Tag: comment

Brief Note Regarding cafebedouin.org in 2024

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

I got involved with the Ergo cryptocurrency back in 2021. There was a lot to learn. Initially, I used Reddit. A few months in, I had a question that I needed to use Telegram to resolve. In cryptocurrencies, most of the discussion happens in Telegram and/or Discord. I became active on Telegram. I spent a lot of time providing tech support, writing documentation and so forth. I also started using Twitter regularly to be more aware of things that were going on in other cryptocurrencies.

The consequence for cafebedouin.org is that I haven’t been using it to write about what I’ve been thinking about and much of my thinking was directed at money, monetary policy, markets and how cryptocurrencies might fit into this new landscape that has been emerging. But, much of that thinking and discussion did not happen on this site.

The problem that I eventually ran into is that, in my considered opinion, there is good reason to believe that a recession is imminent. The current market environment is a strange one, full of distortions from liquidity injections from central banks, supply shocks, the impact of a pandemic on the productivity of workers, and a whole host of other factors. But, my sense, at this moment, is that there will be a global economic recession in 2024.

Many people involved in cryptocurrencies believe we are on the cusp of “the next bull run”. Cryptocurrencies have never been through a recession, and I think this one will be more significant than most. So, this put me at odds with many people in the Ergo community, who are focused on Bitcoin market cycles, Bitcoin ETFs, price action and other developments they believe will be positive for their cryptocurrency portfolio. A certain subsegment seem to believe that if everyone just believes something will happen, and pulls toward that thing collectively, that thing will happen. Obviously, many of these people are young and haven’t experienced how much of life is not getting what you want.

In the end, I decided to step back from my involvement in the Ergo community. A few weeks have passed, and I have slowly come to the realization that being involved in a “community”, whether crypto or another, tends to warp your ability to be objective about it. Nothing particularly insightful about that fact. It’s obvious. But, at the same time, additional lived experience tends to give greater weight to obvious ideas.

This is a long way of saying that this interlude is now over, and I will return to using this blog to think through ideas or just to post about things I find interesting. I’m thinking about returning to the daily posting schedule. If you happen to be subscribed to emails and do not want the increased volume, now would be a good time to unsubscribe.

Happy Holidays! I wish you the best.

I’m looking forward to writing about my experiences over the last few years in this blog in the coming months. I’m not sure they will be of any use to anyone but myself. But, I think I’m due for a long put-off reckoning.

Email & Tool Choice

~ cafebedouin

Like everyone, I get more email than I really want. Most of it is newsletters. I usually use Thunderbird for email. It incorporates most of my email into one interface. It uses IMAP to pull the information from the email providers’ servers, so I don’t have to use some janky, javascript laden website for email. It also has a calendar integrated in with it using WebDAV, which is nice.

But, when I start getting to around 50 emails in my Inbox, I start getting a little twitchy. It’s too much. I know most people have thousands of emails in their Inbox, I am not them. And, the way I keep from becoming them is my secret weapon, Mutt. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’ll see an email in Thunderbird and think, “Oh, I might want to read that later.” When I see the same email in Mutt, I’ll want to delete or file it it – and almost everything else too.

The Convivial Society Newsletter in Mutt

As you can see from the above, the newsletter is still readable. But, it adds more work because HTML is not what Mutt is best at displaying. And while I think The Convivial Society is great and would like to read every issue, Mutt asks a simple question: if not now, when? Which means you become much more likely to delete it. It’s also much easier to delete email in Mutt, just hit the D button, and it deletes the email and takes you to the next one. It can take you less than a minute to delete 100 emails.

Reflecting on this fact makes me once again think about how the tools we use influence our behavior. If you are using web email or even a computer application like Thunderbird, their user interface invites you to procrastinate and the emails pile up. Mutt, with its focus on free text, cuts through that dynamic. I’ve also noticed something similar on WordPress, where there is a significant difference in the kinds of posts I write using the WordPress web interface versus the kind of post I’ll write when I’m using emacs and org2blog.

So, moral of the story, be careful about the tools you use, and there may be advantages of using a less feature-rich application than may be apparent at first blush.