About the Future of America…

Once the Digital Dollar Is Put Into Circulation!

We’ve all been deluged recently with reports on the rise of inflation and the risk of an extended economic recession. And for the past year or so, I’ve been writing about the likelihood that the US will one day adopt a digital dollar and the possible repercussions of that.

I suspect that the economy will get worse before it gets better. And that this will accelerate the move to the digital dollar. The floundering (soon to be foundering) economy should not be a reason to rush towards a digital dollar, but it does provide rationales for pushing it forward by our elected officials that understand how it will increase their ability to have more control over the populace. And they come from both sides of the aisle.

Today, I want to try to accelerate your interest in this topic by giving you some scary but entirely possible outcomes if (when) this happens.

I’ll start with this: The digital dollar will be presented as a solution to three significant problems that – from the government’s perspective – are making it near impossible to balance the budget and build back America’s economy better:

  1. Institutional favoritism to big companies, including pork barrel legislation, federal regulation, and deregulation. (Remember, this will come from both Republicans and Democrats.)
  1. Wealth and income inequality.
  1. Tax avoidance and evasion by the one percent of the richest US companies and individuals.

My theory is that the digital dollar will not solve those problems. It will, instead, make them worse. And it could also result in the destruction of the values that made the US the world’s largest and strongest economy. Those values include free enterprise, individual liberty, entrepreneurship, states’ rights, financial privacy, personal privacy, and democracy itself.

Here is an admittedly sensational way to put it. But since I think it’s within the realm of possibility, and feeling less extreme and more likely the more I dig into it, I’m going to give it to you the way I presented it to a colleague that is producing a documentary about the danger.

I said:

This is the story of the digital dollar being used as a government tool to monitor and record every move its citizens make. Calling it a digital dollar, as if its purpose were a simplified substitute for the dollar, is a ruse. It will become a digital monitoring and control technology that will be connected to every other digital tool we use. It will be on the blockchain, so the activity will be permanently recorded and available, but only to the government. They will track, not just every purchase every person (citizen, non-citizen, visitor, etc.) makes, but every place they go, every publication they subscribe to, every cause they contribute to, every person they do business with, etc.

And it will be married, as the Chinese have already done, to a social reputation score that will determine our ability to purchase the products and services we want. No more things that are “bad” for us, including “unhealthy” foods; “dangerous” herbs and medicines; “subversive” books, magazines, and e-publications; access to “disreputable” chat rooms, clubs, and other social groups. Not to mention our ability to purchase firearms, sell our houses, rent second homes, travel, etc.

The technology will make tax avoidance extinct, as well as any sort of business activity that the government deems unwise or improper. And it will reward us by raising our personal social reputation score when we report on any questionable conduct by our family, friends, and neighbors. (Which most Chinese citizens say they enjoy doing!)

The transition to a digital dollar is already underway in this country. All the powers that be – big government, big tech, and mainstream media – are fully behind it. As will be the majority of Americans when the information campaign to support it reaches its peak.

And it is all going to happen in the next 10 years, if things don’t change.

So, there you have it. Is this madness? A delusion? The paranoid perspective of someone that’s been reading too much fake news? You will have to judge for yourself. In the meantime, when new facts emerge, I’ll tell you about them and how I think they fit into this movie.

Media Confidence Ratings at a Record Low

American’s confidence in two facets of the news media – newspapers and television – has fallen to an all-time low. Click here.

 

Amazon Is Rolling Out the Delivery Drones

Amazon has been talking about moving towards drone delivery since 2015. And now the company says that a pilot program is being launched in California at the end of the year. Click here for a clip from 2015 showing how it planned to do it.

 

Search TikTok? Why Not Google?

Last week, a Google executive announced that “almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

That’s crazy! Click here for a brief explanation of what it means for Google.

 

Hats Off to Rihanna

Rihanna is 34 and has a net worth of $1.4 billion, according to Forbes. That makes her America’s youngest self-made female billionaire. And she did it without starting a Facebook or a Tesla. Her interest in all things tech is limited to some secondary investments. So, how did she do it? Click here.

 

He… She… They… Ze… 

According to the BBC – an institution that I have always considered to be responsible and somewhat reliable – there are now 100 genders. A hundred?!! Click here for an interesting and amusing take on that.

