Author Archives: danijel

Some musings about money

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I’ve been thinking about something for quite a while now.

When I was much younger and had just started working with people and writing, I had very little money, and the people I worked with at the time for some reason found it impressive how I seemed to not care about it at all – I would wear torn clothes, buy a used computer somewhere and work with it, drive a shitbox, and seem not to perceive the entire material sphere, instead focusing on spiritual realities and energy work.

What troubles me there is that they thought this was a good thing, that it’s fine for “spiritual people” to be poor, that it’s somehow a positive status symbol of spirituality or whatever. It’s not. They saw that I don’t care about matter but they were wrong – I didn’t care about it while I was working with them, because they were the priority. The entirety of my focus was placed on trying to get them to overcome their limitations and get the taste of transcendence, so to speak. However, when I was alone I had rent and bills to pay, groceries to buy, car to service and fuel, and not enough money to cover almost any of it. I didn’t wear ragged clothes because I didn’t care about my appearance; I wore them because I had no money, and I truly didn’t care about my appearance when I was doing more important things, so they kind of made a flawed conclusion that this is how things are supposed to be, and anything else represents a spiritual downfall.

Of course I cared about money – I had constant problems caused by the lack of money, that I could never truly solve. However, the fact was that people I worked with tended not to have money, and the people with money tended not to care about me, and my priority was to focus on people most receptive to what I wanted to teach, not teaching people who could be of most material use to me. Sure, I made some compromises, namely continuing to work with some people whom I would otherwise have sent away sooner due to them showing no perspective, due to them “bankrolling” my work with talented but broke people, and in only one instance this turned out to be a bad idea because the person in question turned out to be coercing and manipulating others with money and created a really toxic atmosphere that made everybody’s lives more unpleasant and difficult. The concept itself isn’t bad – you see, anything else makes an implicit assumption that the teacher himself should bankroll the entire operation so that he would be independent of any kind of financial pressure or free from financial concerns that could otherwise bias his selection of students and general approach, or that money is such a bad thing that you should never give it to good people who are doing useful things, especially if you’re not the only one incurring benefit. The concept that people with money should support things that are of spiritual use not only to them, but to other people who might be better positioned to benefit from it than themselves is perfectly rational. Furthermore, people who support good and useful things with money incur a karmic benefit.

But to return to my situation – I had very serious and persistent financial problems, but I did not allow this to influence my choices and work to any great extent. I never rejected a poor but qualified student, or spent less time with them than was needed to produce optimal outcomes. It’s just that I allowed some more affluent, but unqualified people to hang around, thinking no harm can come from it, and they might pick up useful things in the process and acquire spiritual benefits. You see, it wasn’t that I really had that many options. I could have abandoned the whole thing, returned to software engineering, made a career in that and have no problems with money, however I felt this would have been a waste of life, because I felt I had to contribute to the world in the most meaningful way I am capable of, not merely in the way that people would pay the most money for. The result was that I was poor for decades, but, in hindsight, I can say that I did the best I could and followed the line of righteousness that made me essentially immune to all kinds of karmic attachments and backlash that normally destroys spiritual people.

So, no, I wasn’t poor because that’s a good thing. I was poor because people with money didn’t give a fuck about what I did, and even some people I did work with thought poverty suited me just fine. Of course I could have used a car with air conditioning back then, and a computer that is actually capable of editing a book cover 600 DPI TIFF, and has a screen bigger than 15”. The thing is, good things tend to be owned by people who have the money to buy them, not the people who need them the most. However, that’s not the part that irritates me. What I found really, truly humiliating is the attitude of some of my then-students, who sincerely thought that good things were too good for me, and shitty things are just right, and liked the feeling of being financially above me. Of course I could se that in their minds, it was more than obvious, and this truly pissed me off, because it reeked of contempt and disrespect.

