Politics

TLDR: Virginia passed the Sales-Based Financing Providers Act in 2022 to regulate merchant cash advances New York extracted a $1 billion settlement from the same predatory lenders. New Jersey got $27 million. Virginia has done nothing - zero enforcement actions in three years My case was dismissed on procedurals. No court has ruled on whether my agreement violates Virginia law. When laws exist but no one enforces them, the legal system becomes a collection agency for loan sharks The Six-Minute Signature In June 2023, I signed an 18-page merchant cash advance agreement in six minutes and forty-three seconds. DocuSign timestamps everything. ...

TLDR: Conservatives believe in jungle law (survival of the fittest), while socialists risk creating dependency We need a third way: guarantee human dignity while demanding everyone contribute more than they receive Five pillars—healthcare, food, shelter, education, and the obligation to give back more than you take—create a society that’s both more humane and more resilient than either extreme offers The Dead End of Left vs. Right We’re stuck in a tired debate. The right looks at society and sees the jungle—survival of the strongest, competition as the organizing principle, let the weak fall away. There’s an honesty to this: nature is brutal, competition drives evolution, comfort breeds weakness. ...

There’s a phrase in Latin that refuses to let us hide: hic et nunc—here and now. Whatever your story—your religion, your cosmology, your philosophy of where souls come from or where they’re headed—today you are a human among humans. You woke up inside this species, on this planet, with agency. That is enough to give you a duty. Respect the origin story. Respect the destination. But protect the present. I’m convinced of something simple: if, by whatever cosmic lottery, your consciousness ended up in a living human, then you are responsible for what happens to us—now. Not responsible for everything, but responsible to someone. Responsible for the choices you touch, the systems you influence, the harms you prevent, the goods you can advance. ...

TLDR: Regulation is inevitable—if democratic institutions don’t write the rules, corporations will through their “permission systems” Current complex regulations favor large companies while crushing small competitors, creating digital feudalism where platforms extract rent from participation The solution isn’t eliminating rules but creating thin, open, transparent protocols like the early internet that enable innovation without permission How We Traded Democratic Rules for Corporate Permissions Regulation is the landscape, not the weather. Whether you’re building an app, writing a newsletter, selling crafts online, or just trying to share your work with the world, you will encounter rules that shape what’s possible. If democratic institutions don’t write them, the market’s largest players will. The question isn’t whether we’ll have rules—it’s who writes them, and whether they serve the many or the few. ...

TLDR: Labels like “left/right” or “elite/worker” don’t just describe reality—they create and reinforce the divisions we claim to oppose Inverting our language (“cancer got this person” vs “person has cancer”) externalizes conditions rather than making them defining features AI could amplify collective wisdom without the distorting lens of political categorization, helping us see each other as humans first Small linguistic shifts can create cascading changes in how we perceive reality and relate to each other In a world increasingly defined by division, we find ourselves trapped in a paradoxical cycle: the categories we create to understand our society reinforce the divisions we claim to oppose. Left or right, Democrat or Republican, worker or elite, pro-choice or pro-life—these labels don’t just describe reality; they actively shape it. ...