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https://youtu.be/ssvSsMqTtjo Kibbe on Liberty: Pandemic imprisoning and the culture war. Perspectives from Britain and the USA. Great conversation.

***Split from Correspondence and Coherence*** Most upbeat. What's to stop bitcoin crashing in a year or two? There's no inherent or objective value/standard that I can see, and the huge fluctuations seen in its value point to its obvious attraction for speculators, well above the individual freedom and practicality the writer justifies. Does one want to own a speculative cryptocurrency which can soar or crash, the value varying by market demand day by day? Could make one nervous.

I know several people who made money and some who lost a lot due to the girations of Bitcoin so I don't have any fascination either way. But from the technical side, bitcoin or blockchain used in bitcoin type electronic cash has at least one built in use. It cuts out the middle man in financial situations where "proof of funding" is necessary. Proof of funding means, I know what your account number is and I know the balance ... right now. Let us say, you have a volunteer fire department. There are a thousand inhabitants, that sign up for the protection. At any moment, the users of the service want to know if the service is fully funded. But ... some or all the users of the service don't want anyone to know if they paid or not. Some will pay extra and some will not pay enough. Nevertheless, people want to know if the service is fully funded, so that it is in operation. They want to know things like "is it about to go bankrupt or not". The way it is right now, with our cash and bank system, the ledgers are private. You have to jump through hoops to find out if the bank account of the volunteer fire department is fully funded. With a bitcoin type solution, you would know if the service is full funded IMMEDIATELY. The ledger is available to all without a bank middleman, without auditors, accountants etc. You see the full funding of the entity without any of that expense. Now, for that to happen, the fire department declares to everyone what their account number is. So everyone can determine what the balance is as it changes moment by moment. People see money going from accounts that they don't know who owns, to an account that is known to everyone. That was just one use. There are many in relation to the fact that no banks are involved. One the other hand, there is a fundamental problem. There are other coins that could do it faster and cheaper as transaction cost and speed suffer. So bitcoin clones are created without anything to stop it. It's a speculation problem that requires "maturity", psychological growth, in understanding how this market works so that money is not printed infinitely. Right now, the crypto space is just a casino. In the case of Etherium, the entire stock market can run on it, without any safeguards. It would be truly a free market type market.

Zuby noted how he liked to keep it real, as opposed to saying what he thought his audience might want to hear, and associated keeping it real as a contributing factor to his growing fan base. (around 20 minutes.)

Rand started writing AS on September 2, 1946. I don't suspect her of using numerology. Just self-reference. The reason I think Chinese numerology might be relevant to Firefly is because the Chinese language and culture are components of the show. The Alliance is really a union of the American and Chinese core planets. So like all the other yin-yanging in the show, Whedon also depicted the West and the East joining together. Yeah, that's a whole debate on its own. I don't think Fox understood or appreciated the show. The person who cancelled it, Gail Berman, said the show was expensive to produce and wasn't getting good enough ratings. But airing episodes out of sequence and in the "Friday night death slot" didn't help matters. Also, Whedon had to fight Fox over basic story elements. For example, Fox wanted a romance between Mal and Zoe, but Whedon stood firm and insisted that the Zoe-Wash marriage was important.