Alright so I saw three different comments on Twitter yesterday about the Earth being flat. Pretty sure two of them were serious and one of them was not. Yes, my 'for you' page is that lit. Jealous much?

Yeah one of them was a joke asking if people beyond the Game-of-Thrones ice-wall at the edge of our world had to pay taxes. I guess the above picture doesn't represent this idea. Let me find a better one.

Was one ice-wall not enough?

Allow me to offer you two ice walls!

Yeah that's my shit right there.

Labeled maps and everything.
Because that makes sense.

Seriously though I hope that the Earth is flat and that there is an ice wall and that all this shit is true. That would be amazing, don't you think? Of course it would: it would basically confirm that God exists (I'm largely atheist; so score), we have an immortal soul (or perhaps our immortal soul has us), and that we really are living through the end-of-times during the apocalypse and are going to get tested like in The Stand (1994) mini series.

After a deadly plague kills most of the world's population, the remaining survivors split into two groups - one led by a benevolent elder and the other by a malevolent being - to face each other in a final battle between good and evil.

A DEADLY PLAGUE YOU SAY?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Yep, bring it on.
Let's do this.
I was born for this.

In any event

The reason this flat Earth shit is going around right now is that people recently saw a "Chinese spy balloon" in the sky and thought, "Hey you know that kinda looks like the moon." 10/10 logic right there. Also the thing attached to the balloon basically looked like a space-satellite because of the solar panels on it, which exacerbated this idea that all satellites in the world are just floating around on balloons (even though we can see them at night speeding through the air at ridiculous speeds looking like a star because they are so far away).

You know how an airplane looks like it's moving slowly because it's far away? Yes well we all know they are traveling 500 MPH or more, yeah? No one contests this fact, not even the wildest of conspiracy theories. So when we see a satellite in legit orbit moving even faster than that on a relative scale... it's not too unbelievable to hear that it's travelling at something like 7000 MPH. A little birdy told me that balloons don't travel at 7000 MPH... or even 100 MPH for that matter. The "spy balloon" traveled at "25 knots" which is apparently 29 MPH.

Switching gears.

@whatsup jokingly asked if our flat-Earth spins, to which I replied of course not because the centrifugal force would fling us off it like a merry-go-round.

Also I just have to say that the spelling of centrifugal is really throwing me off... pun unintended but welcomed. I've always pronounced it "cen-tri-fi-cal" but the spelling is basically centrifuge (which actually makes sense considering what a centrifuge is). Words are weird. Maybe it's my Californian accent. Nope wait looks like the Brits actually say this one correctly and we're the ones who say it wrong. That's a first. Damn Americans getting lazy with words.

How many more times will the topic at hand be derailed?

Okay so the idea here is that because we're told that the Earth spins at 1000 MPH, people don't believe this. 1000 MPH big number. Can't be true. Just like merry-go-round we'd just fly off the Earth and be instantly killed, yeah? A merry-go-round is much slower than 1000 MPH. It all makes sense... or does it?

Much how we were sold by the media this idea that COVID-19 was a brutal pandemic that rampaged the entire world... at the core of these arguments is this concept of raw data being isolated without mentioning the critical relative percentages. The media wanted people to think it was a bigger deal than it was, so they said things like HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS DEAD MILLIONS DEAD BODIES PILED EVERYWHERE OMG RUN FOR YOUR LIFE GET THE VAX YOU GRANDMA KILLING MONSTER.

People who realize the truth know that the establishment could have just as easily went the other way with it: they could have said don't worry about it go back to work everything is fine less than 0.1% of people are dying and it's mostly old people that were going to die of something else anyway. In fact this is what we should have expected from a capitalistic system that views people as collateral. It's actually weird that it turned out the way it did, and we should be asking why the media chose to act like they give a shit about people dying. They don't. This is a known fact. Uncontested and proven a thousand times over... unless they can make money off it of course. Capitalism.

Derailed again

Okay so the point of that COVID nonsense was the absolute numbers. People hear 1000 MPH and they flip out. The Earth can't be traveling that fast! Number too big! 8M people dead is a metric shit ton pile of bodies, while 0.1% world population dead is barely anything! They are exactly the same number, peasants. Wake up.

So what if I told you that instead of the Earth traveling at 1000 MPH I instead told you that the Earth makes 1 revolution every 24 hours. Small number is small. This is much slower than a merry-go-round. Now it makes more sense. Unit bias is a helluva drug.

Look at the screenshot above about how to increase centrifugal force. Notice anything? If you decrease the radius of the object the force gets stronger. Meaning if you increase the radius it gets weaker. Gee, what's the radius of Earth? Pretty big I'm thinking. It's more about how fast it makes 1 revolution (24 hours) than it is about relative speed on the surface. If we lived on a planet that was twice the radius but still rotated once every 24 hours, the centrifugal force generated would be exactly the same but the relative speed on the surface would double. The absolute speed is completely irrelevant.

Speed? Relative to what?

