybe a family of contracts and conventions? Philadelphia Congressional Convention?

I donno. I give myself the assignment of thinking on it for a while. Sittin for a spel.

The Case for Charity Graph

Big name, modest goal: have representation on the blockchain in the form of contracts, connect up all those representations somehow. (modest)

Totally Illegal Tax Evasion (or the Anarcho-Capitalist’s Cookbook)

Taxes are definitely the thing. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts will be or at least will be perceived to be a class of people with probably-a-bunch-of-money with little political power. So, we are fucked for a while, probably. So, with not so many other options, despite the 43.2912% that I am obligated to hand over because social contract, I really find myself trying to think of ways to avoid doing this. I may as well be a terrorist drug dealer.

I can’t help myself. I feel myself wanting to talk about this topic openly, despite the risk of imprisonment for inciting insurrectionist tyranny. That n% was calculated to maximize fairness, after all. It’s basically the ideal amount I need to pay if the world were a fair place. Not 18%, not 83%, not 23%, not even 4%, exactly 43.2912%. The fairness experts have consulted their spreadsheets several times.

Assuming I was going to talk about this directly, clearly, openly an honestly…

wiiiiiinnnk!! …

...how would one avoid all that?

Oh my god. What a rush. I can feel a judgmental true patriot justice league staring over my shoulder right now! I bet I’m doing a naughty by putting these words on tuh internet.

Here is one way literally everyone can avoid literally all income (and other) taxes.

As you walk the street and greet your peeps, you hear hushed whispers about “skorphing or for bob”. Someone comes up to you, their eyes darting about, asks you if you want to skorph for them. Wha?

Eventually the cool kids let you into their little libertarian clique and you learn that skorphing is just coding for someone “as a favor” and then.. oh.. later.. You discover some anonymous stranger has dropped exactly the amount you predicted they would give you anonymously a bit later into your completely air-gapped wallet. Well, you have to scan in your wallet to discover this. But you had a hunch.

You then take that crypto-value and cash it out into your bank account to pay for your rent, dmv registration fees, gate-kept monopolies-by-fiat power company (that has its own fluxes of monies. Going here first, refund for that, get your rewards card punched for the other thing...), taxes, $600 of goods-plus-taxes at walmart, and other things. You use USD as a working fluid to operate your life. It’s just to interface with the crusty, entrenched, regulation-protected, dysfunctional segments of the economy. Think: lots of paper work, USD going from one place, and then to another, and then you get a bill, which you will need to pay either by a Paper Chex or by reading out a number to a meatbag on the other end of a phone call… those places. God bless’m. People need jobz.

tl;dr -- You exchange this crypto (that has no meaningful provenance) for dollars. It was a gift. Is that a tax thingie? Give me a number. I will write you Paper Chex. (got a little manifestive)

I mean. What exactly is the plan here, IRS. I’m thinking about seeking out and acquiring just such a skorph. Wat do. When I tell you I’m koding4fun, do you question me? When I tell you these are gifts, do you question me?

Yeah, but you’re saying right here, “I’m gonna do it”. Ok, dummy. You are the problem. How do you distinguish me, the lier, from the other ⅓ or whatever that are actually telling the truth, and yet get the IRS battering ram either way. It puts the ink on the Paper Chex...

And consider that folks can just randomize the order in which these agreements get executed. Consider:

• Promise to do work illegally for crypto → Receive funds illegally that may be from drugs

  - Vs. -
  

• Receive funds illegally that may be from drugs → Promise to do work illegally for crypto

Do you see the problem here? No? You are probably that same dummy.

I don’t think there’s enough patriotic juice left in the system to keep people from giving themselves a 50%+ raise just because we need more light rail or the “Newly Not-Repressed Formerly Repressed Demographic Military Achievement Museum”.

Pyramids! Are we building pyramids yet? Hollowed Great Man of History Mausoleum…??

Ow, My Balls?

Anyway, how? Well, skorph. I think people need to move to this model (boldy, comrade) more than the technology needs to keep up.

Maybe some clever person should set up a skorphing website. With all the instructions and convenient tools right there, drizzled with ganache and truffle.

There’s also just infinite other things, dawg

Like, how about a pool of stuff that orchestrates this? Never mind how it works, I think you’ll be able to find people who are confident it can be done. I’m one of them, so read on, slave. The point is data and value go in and data and value go out. It’s a financial wormhole that lets you throw money in there. All the regulators know is that “pretty sure lots of tax avoidance going on in there” but that’s it. Are they going to outlaw the creation of such a system? Really? Because, dude, there are aspects to this stuff that 60% of regular people don’t understand and 99.9% of “politicians” don’t know about. It’s an unknown unknown but I know that they don’t know it! It’s math, it’s not a bigger missile. It’s math. You cannot fuck with actual math.³

You are free to say, “yeah, whadda u no fagit?” I don’t think I’m missing anything here. Gasp, our 9 billion pages of tax-and-dollar law have a bug!!

So write a contract, stupid

I think it’s more than just a contract. But yes, agreed. What’s kind of funny is when it’s boil down, the tax-avoidance problem and the above charity problem are kind of the same thing. Why is, for example, saving an additional $10 on taxes to buy some flea and tick medicine any different from me donating to the RSVP. I would argue it’s a lot more direct and effective, and less wasteful! “Charity” used to mean, “being good to people and helping however you can”. It now means “a tax-system-favored corporation-like structure that a panel of elderly people decided is worthy of getting more donations because of their tax-deductible status (or lack-there-of)”.

