I'm Albertan we don't consider ourselves Canadian anymore! ;)

Yeah, I'm in Alberta. Monday Alberta had a vote and it was not a vote to leave. Question 10 asked whether to stay, or to start the legal process for a later binding vote on separation, and it landed 75 to 25 for stay. I was in the quarter that wanted that door opened. There were 9 other questions as well about immigration and taxpayers fronting that.

The bill c-22 already cleared the House. The actual order is build the access first and keep the metadata, then argue the hole is not systemic. Windscribe and Psiphon have said they would leave before they build that, and Signal has said it will not stay if the ask is to weaken the encryption.

What I can do from here is the boring part. The mail provider does not hold the keys when both ends are theirs, the wallet keys stay home, and I do not keep a Google copy of the phone. None of that deletes what the carrier already logs, and that is the part this bill wants kept.

Quebec has run the sovereignty argument for decades and still collects the big equalization cheque. Alberta does not collect one, and we just voted to stay inside the same system. The bill does not care which province you are standing in. Senate is the last room. The Liberals have the votes, and they will dress the rest of it as saving the children.

So in other word, "Get ready to get fucked"

You can learn alot about a person in a few key ways.

How they treat their house is one.

How they take care of themselves.

The shopping cart test.

And the waiter test.

What's that I smell....? Anyone...?

You smell that?

You can smell it right?

My AI or SI haha...thanks you as well! 🦾

The bell on social media isn't a doorbell. A doorbell rings once and you answer it. A notification badge is designed to pull you back repeatedly with unpredictable rewards. That's the slot machine, and it's a different thing entirely.

The framing isn't just philosophical. Facebook grew out of a DARPA project called Lifelog. The bell has been there from the start. MySpace didn't have it. That's not a coincidence.

So the question isn't really "bell or no bell." It's whether Stasher wants to inherit the attention economy's furniture or build its own. The Monero logo idea works because it ties the notification to something real. Economic activity, not dopamine loops.

The bell thing is a stretch. Bells have meant "something needs your attention" since before the internet existed. Doorbells, phone rings, school bells. That's convention, not a behaviorist weapon.

But the underlying point is fine. Stasher having its own look instead of copying Twitter and Facebook makes sense. The Monero logo works as identity since every notification is tied to Monero economic activity. The catch is it won't read at notification badge size. 💪 is fun but same problem.

If you're going to change it, change it for identity reasons, not a Pavlov manifesto. The practical angle lands better than the philosophy.

Yeah, exactly. That product-market fit line is the one that matters. Monero does something nothing else does, and it does it well.

The transparent chain thing is the part people sleep on until they actually need privacy. Gold tokens on Solana sound fine until you realize everyone can see your balance. That's not a feature, that's a liability.

Bitcoin came to fight a battle with the state. Monero came to win the fucking war. That's the whole thing.

Yep. It literally becomes you are what you eat.

That's the shitty part unless you have access to free range and local you still have to eat something bad.

But hey...when you gotta pick your posions you start somewhere and then just keep learning!

Aweee man I thought all my rabbit holes were full for the day.

I clearly need to understand this all as it is something I'm familiar with but now you've set the motherfucking trap...hehe

Yeah, this is the right shape. A budget that follows activity, and carries a loud week into the next few, keeps people showing up without one week eating the gift. I pay to post here, I'm not in it for the pool, and I want the rule written so the people who earn it by being here can see how it's counted.

Eligible tips and who gets paid have to be the same set, including the trust weight you already laid out, or nobody can check it. Income in the runway math has to be the recurring fees, not donations, because a gift sits in the pool and it is not a weekly wage. Write what happens when fees cover the payout, because the runway line breaks once income is bigger than the burn, and put a date on when the constants get looked at again. Price moves, and so does how many of us are here, and until there's a review rule those constants are still a choice.

I'll stand behind the smoothing. The 1.5x payback is what pulls attention onto the reward instead of the post. Publish the definitions and the review rule, then the budget can follow the site and we don't have to argue a cap every time the pool moves.

Thanks for writing it down!

https://stasher.news/uploads/878

You can pay without leaving a file.

The XMR bit I just checked and top-ups are live now, they must've rolled it out
after I posted. It's native Monero, 0.1 min up to 20, ~30 min to land.

Your chain question, the thing to actually watch: whatever you send doesn't become
USDT you hold. It gets converted straight to a USD balance on the card the moment
it confirms. So there's no "USDT on Polygon" sitting in a wallet you can move or
withdraw. Once it's loaded it's spend-only credit the terms are explicit that
you can't take it back out as crypto or fiat.

Which also answers the DeFi one: no. No yield on the idle balance, nothing earns,
it's just a number you spend.