Another thing that pissed me off were the people who arrogantly criticised me as being materialistically disposed and trying to personally benefit from others by charging money for my books. Putting those books on the market was hugely expensive for both me and my students, in both money and labour. It was a significant sacrifice to make those books available to a wider audience, and it came with a spiritual blessing that was to awaken the presence of God in people, that would grow and overcome everything else if they chose to allow it. What I expected in return was that they buy the books, so that the financial load on my students would be reduced, and, possibly, that I could pay the bills without being a burden on them at all; it looked like a karmically beneficial thing, a way to spread both the benefit and the load. What I got instead was an opportunity for all kinds of worthless assholes to denigrate and humiliate both me and my work, and this made me very angry, especially since some people made it a point of pride for themselves to offend me for making the effort. It made me so angry I withdrew the books from the market and physically destroyed all the available copies, and I also withdrew the blessing. No, the books are not available for free in the digital form now because I’m more spiritual now or anything. They are free because of my contempt. You see, I earned substantial amounts of money in the payment industry, by charging a percentage for a service of navigating through the maze necessary for supposedly high-risk businesses to get a merchant account in order to sell their goods and services online. It was frequently some highly questionable stuff, such as the online dating sites, but I always had a feeling of a clean and transparent business transaction. I was never insulted or humiliated for any of it – quite the opposite, I was the respectable businessman and a gentleman who provides a valuable service to others. The only time I was exposed to deliberate ridicule and humiliation and treated as if I’m defrauding the naive and doing it all for money, and called a worthless and stupid poor person who wants to get rich by scamming others, was when I made the choice to endure financial hardship in order to provide the greatest benefit to others that I was capable of. This truly traumatised and offended me, and I feel that this is a mere shadow of God’s cold rage directed at those who offended me then, because what I did was expose the presence of God in this world and make it available, and all the contempt was in fact directed at and felt by God, and God didn’t like it one bit, let me tell you that. All the contempt, ridicule and abuse hurled at me went straight to God. All the thoughts of how shitty stuff is good enough and just right for me went straight to God, and let me tell you something: I am very glad God isn’t that angry at me.

So, at this point I live in a place that’s too good for what those people would wish for me. I drive a car that’s much better than they would let me have, I wear a watch that’s much more expensive than they would approve for me, and write this on a computer they would deem much too powerful and good for what I need. Fortunately, nobody really gives a fuck about their opinion any more.

There’s another implicit premise the worthless people assume – that if a man of God works for God, he should be paid by God, not by them. No, that’s not how things work. A man of God is the presence of God in this world, and God doesn’t actually like you or think you’re worthy, because He knows what you are, and you need to pass His tests, because that’s how things work – you don’t test God, or place demands God should meet, because you’re not the ones in charge and nobody asks you how things should be done. No, God tests you, to see if you show promise. God tests you by taking something that is a known absolute quality, such as His own tulku. A test for you is for this person to be presented before you, and you have to decide what it is, and how you will treat it. Basically, it’s like having two places presented to you, and you need to decide which is heaven, and which is hell, and then of course you go to heaven of your choice. God tests you by showing up among you every now and then, and you have to decide what that is, and how much it is worth to you. And then you go to a heaven that’s created for you by your choices.

CIA controlling your sources and money

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There is strong evidence that CIA is editing the Wikipedia.

However, if you think it’s the only source they are manipulating in order to provide you with their “facts”, you are too naive for this world. You see, what is usually called the “main stream media” in the West, is basically the CIA. They give you the “main stream”, and if you want actual facts, you need to carefully sift through “discredited conspiracy theorists”, of which some are crazy, some are giving you the truth, and some are both.

The political class in the West, both opposition and the government, is pre-selected by the CIA, except for the politicians and parties that are laughed at and discredited by the media – those actually represent your interests, but if you vote for them, like people did for Trump, nothing will come of it because the actually elected politicians are sabotaged and the next election is carefully rigged to remove them from office, and then possibly imprison or kill them.

If you want to know what’s actually in your interest, make an intersection of all the things main stream media tells you is bad, laughable, ridiculous, criminal and dangerous, and go for it, because that’s your only hope. If they say only criminals would use encryption, use encryption. If they say only criminals would use crypto, use crypto. If they say only criminals would use gold, use gold. Those people divide people into three groups: sheep that trust them and are exploited and occasionally culled, when it’s good for the environment; “criminals”, who are the competition and who act independently; and sheep dogs, the police and the military, that keep the sheep obedient and “criminals” controlled. They have only two weaknesses: they are sensitive to revolution, which is why they try very hard to brainwash the sheep and keep them docile, playing video games in virtual reality and not paying attention to the physical world, and feeding them propaganda about the next group they should hate. The other thing they are traditionally sensitive to is running out of money.

The present situation, as I see it, makes all the governments in the West highly sensitive to bankruptcy, because they have been persistently eroding every productive force in society and feeding parasites and madmen for quite a while, in their anti-meritocratic, anti-capitalist policies, and this genuinely looks like they forgot how and why things work, which is good because it imposes a limit on their efforts of eliminating individual freedoms. You can’t finance the giant oppressive system that feeds useless immigrants if you’re broke. However, before they go bankrupt, they will do their best to completely drain all the useful resources from the system, and impose unseen methods of totalitarian control. Imagine a credit card that is rejected if you’re not sufficiently vaccinated, chipped, or if you didn’t make enough public displays of support for the current thing. Yeah, not hard to imagine because that’s how things work now, it’s just that now you have alternatives, such as cash. However, cash is being increasingly limited because “it’s good for money laundering”, which means it’s something you can use to escape totalitarian control, so they are working on eliminating it by making steps toward some central bank digital currency that will be controlled from a central place and all alternatives will be outlawed.

