{"id":1400573,"date":"2023-08-13T12:10:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T16:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1400573"},"modified":"2023-08-13T12:10:00","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T16:10:00","slug":"life-in-2033-monetary-apartheid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/life-in-2033-monetary-apartheid\/1400573\/","title":{"rendered":"Life In 2033: Monetary Apartheid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Life In 2033: Monetary Apartheid<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In the future, it\u2019ll be a lot more expensive to be free.<\/h2>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger and Reggie were identical twin brothers, born in Merrickville, Ontario around 1980.<\/p>\n

They both had normal school trajectories, even sharing an apartment through college \u2013 Roger taking computer programming and Reggie electronics engineering. The brothers seemed well positioned to enjoy reasonably affluent lives, having secured high-tech vocations in an increasingly digitized world.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re in their early 50\u2019s now and it\u2019s hard to say exactly where their lives diverged \u2013 this is not a \u201cseparated at birth\u201d story. They were separated by something else.<\/p>\n

Here in 2033, both of them are married \u2013 or least\u00a0got<\/em>\u00a0married. Reggie\u2019s wife left him in the late 20\u2019s. She gave numerous reasons why \u201cshe couldn\u2019t take it any more\u201d, but statistically, financial stress overtook infidelity as the number one cause of divorce around the time of the first climate lockdowns.<\/p>\n

Reggie ekes out a life of quiet desperation: he works as a remote drone repair \/ recovery technician, which has him licensed to drive a vehicle and his employer is allowed to operate seven months per year.<\/p>\n

That leaves him on Yubey (\u201cUBI\u201d) for five months, usually in stretches of three and two months at a time, during which he\u2019s confined to his fifteen minute city (a.k.a \u201cfifdom\u201d). By the end of it, he\u2019s usually pretty gaunt \u2013 the caloric quota assigned to his body type, he always thought was a tad meagre.\u00a0\u201cAnd probably racist\u201d<\/em>, he often fumed,\u00a0privately<\/em>\u00a0(he would never post that on a socnet, not again, anyway \u2013 he found out the hard way the first and only time he voiced his objections to his carbon allotment and feels he\u2019s never quite earned-back those demerits, and probably never will \u2013 he laments).<\/p>\n

He has visitation rights for his kids, but they live in a different fifteen, with their mother and a court appointed Parental 2. Even though it\u2019s adjacent to his, he has to be careful around his travel allowance. The government finally approved OHIP coverage for MRNA syndrome, but the only practitioner he could afford was also in the adjacent zone, so he was left with either timing medical appointments with visitations or \u201csaving up\u201d by skipping one of his allowable excursions.<\/p>\n

Reggie can\u2019t afford to go to restaurants, and live entertainment in his socio-economic strata wasn\u2019t much to write home about. Musical instruments aren\u2019t approved for power usage in his fifdom and he was never much into acoustical folk music. So he spends most of his time at home, a fully subsidized basement bachelor, and most of his time there in his pod, wireheaded in a semi-sonubulistic state, immersed in a combination of pornographic fantasies and electrically induced opioid-like highs.<\/p>\n

He never talks to his brother, he couldn\u2019t pay for the stream even if he wanted to.\u00a0\u201cOff quadrant my ass\u201d,<\/em>\u00a0he thought. May as well be off planet.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger, (and family), live in El Salvador. In the winter, anyway. Most winters. Sometimes Costa Rica. During the Northern spring and summer he keeps a residence in Texas and his main business operates out of Bermuda, inasmuch as it is tied to any physical location. It\u2019s really just a holding company for his multiple income streams, royalties and investments, and it could really be anywhere.<\/p>\n

School for the kids isn\u2019t a problem because the tutors just travel with the family. The carbon taxes on private jets are excessive, to say the least, so they make due with a fractional. Pretty well everybody does. Sometimes they have to adjust their travel times by a few days or even a week \u2013 and if they\u2019re flying when there\u2019s a lockdown on then it\u2019s even more expensive to shell out for an \u201cETE\u201d (Essential Travel Exemption), but for the most part they make it work.<\/p>\n

Roger isn\u2019t overly ostentatious with his choice of cars, private vehicle ownership being a luxury unto itself; but he and his wife like to dress well, travel well, and overall, live well. That includes (like most SovInd\u2019s), eating meat \u2013 real meat, not the lab hatched sludge (a.k.a \u201ccarcinogen in a can\u201d) \u2013 whenever they feel like it, which is every meal. It\u2019s expensive, all those carbon debits, but it\u2019s no worse than the sales and income taxes of yore.<\/p>\n

He hasn\u2019t heard from his brother in over a decade despite having sent emissary agents out to establish contact with him years ago, but Reggie doesn\u2019t seem to have access to any AI or encryption at all.<\/p>\n

What was The Great Bifurcation?<\/h2>\n

How did the two brothers\u2019 lives go in such different directions and reach such starkly different outcomes after starting out life in exactly the same place, having almost identical upbringings, educations and opportunities?<\/p>\n

Near as Roger could figure it, it had to have been around the fourth Bitcoin halving. Roger had been dollar-cost averaging sats since 2021 \u2013 started buying right at the top of that cycle, as luck would have it, but he remained undaunted in his conviction. Having read\u00a0The Bitcoin Standard<\/a>\u00a0and then\u00a0The Fiat Standard<\/a>, when he finally picked up a copy of\u00a0The Sovereign Individual<\/a>, it exploded in his brain and he was never the same again.<\/p>\n