I would argue that there is not a clear distinction. I love my dog. I use X proportion of my money to treat my dog like the foo-foo princess that she is. You are convinced that if I wrote a cheque to the RSPCA, it would, if you followed all the penies and their effects, have just as much benefit on an animal? You could arge that they take care of sick and hopeless animals that were about to be gassed.

Millions of old ladies would like to point out that they do much the same thing. Bless them, sans irony. Do you not recognize their efforts because they did not fill out the proper forms for official recognition?

Skorphing takes the tax dead-loss out of your life, Charity.sol takes the tax dead-loss out of their lives. S.F.T.

Well, I’m just sorry if I’m not a good Royalist. I’m fucking tired of seeing ineptness protected by guns. I don’t think I’m the baddie here.

Medical?

I have a history of trying to force people to think a certain way about the “healthcare crisis”. I think the following points have cromulent verisimilitude:

• The most broken “system” also happens to be the most heavily regulated one.
• $50 bandaids (or whatever the current outrage) -- we have basically zero “public discourse” about what would maybe be the optimal way to address the crisis. I mean, have you ever seen a panel sit down and discuss the 7 infitillion aspects of this problem. What, say, for example is the cause of the $50 bandaid. Most answers are one or two word answers. I have never seen a three. Is no one curious? Why do people trust their instincts when trying to reason out a problem with 7 billion+ actors? “It’s cuz of big corparashuns”. Ok, well, how did the big corporations get their leverage? Have you ever had Safeway break down your door to collect a bill? There is “some law” about what they can do if I walk out of their stoor with a loaf of “bread”, but other than that, pretty sure Safeway et al are not allowed to use guns directly. From whereist doith they get their power? How dat? Why can’t you bring in your own IV bag into the hospital? What if a hospital decided to allow that to happen? Maybe a few forms, careful scientific trials on outside IV bags? “IV bags brought in off the streets into the emergency room, is this really allowed!!!?” Don’t worry, lots of things aren’t allowed.
• Why is it you “click” on amazon to buy an inflatable 12 person raft and you “fax” your doctor and ask them to “fax” the pharmacy? Why is it that the top five organizations that have humans taking numbers over the phone and typing them into ‘the system’ are

1. Medical anything
2. …

• Why is it that you are allowed to ask your learned mechanic friend to fix your car but your learned friend who worked in for army putting people back together but never got around to getting his medical license will go to jail if he accepts money to reset your leg? Do you snicker at the idea? Your admitting you’re too dumb to work something like that out is a kind of flex for you? You are to be hypnotized by the white coat? The very idea is absurd, huh? Not so bad, eh?

Anyway, if the very idea that we need to pretty much drop all the nonsense make-work nanny state bullshit and just let people choose how they get treated whether it’s “approved (importantly by the FDA and not ‘science’)” or not. Cash money? acupuncture!

I think we should have a public discussion: “why not”, why can my uncle who thinks he knows how to reset a leg, palpate a prostate, take some blood and walk it over to the lab and provide you the report by email? “HIPPA Schmippa”?

The very idea is absurd, you say? Friends and neighbors might find out my mom gave my dad HIV, you say? Well, your mom can seek out a doctor that values patient privacy and actively works to keep the records safe, talks to you about destroying your records, has a pamphlet explaining his business’s policy and protocol on patient privacy… etc. Instead of: a vague, buggy law that threatens you with a spanking. You choose the latter? Can a doctor destroy records? Do you need to call the FDA to find out? Why has that never been mentioned to me? Because they are greedy and want to hang on to my records greedily? Wowing the patient wouldn’t exceed that in value?

The upshot is that you could pay your Gulf War I vet uncle Al to reset your leg and have all the right meds on hand, and all the best military-grade safety protocols in effect for the cost of, say 900 loaves of bread, payable in MediToken… Instead of: Going to a doctor, filling out 5 redundant forms, told you will be seen, finger up your but, hammer to the knee, deep breaths, cough, take some blood, “don’t eat like that and exercise more”, $50 copay (5 other bills come in the mail, on paper. more phone calls.), slap you on the back and tell you to have a great day. On to the pharmacist, they are still going through their faxes and counting pills (but my uncle!). And there’s blood on the doorknob! Some things parody themselves. Don’t look at me.

But wait, my uncle is an accomplished country doctor with several pieces of paper, framed, on his wall. You meant to say you are going to just let uber some uneducated, slack jawed, blue-collar, redneck, inept, uneducated, unobjectionable-ethnicity fool offer services just down the street for 1/10th of my rate? Why the very idea is patently absurd. Monocle. Brandy.

Medical services (they touch your body and give you pills) for crypto payment is a thing in theory already (assuming the pills fell of a truck down by the docs in Worcester). You can do it right now. The question is, do they battering-ram nice, stenciled glass doors in office buildings? Or would that look too ridiculous, not play in Peoria?

I guess all the contracts and infrastructure need to be created. Let’s get out our gas masks, everyone, treat the sick with a voluntary exchange of value for services. Got to fight the power. Can’t have non-Scientician practicing The Craft!

Onward noble dweebs!

Notes

 I have a very very hard time finding this, despite internet. I try not to think about it too much lest I scare it off into a universe fork and it becomes my own mandela effect.

 Wasn’t this “about getting a job”?

 That is, distinct from crackpot math. Crack a book and understand the difference.