That’s their most vulnerable point, because if that digital currency is not adopted, and people start transacting in gold-backed stablecoins, they are fucked, and that’s exactly what we need to do – face them with a situation where over 90% of population is non-compliant, because they can’t deal with that. They can only deal with situations where 90% is compliant, and they violently oppress the rest. When nobody accepts their shit, there’s nothing they can do. Furthermore, people only use their fiat money due to inertia, because that shit isn’t backed by anything and has no actual value other than people accepting it out of habit, because it all works. However, since the governments have inflated the fiat currencies to the point where this system will break, they intend to replace it with another system, which will give them totalitarian control over whether you eat or not. Basically, obey or starve. You see, Bitcoin is shit represented by a gold coin, but why not use crypto that’s actually redeemable in gold on demand, eh? Something that’s actually a pointer to a gold coin. Yes, it’s excellent for money laundering. It’s even better for blocking totalitarian, anti-democratic shadow world government that works on your enslavement and extinction.

Transact in crypto. Settle in gold.

Political induction

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There’s an interesting socio-psychological phenomenon I noticed in Western politics.

As time goes by, official narratives about things are first accepted unconditionally, and then as things move on, they are discredited and what used to be considered an extreme conspiracy theory turns out to be the truth.

However, nobody in the media or the political circus ever connects the dots, and concludes that if something is true for element x and for element x+1, it will most likely also be true for x+2, x+3 and so on.

No. Instead, every new “thing” is treated as if it exists in a vacuum, and the official narrative is to be unconditionally trusted. Also, reasonable people in the West who know that their media aren’t to be trusted with anything, unconditionally trust the official narrative about China, Russia and so on, and believe that every country the West wants to go to war with is a dictatorship ruled by a corrupt tyrant who oppresses his own people and something needs to be done about it. Also, induction is never applied and each new case is treated as if there were no precedent.

The problem, of course, is the emotional cost of the logically correct conclusion, because one would have to accept the fact that the media are controlled by an invisible ruling oligarchy, that the visible politicians are mere puppets, that we are not free, and there is no obvious way out. Also, the more one is invested in the system through “education” etc., the greater the emotional cost of realising it’s all based on deception and indoctrination and is not qualitatively different from the North Korean regime.

 

The Mac Pro problem

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Apple seems to have painted themselves into a corner by being perfectly reasonable. You see, they recently updated the Mac Pro tower, and it turned out to be the Mac Studio Ultra in a bigger box. The pci-e slots inside are barely of any use since GPUs are not supported, and the machine is inherently un-expandable; you can’t add more RAM, for instance. So, while this machine is extremely powerful, it’s by no means an open-ended system you can expand to fit your extreme workflow – for instance, trying to do fluid dynamics simulations or something. So, basically, the biggest Mac is great at doing normal Mac things, such as movies and audio, but it doesn’t extend into high-end scientific or engineering workflows. Is that a problem? I don’t think so, and let me explain why.

What Apple did right was design a range of machines that covers their professional and prosumer user base; people who make videos in Final Cut, make music in Logic Pro, or edit photos in Lightroom and Photoshop. They made excellent laptop range that covers everything from writing articles and checking Twitter in Starbucks, to the most complex software design, or audio, video and photography work. Then they made a desktop range that covers all of that and extends deeply into professional studio use, and I don’t think they left even a fraction of their traditional or potential user base uncovered. Heck, even I got a desktop Mac, which I resisted so far because all they had either came built into a display, overheated under load or cost extreme money while offering no benefits over what I had. The drawback of the current Mac lineup is that it doesn’t extend endlessly, and some, like Linus, will whine over that, while I might offer a more constructive approach.

You see, there’s only as much you can expect a desktop machine to do, and M2 Ultra actually exceeds this expectation by far. In order to exceed this ceiling, Apple would have to completely redesign the system that’s perfectly good for 99.9999% of their user base, in order to cater to the affectations of those who actually need a supercomputing cluster but aren’t technologically savvy enough to realize it. In order for Apple to try to artificially meet this almost non-existing demand, they would have to create a completely new architecture centered around a passive bus motherboard and Max/Ultra daughterboard cards that connect over this bus the way two Max chips are edge-connected to form the Ultra; in essence, combine the infinity fabric and PCIe technologies and make it work. The engineering overhead would be immense, and they would only sell a handful of those machines because the demand at such a high-end of computational needs is very slim.

Alternatively, those who actually want to perform complex computations should make their software cluster-friendly (basically, dump workload packages onto a NAS stack, and have the cluster nodes run workload processors that pop packages from the workload stack, process them and push them onto a result stack, and when that is done, have some script go through the results, check their integrity and assemble it all into the end product). Then you could have multiple Mac Mini or Studio devices connected to the LAN, processing the work you give them, and you could extend this infinitely, and the demands on an individual node would be such that you could optimize it for cost-effectiveness by buying the base Mac Mini or Mini Pro devices by the truckload. This kind of work is usually done on Linux nodes, but a modern Mac is so power-efficient that it has genuine advantages for cluster applications.