When the Great Restructuring was declared<\/strong><\/em>, after a month-long banking holiday across the entire G-20 nation states, the entire world bifurcated into a type of\u00a0monetary Apartheid<\/em>. Everybody and anybody who\u2019s entire net worth consisted of banking liabilities found themselves ten times \u201cricher\u201d at least in nominal terms \u2013 their deposits having been converted into IMFCoin at the rate of 10-to-1.<\/p>\n

But all the wallets were the same: you had to enter your medicals, link in your shopping apps and pretty well anything capable of an e-commerce transaction \u2013 they were now all reporting each transaction via the Basel API and people started seeing tabs for \u201cAllowance\u201d and \u201cQuota\u201d showing up in their wallets.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger wasn\u2019t surprised, he\u2019d been expecting it, and he took this as his cue to pull up stakes and move himself, his family \u2013 and his wife\u2019s mother to El Salvador. They had owned a vacation house there for some time. Bitcoin\u2019s market cap had entirely replaced that of bonds, and gold added another half on top of that. Buying at the top of the 2021 cycle now looked like a rounding error, thank god.<\/p>\n

He tried to talk to his brother about dollar-cost-averaging into Bitcoin during that same cycle. Reggie would have none of it. Pointing at the FTX, Tether and Binance scandals, he dismissed it all as magic internet money and put his entire savings and RRSPs into \u201cclean tech\u201d, ESG ETFs and government bonds, a worse combination no-one could have ever imagined. By the time the Restructuring ran it\u2019s course, a full blown depression wiped him out. He reverse mortgaged his condo, and after real estate tanked, he was even underwater on that \u2013 his wife took the kids and left, and he was evicted.<\/p>\n

All he had from that point on was whatever showed up on his phone each month, which he had to spend before the next stim hit (on allowable expenditures, of course). It actually didn\u2019t matter whether his monthly top-up was from his work or from his Yubey \u2013 it was all the same.\u00a0It was more of a score than money. Just a number on his phone that decremented anytime he did anything, his entire life having been gamified in a weird, Kafka-esque manner.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Roger couldn\u2019t understand how anybody could have been surprised by any of this. It wasn\u2019t some big, closely held secret. Central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements had all been publishing white papers spelling everything out for years (he had been tracking it via\u00a0his subscription to The Bitcoin Capitalist<\/a>\u00a0and its \u201cEye on EvilCoin<\/strong>\u201d section in every edition).<\/p>\n

Even The World Economic Forum with their cartoonish mascot, Klaus Schwab had been telegraphing all this like something out of pro wrestling: the global financial system was imploding, the debt super-cycle was ending, and generations of living beyond ones means on government granted entitlements and borrowed money was coming to an end.<\/p>\n

Everybody was going to have to get used to ratcheting down their standard of living, and by \u201ceverybody\u201d it meant,\u00a0everybody else:\u00a0<\/em>those who had no independent means of wealth who relied on the government for their economic sustenance. After a decade of rolling lockdowns and what looked like a controlled demolition of the middle class, that encapsulated huge swaths of the populace.<\/p>\n

The pathway into digital serfdom was paved with years long mass public propaganda around a climate crisis and a purely fabricated new religion called \u201cdegrowth\u201d.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

By the time The Great Restructuring hit, it didn\u2019t matter if the public really believed anymore. They only had to buy it long enough to become completely beholden to the system, and after that \u2013 they were locked in for perpetuity.<\/p>\n

The exceptions were those who had preserved (and grown) their wealth, holding it in secured digital bearer instruments within the decentralized economy, and\u00a0outside\u00a0<\/em>the legacy banking system.<\/p>\n

This was an ascendant class of textbook Sovereign Individuals, who figuratively island hopped across various network states and crypto claves that were marbled globally throughout an otherwise collectivist, proletarian \u201cparadise\u201d.<\/p>\n

Roger and his family were among this latter class. He knew the CBDC regime wouldn\u2019t last forever, it would probably collapse in less than half the time it took for the fiat era to implode, but he also knew that the better way to navigate the Age of Collectivism was as a sovereign individual and not a serf. Whatever system arose on the other side of this, it would be far better to enter it with wealth, property, assets and mobility than with none of the above.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

This is the prologue from my forthcoming book:\u00a0The CBDC Survival Guide: Preserving your wealth, freedom and sanity in the coming Age of\u00a0 Collectivism.\u00a0<\/strong>Due out this fall. Bombthrower list subscribers will get the\u00a0CBDC Cheat Sheet Summary<\/strong>\u00a0when it drops (and the\u00a0Crypto Capitalist Manifesto<\/strong>\u00a0while you wait).\u00a0Get on the list here<\/a>, and follow me\u00a0on Nostr<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Twitter.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

You can cut straight to the The Bitcoin Capitalist and learn\u00a0how to escape Crypto Communism here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 08\/13\/2023 – 08:10<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/crypto\/life-2033-monetary-apartheid<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life In 2033: Monetary Apartheid Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com, In the future, it\u2019ll be a lot more expensive to be free. Roger and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1400573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}