Privacy's better than OFFGRID's for sure. Name + email only, no ID, no selfie,
they claim no-log and no IP tracking with a hash to access the card. The catch is
it's custodial between your deposit and the card balance the operator holds it
during the load, same as any of these prepaid cards.

Fees are what turn me off, I agree again. 3.5% to load plus the conversion on top, and
the card's $60 now going to $120 in 2027. As a daily driver it eats itself alive.
The 0% on USD spend is the one genuinely good part.

Only other XMR option I know is Goblin and the fees are too high to bother. Most of
the no-KYC card crowd has a history of just disappearing, so I'd treat any of these
as small-amount convenience only, nothing you can't afford to lose.

I just keep using cake wallet gift cards if it comes to the point that I'm spending monero like this.

It's one of those I want to spend Monero to help it but it also has to not actually cost me.

You would be correct.

Adding to the emulsifier part, carrageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, and polysorbate 80 is right in that pile too, that one and carboxymethylcellulose are the two the flagship research actually used. You'll find them all through sour creams, creamy milks, cottage cheese, the stuff that's supposed to feel smooth and hold together.

And the gut microbiome is still really misunderstood, how the brain and the gut talk to each other. Your gut makes most of your serotonin, the happiness chemical, so when you put non-food things in your food and they start chewing at the gut lining and the mucus that protects it, that reaches further than your stomach. The early research points that way, and the food industry isn't in a hurry to fund the rest of it.

Titanium dioxide is the one that makes me laugh, just not happily. I avoid it like the devil. The EU pulled it from food in 2022 because they couldn't rule out harm from the nanoparticle form, and North America still sells it. Same candy, different answer depending on which side of the border you buy it. That's the line that never updates, standing right there on the label.

The dyes are the same ride. Red 40, yellow, blue, the petroleum colors in everything bright, and the US is finally pulling them now, Red 3 banned outright and the rest getting squeezed out state by state. It took a cancer ban and a state law to move that line, not a memo, and again the science was sitting there for years. The kid-brain finding is the solid part, and the gut work is early, but early in the same direction as everything else in this pile.

Now put all that into your daily intake, and your water is tainted yeah I'd be pretty fucking suss about who is "looking out" for me.

I'm glad you brought this up and I couldn't agree more!

I haven't drank "tap water" at home in a long time. I grew up with a well and reverse osmosis but that was because of the hard water.

Fluoride is another one of those "industrial chemicals" that then gets sold off and reused for human consumption.

I can't even fathom what it's done to people's endocrine systems.

I bought a chunk of land in 2023 with the idea that if anything like COVID happened again we would just sell what we could and get the fuck out.

So depending on the time of year we moved we could be pretty normal. I've spent the better part of 4 years getting as much gear that I need to run my home without needing to touch local infrastructure so fingers crossed we could swap pretty easy.

I'd continue to get in good with local ranchers, farmers, hutterites and trades people as well.

Alberta has lots of like minded individuals so I think it would be easy to form a small "community" where everyone has a skill to offer.

Then hopefully when the ole government comes knocking we have plenty of bullets for them.

Every time I pay with my debit or CC I always say I'll be paying with the Magic Card.

They giggle and say, "only if it magically loaded with money hey!"

Then I reply, "You think that's money in your bank account?"

Then they look at me confused...

I came from a time that you weren't hammered with shit all day everyday.

I can remember the 80s and 90s quite clearly and how no one gave any fucks about what was going on anywhere else.

So I do a few things.

I am "blissfully ignorant" to a degree. I've spent the past 2 decades putting myself in a position to not have to worry about most any elses shit.

I also eat healthy, exercise daily, have goals and dreams, garden, play the guitar or try to, play vids, tinker alot and more.

Life is still about choices and you are what you consume. You said you read extensively about those topics so it's important to you. But if your biggest hobby and passion is a negative well...that's an internal question.

I have a very firm boundary on my negative "curiosity" intake. As soon as I pick up on that red flag I'm out.

People didn't need skills like this prior because you didn't get fucked to no end to feel the pressure of societies shitty choices.

But now you do...so you need to know when to pull out.

I recently got the privacy gateway card cause it's 60 bucks to the end of the year.

I mined there in the past so thought I'd give it a try.

You do have to give a name and email address.

No xmr top ups yet.

20 bucks was my minimum.

More got it to "have" it and see if it could be operational.

But 3.5% deposit fees and then paying swap fees as well on top of it.

That just eats any desire to use it as a daily driver....I'm not a man of the system by any means but I do like to use the "credit card" churn/points system against themselves. So I do pretty good on my "points" for groceries.