So, basically, the Mac lineup is truly powerful enough, and it allows for open-ended design for those who need endless computational power; it’s just not open-ended inside a single chassis, which is only a problem if you have unrealistic expectations, or a workflow that is poorly designed, by not breaking down the job into manageable components. Honestly, I could write such a cluster setup myself in less time than it would take me to start whining about lack of power and tasks taking too long.

Why Apple and not Linux?

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I am aware of all the problems with America weaponizing IT by spying, withholding access to technology to those who defy them, and so on. So, why did I not migrate away from American technology, for instance by migrating everything to Linux?

I considered it, but eventually concluded that it wouldn’t solve anything, and would just make things difficult for me in the time before everything collapses anyway.

Let me show you my line of thinking.

I live in Croatia, which is an American vassal state. The government, police, military, courts and news/media are tightly controlled by America. In a best case scenario, I could have a computer that is not controlled by America, but the computer is the least of my problems if they really want to deal with me, as the example of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan illustrates. They, too, lived in an American vassal state and thought they could be independent, sovereign individuals, and they were proven wrong quite easily. I am perfectly aware that the Americans can at any time pay or pressure any number of local corrupt bastards to plant fake evidence, purchase fake witnesses and lock me up indefinitely on fake charges, if they really found me a threat. They don’t, because I don’t have a significant audience, but they could. Migrating my computers and phone to Linux would not solve any of those issues. If doing it would actually contribute to my safety from any kind of oppression, I would have done it already.

The second argument is that having a technological setup that depends on being able to log in to a cloud service in America might make it all defunct if something happened to either America or the Internet. If that happened, I guess I would have bigger things to deal with than the computer, but I do, in fact, always have alternatives. I have an old laptop with Linux/Windows dual boot, everything on it is up to date, and I can open it at any time, boot into Linux and, in case Microsoft and Apple do some kind of a lock-out, I can still go online and access everything. It’s not like I would have to learn Linux from scratch or anything. I also have a spare Xiaomi smartphone with a spare SIM card, in case my primary phone ceases to function. My main worry in case of a major Apple/Microsoft denial of service is inability to contact people or perform basic tasks, such as the access to Internet banking, mail, ssh, web and so on.

The third argument is that the operating system is actually the least of my concerns, as all hardware seems to be designed with back doors in mind, such as the Intel management engine (ME), which is an ARM core on every modern Intel CPU, that listens to the ethernet port and seems to be designed to wake the computer up on remote command, and perform tasks below anything the user can see or control. Above that is the UEFI/BIOS, which is also proprietary technology that does who knows what, and only then we get to the operating system. The entire palimpsest of technology is so complicated and convoluted that I freely admit inability to secure my computer infrastructure in any meaningful way, because the American back doors are installed in every aspect of the infrastructure. It’s as if the primary purpose of it all was to extend American power and influence, and everything else, such as utility, was a secondary concern, or merely a way to market it. The way they went nuts when Huawei started to out-compete them in selling infrastructure was telling; basically, they couldn’t order the Chinese to install all the back doors and spying tools they install through the American/Western/vassal companies, and every Huawei infrastructural device meant loss of control for America.

So, I could dedicate quite a bit of my personal time and effort to attempts of securing my personal IT sphere, and it would all probably be for naught, so I shrugged and decided not to even try – instead, I decided to secure my money by keeping it almost completely out of the state/bank system, keeping connected just enough to make it easy for me to pay the bills and purchase goods and services in the system before it all fails. You see, there are several levels of true sovereignty. The first is the level of physical power and invulnerability. The second level is money and influence. The third level is all the unimportant stuff people fuss about. I don’t have anything to protect me against the first-level threats. I have enough money on the second level to make me a hard target; close my bank account and I’ll laugh. Try to cancel my credit cards and you’ll find out I don’t have any. Try to make me default on my loans and see I don’t have loans, I do everything cash. I have debit cards because I have to pay for the online stuff, and that would be a problem. I do use communal infrastructure, like water and electricity, and I’m sensitive to interruptions there. I also buy food, so I’m sensitive to interruptions in supply. As you can see, I thought things through and decided that computers are a luxury that works in the present-day environment, which is quite fragile, and it might all blow up at some point, in which case I am prepared to deal with all kinds of contingencies, but migrating to Linux? Yeah, if in some unlikely case in a world without Internet and American services I need computers, I am sure I will be able to patch something together well enough to serve the purpose, but I am more concerned with water, electricity, food, antibiotics and so on. Essentially, it’s a non-issue.