I got the following text this morning. Here was my reply:

1. Tell them that you love them, aren’t ashamed of them, and that this is something that you have had to overcome. Tell them they can do the same.

'Tera mera rishta kya, hindu, hindu,hindutva' is a clear take on 'tera mera rishta kya,la ilaha illallah'. As much as Hindutva hates the monotheistic religions especially Islam, there's a strange wistfulness and subliminal need at display now, to BE that they hate. 1

Charlie Hebdo doesn’t come up as a cautionary tale now but rather 'why cant we be like that'?
Growing up, Hanuman was an adorable deity for us, who swallowed the sun, or who couldn’t figure out what was Sanjeevani booti so he picked up a whole mountain and came back with it. 2

Or he was loyal, admirable and when he cleaved his chest, you saw both Ram and Sita. Now we have a lot of “Angry Hanuman” stickers. Why is a cute childlike God angry? We don’t know. It's a convenient blank space where to paint all the angst of Hindu Khatre mein hain narrative. 3

The other strange thing that has started happening is pictures of Ram appearing sans Sita. “Jai Siya Ram” has become “Jai Shri Ram”. Some people disingenuously explain it as being the same thing - because Shri is a name of Lakshmi. Not really. Siya is an apbhransh of Sita. 4

Shri is a prefix of respect in this case. Hinduism is being militarised. A woman/Sita has no place in it. Even the militaristic Goddess that is Durga has no place in this conception of neo-Hindu divinity, as evidenced by Dilip Mandal wondering where Durga came from. 5

Pyramiding 2.0

A thread-

What is pyramiding?

It is simply adding to your winners.

Why use pyramiding?

1. It makes your winners bigger than your losers.

• Because you are adding positions when your trades are going your way, you are increasing your gains but your losers will be small comparatively.

2. You lose less during Draw-down time ( it saves you from losing big during whipsaws )

• Many times when the market is in sideways mode, Entering a trade with full risk might not be the best idea.

• So, you test the waters with a small position first, it could be ⅓ or ¼ of your total risk.

• So if the Breakout fails or whipsaws come, then you will only lose a small part of your overall risk.

• Then when position starts to go in your favor you can add to it.

3. It helps you to concentrate on a few trades,

They say that don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but don’t put them in too many either.

• See, Everyone can see charts and find breakouts, pullbacks etc.

It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I