Escaping the 'fitness industrial complex'.

Upmarket commercial gyms, pushy personal trainers with convoluted workout systems, fitbits, workout tracker apps, scientific scales, pre-workout supplements, post-workout supplements, creatine, fat-burners etc etc etc. When it comes to getting and staying in shape there are no end of products and services vying for your hard earned money.

After years of working out, it’s my contention that everything on the afore-mentioned list is utterly superfluous; a triumph of pure unadulterated capitalist salesmanship fomenting articial demand in the midst of a contemporary culture of consumption and excess. I grow tired of seeing fools lumbering into the gym with absurdly large gear bags, poncing around in expensive training gear adocked with 'beast mode', 'gains' etc - conspicuously displaying their membership of the ‘fitness subculture’ (incidentally, a classic example of artificial group identity based on consumption), fiddling around with resistance bands, drinking rip-off protein shakes, taking post-workout selfies, and generally following the exact script laid out for them by fitness industry magazines.

Let’s take chest day as an example. Fitness industry gurus implore, ‘you need to hit the muscle from every angle’, or ‘you need to mix things up regularly so the muscles don’t get used to your workouts!’ They would have you believe developing a muscular chest requires a full compliment of olympic barbells, dumbells, smith machines, incline press machines, pectoral machines, and cables... The truth is you can build a muscular chest with just high volume press ups alone. Ask any prison inmate.

Cardio is perhaps an even better example of commercial superfluousness. Gyms offer you a myriad of luxury state of the art treadmills, bikes, cross trainers, rowing machines and stairmasters - all with the latest high-tech features and apps... You can achieve the same result going out for a run, and consume a heck of a lot less electricity in the process!

When it comes to diet the gurus will tell you to ‘eat 2 grams of protein for every pound of bodyweight’, or ‘you need to bulk before you can shred’ and other assorted nonsense. The bulking mindset is totally misguided. Almost without exception the guys lifting the heaviest weights in the gym have obese waistlines, chronic back problems, and struggle to climb a set of stairs let alone run around the block. Eschew mass gainers, protein powder, creatine etc... And simply eat cheap healthy food like eggs, tuna, nuts and fruit.

Ultimately, unless you are training for Mr Olympia... A set of dumbbells, an adjustable bench, a chin up bar, an ab wheel, and a decent pair of running shoes are all the gear you need. And rather than sitting around staring at a phone between sets, you can get on with housework or something else productive. Home workouts can replicate every basic exercise you do in a gym, and save time and money in the process. No membership fees, no commuting, no waiting to use equipment. These exercises are all you will ever need to achieve a lean, toned physique:

Arms - Curls, hammer curls, dumbbell tricep extensions, diamond push ups.

Shoulders - Pike push ups, dumbbell shoulder press.

Chest - Press ups, dumbbell chest press, flies.

Back – Dumbbell bent over rows, chin ups, pull ups, australian push ups.

Abs - Ab wheel rolls, sit ups, leg raises, dragon flies.

Legs - Goblet squats, calf raises, stair step-ups.

Cardio – Distance running, sprint intervals, burpees.

Drunk freshman economics students are smarter than Blockstream devs.

Every British economics student of a certain age should be familiar with the 'little green book'. Introductory Economics by the late GF Stanlake has stood the test of time as the ultimate rudimentary introduction to the dismal science, tatty, bedraggled old editions are passed down the generations at Universities to this day.

Bitcoin at it's foundation is a global economic system, as such one would hope those charting the roadmap for it's future development would have grasped the fundamentals of economics. Unfortunately, one of the most elementary principles taught to heavily inebriated freshman on freshers week, seems to have eluded them...       

Stanlake: Chapter 1, Section 1...

"A large percentage of the human race still lives in very small, self-sufficient peasant communities. These people experience great poverty, but they can provide, on an individual basis, for their own survival. They have a degree of economic independence. If we turn to the inhabitants of New York, London, or any other great metropolitan area we must observe the opposite situation - a high standard of living together with an extreme economic dependence... The richer the nation, the greater is the inability of its citizens to survive unaided and alone. Such people depend, each and every day of their lives, on the efforts and cooperation of many thousands of specialist workers... In the economically developed countries we are rich, not as individuals, but only as members of a complex economic organisation."

The peasant communities described by Stanlake operate under a system of 'subsistence economics', whereby individuals produce their own food, shelter and clothing. Typically such communities are small in scale, and maintain social cohesion through mechanical solidarity (Durkheim), largely as a function of homogeneity and corresponding high levels of social-trust.

In stark contrast, industrialised nations operate under a system of 'division of labour', famously illustrated by Adam Smith, whereby individuals and firms specialize in a narrow field, facilitating enhanced productivity, and fulfilling most of their economic needs through trade. As specialization increases in an economy a new source of social cohesion emerges, organic solidarity the economic inter-dependence between participants.

Both the subsistence and the specialist approach to social organisation, represent trade-offs. In an era of ever accelerating hyper-global-capitalism, living off the grid in small scale Schumacherian social-cooperatives to escape the atomisation and social pathology of contemporary life is an increasing appealing prospect to many. 

Human beings are not insects (despite the best efforts of Silicon Valley) and there is far more to life than economic efficiency.

Bitcoin, as a global network, is the absolute antithesis of a small-scale social cooperative. It's massive, heterogeneous user base could not be further from the close-knit, homogeneous, high-trust community of the peasant commune, and only persists as a function of shared economic incentives.

Every network user running their own tiny node represents the subsistence model of peasant communes. 144 Megabytes of data a day represents economic penury.   

Specialized miners investing in industrial scale inventory and data storage whilst network users focus energy and resources on building applications, infrastructure and commercial enterprises (facilitated by the massive scaling of said specialized miners) represents division of labour. Terrabytes of economic activity a day represents industrialised civilisation. 

If only 1 Meg Greg had read Stanlake.