On a very real level the Earth isn't moving at all. Yeah, you heard me right. If you believe that the Earth is the center of the universe then it's the universe that is constantly revolving around the Earth while the Earth stands still. It's all a matter of perspective. There is no relative difference between the Earth spinning and the universe revolving around the Earth (as far as we know). This would change if we found something outside the universe that could once again be used as a reference.

What is the anchor?

Imagine you are driving 70 MPH and the person next to you is driving 80 MPH. Where do these numbers come from? They come from the Earth. Respectively one person is driving 70 and one is driving 80 relative to Earth itself. Earth is the anchor.

But what if the Earth wasn't there? What if it was just you and the other car? What then? Your brain can actually interpret this scenario in two unique and valid ways:

1. You are not moving at all and the other car is moving 10 MPH.
2. The other car is not moving at all and you are moving backwards 10 MPH.

There's also an entire spectrum in between.

Could be that you're moving backwards 5 MPH and he's moving forward 5 MPH. Could be 9-1, 8-2, 7-3, or 6-4. The only known fact is that both numbers add up to 10. Without a frame of reference it's impossible to determine what is actually happening.

The human brain will default to interpreting the situation with themselves as the anchor. Without a proper frame of reference the human brain will assume they are the ones travelling 0 MPH and the other car is travelling 10 MPH. However I'm fairly certain that almost everyone reading this post has had one of those moments in the car when an illusion occurred and you misinterpreted the situation.

Sometimes the car next to us will move forward but it feels like we are moving backwards, or sometimes we are moving forward and it feels like the other car is moving backwards. This can happen when we lose our frame of reference and are only noticing the other car in relation to our own.

The Earth itself doesn't have a frame of reference.

The Earth might be spinning at 1000 MPH, but relative to what? Because Earth is the default reference, it is always moving 0 relative to itself. This is true for all objects in the universe.

Many would argue that the stars are the reference, but they are not. The gravitational pull of the stars and other celestial objects rounds to zero and has no effect on Earth... all except one.

That's right! It's moon time!

Everyone in crypto loves the moon. The moon is the one gravitational pull that matters when the Earth is concerned, and I'm fairly certain I've heard claims that life as we know it would not exist without the moon. Our entire evolutionary timeline has relied on this stable source of shifting gravity. Tides come in, tides go out. Earth not flat. Very sad. Wen apocalypse?

I'll always remember going to the Exploratorium as a kid and experiencing this experiment. You sit on a swiveling chair while holding a spinning bike tire. If you change the angle of the bike tire it creates acceleration and speed. Mind blowing. Physics is wild.

The point here is that this kind of spinning force works because Earth's gravity acts as a frame of reference. When the tire is parallel to gravity, nothing happens, but when you twist it perpendicular to gravity you'll end up spinning. Because Earth's gravity trumps all other gravitational fields around it, the 1000 MPH spinning becomes very irrelevant metric even though it sounds a lot to our unit-bias.

Acceleration is the real variable.

This should become obvious. When you maintain a constant speed of 70 MPH on the freeway it feels like you aren't moving at all. Movement is only physically felt if the car is speeding up quickly, slowing down quickly, or turning quickly. Where "quickly" is self-defined by if you can feel it or not.

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Just to reiterate the previous statements: a constant speed becomes the norm. An object moving "quickly" is effectively the same as it not moving at all when the object references itself. A weird concept to be sure, but accurate.

I also wanted to speak to this concept in terms of money

But this post is running long again so I'll hurry it up.

Money also needs a frame of reference to make sense, just like speed. If I offer you 10k Hive in exchange for one Bitcoin, how do you know if that's a good deal or not? The answer is you don't and you need a frame of reference.

USD is that frame of reference.

We call this unit of account, and it's a very important quality of currency. In fact it is the most important quality that crypto lacks (even more important than privacy). Only a relatively stable asset can be used to measure other assets.

So you calculate that 10k Hive is $4500 and 1 BTC is $23000 and realize the trade I've offered you is god awful. Denied. It's much harder to come to this conclusion without the reference.

Final thought

I almost never tell people to buy Hive, but the 200 day moving average is such an obvious wall to defend. If we can hold here all the golden crosses will come and more speculators will come in and pump it higher. Maintaining this level should be fairly inexpensive. I'm buying. Goddess moon commands it. Help me out.

Conclusion

The Earth isn't flat, although I wish it was. Many people wrongfully assume that anyone who believes the Earth is flat must be a moron. How could anyone believe in such an absurd "theory"? Yet, every single person I've ever met that believes in a flat Earth has been highly intelligent. That is a fact.

This is a classic case of conflating intelligence issues with trust issues. We see this often in over emotional left vs right politics, with both sides making claims like, "Anyone who believes in XYZ must be a fucking moron!" Again, people aren't dumb: they simply continue to trust the entities that they've been conditioned to trust since childhood. This is the standard, not an outlier.

Given such context, it's clear to see that anyone who believes in hardcore conspiracy theory refuses to trust the establishment on more layers than an onion. I don't know about you, but these are the kind of people I want on my team. Hands down.

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