Sometimes You Get It Right…

And When You Do, Why Not Crow About It?!

I bought this painting 30 years ago in a yard sale from a neighbor, who was Pakistani, as he was leaving the housing development we lived in then. I didn’t know the artist, but I very much liked the painting, and paid $5,000 for it.

A year later, my ex-neighbor called me and offered to repurchase the painting for $6,000. I declined. Every few years, he called me anew, making consecutively higher offers. The last one I turned down was, I think, $20,000. At that point, I decided to do some research on the artist. (Not easy. No Google then.) I discovered that he was an important Pakistani modernist. His name is Sadequain Naqqash. His work hangs in the Lahore Museum, the most important art museum in Pakistan, as well as dozens of other major museums around the world.

Last week, Suzanne, my partner in Ford Fine Art, told me that one of his pieces, similar to but smaller than mine, had recently sold at Artcurial in Paris for $146,000 (with buyer’s premium). I got online and did some checking on my own. Another piece of his sold recently for almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Wow! Am I smart, or what?!

Things like this have rarely happened in the art world. And these days, thanks to the internet, they almost never do.

But when it happens, it’s hard not to brag about it. So, there you go.

Understanding Gravity in Five Lessons

I have always wanted to understand post-Newtonian physics, which is probably the most important area of scientific thought of the last 100 years. Not seriously. I’m too old to attempt that. But at least enough to be able to make the occasional statement that impresses friends and colleagues.

I have taken several stabs at it over the years. Earnestly and with irrepressible hope. What happens is that I make good progress initially – say, with the first few chapters of a book I’m reading. And that feels good. But soon thereafter, and especially when the explanation turns into advanced mathematics (as it always does), I get lost. Whereupon I put down the book in despair and stop thinking about it… until I see another book that promises to explain Einstein, et al., to me in simple terms.

It happened again last week when I spotted a promising video on my YouTube feed. The idea was clever: an astrophysicist explaining the concept to a grammar school child, then a high schooler, a college student, and a graduate student. Brilliant!

I dived in and made it nicely through the grammar school explanation. But got lost halfway through high school. And then I gave up. But perhaps you can do better. If so, please write and explain it to me.

Click here.

Two More BIG Awards for Rancho Santana!

Travel & Leisure just announced its 2022 awards for “Best Resorts in Central America” and “Best Hotels in the World.” Not surprisingly, Rancho Santana is on both lists: #4 in Central America and #56 in the world!

Those are damn good numbers… especially when you consider the world-class resorts and hotels that we beat. A few examples:

* Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica

* Four Seasons Hotel Kyoto, Japan

* Mandarin Oriental, Marrakech, Morocco

* San Ysidro Ranch, Santa Barbara, California

* The Goring, London

* Hotel Savoy, Florence, Italy

* Curtain Bluff, St. John’s, Antigua

* Shangri-La Singapore

* Nobu Hotel Miami Beach

* Le Bristol Paris

For the complete lists, click here and here.

And for more information about Rancho Santana, click here.

“Knowledge is a store of factual information. If you have enough knowledge you can make correct decisions. Instinct is a store of personal experiences. Instincts can help you make good decisions when you don’t have the knowledge you need. The accumulation of experience takes time and risk. Wisdom is the ability to collect whatever useful knowledge you can before making a decision and sometimes taking risks to expose yourself to experiences that can teach you more.” – Michael Masterson

A denizen – from the Late Latin for “from within” – is an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place. As I used it today: “Apartment denizens that use coin-operated washing machines have noticed a ‘shortage’ of quarters since the pandemic.”

Re my mention of The Stanley Hotel in the July 12 issue: 

“Beautiful hotel in a stunning location. I didn’t know it was the inspiration for The Shining. A great movie, btw.” – TO

Re the July 15 issue: 

“Three articles in this blog that were utterly fascinating: The Mathematical Power of Three Random Words, the William Blake article – I became a Marginalia donor as a result – and the Omeleto video. Thank you for your research. It gives me hours of reading pleasure.” – MF

A plug for my book The Pledge

“Incredible Book! I highly recommend it to anyone that wants more success in their lives at a much faster rate!” – SV