Michael Snoyman's personal homepage and blog, featuring writing about programming, open source, health, finance, religion, and whatever else catches his interest.
In my last post , I compared Kabbalah to Haskell. It's only fitting that my next post compares Kabbalah to another topic I blog about frequently: economics. Heads up in advance that this post will be very revealing about my political/economic compass. It's all about want One of the first things you learn in economics is about wants . Human beings want things. Those things are scarce. Economics…
For the past year, I’ve been learning Kabbalah for the first time in my life. It has been a fascinating journey. I haven’t really shared much about it publicly, and I’m not sure whether I’m going to continue discussing it on this blog or anywhere else. However, I recently ran into an overlap between Kabbalistic teachings and purely functional programming which is, frankly, kind of hilarious. So I…
President Trump has started rolling out his tariffs, something I blogged about in November . People are talking about these tariffs a lot right now, with many people (correctly) commenting on how consumers will end up with higher prices as a result of these tariffs. While that part is true, I’ve seen a lot of people taking it to the next, incorrect step: that consumers will pay the entirety of the…
Humans want the resources of other humans. I want the food that the supermarket owns so that I can eat it. Before buying it, I wanted the house that I now own. And before that, someone wanted to build a house on that plot of land, which was owned by someone else first. Most of the activities we engage in during our lifetime revolve around extracting something from someone else. There are two basic…
My blog posts and reading material have both been on a decidedly economics-heavy slant recently. The topic today, incentives, squarely falls into the category of economics. However, when I say economics, I’m not talking about “analyzing supply and demand curves.” I’m talking about the true basis of economics: understanding how human beings make decisions in a world of scarcity. A fair definition…
Up until this year, my Bitcoin custody strategy was fairly straightforward, and likely familiar to other hodlers: Buy a hardware wallet Put the seed phrase on steel plates Secure those steel plates somewhere on my property But in October of last year, the situation changed. I live in Northern Israel, close to the Lebanese border. The past 14 months have involved a lot of rocket attacks, including…
The world we live in today is inflationary. Through the constant increase in the money supply by governments around the world, the purchasing power of any dollars (or other government money) sitting in your wallet or bank account will go down over time. To simplify massively, this leaves people with three choices: Keep your money in fiat currencies and earn a bit of interest. You’ll still lose…
This blog post is in the style of my previous blog post on Matrix . I'm reviewing and sharing onboarding experience with a new technology. I'm sharing in the hopes that it will help others become aware of this new technology, understand what it can do, and if people are intrigued, have a more pleasant onboarding experience. Just keep in mind: I'm in no way an expert on this. PRs welcome to improve…
UPDATE A few days after posting this article, I saw a video on X that gives (IMO) a better argument in favor of tariffs than I came up with here. If you're interested in the topic, I'd recommend giving it a watch, it's only about 11 minutes. I’m a believer in the idea of free markets. The principle is simple: with less regulation and freedom of individuals to engage in trade and their own price…
Since deciding to write more blog posts again , I’ve drafted and thrown away a few different versions of this blog post. Originally, I was going to try to explain how Bitcoin works, or motivate to others why they should care about it. But the reality is that there is already much better material out there than I can produce. So instead, I’ve decided to make this much more personal: my own journey,…