Bent Measuring Stick — Monday’s Straight Measure Volunteers are still showing up, which ruins a lot of tidy narratives. AP reports that Points of Light has launched a national volunteer strategy with a $100 million push to grow volunteering in America, with a goal of reaching 150 million volunteers by 2035. It is easy to roll your eyes at the polished language. “National strategy” sounds like the kind of phrase that gets laminated before anyone fixes a damn thing. Fine. Roll your eyes. Then notice what is underneath it: people still want to help, local groups still need them, and a lot of the country’s real repair work never starts in a press conference. AmeriCorps and Census data found that 75.8 million Americans formally volunteered through organizations in 2023, up from 60.7 million in 2021. More than half of Americans also helped neighbors informally. That is not nothing. In a culture constantly told it is divided, atomized, exhausted, and too online to function, that number has a little backbone in it. This is the straight measure worth keeping. Not every repair needs to begin with a new agency, app, subscription, or committee. Sometimes it starts with a food pantry shift, a ride to an appointment, a youth coach, a cleanup crew, a church basement, a veteran’s group, or somebody with a truck who answers the phone. Volunteers do not replace strong families, honest institutions, or competent local government. But they do reveal something the doom machine hates to admit: a society is not dead while ordinary people are still willing to carry part of the load. #Volunteering #Community #BentMeasuringStick

Bent Measuring Stick — Sunday Observations The Fourth of July receipt has zero respect for tradition. I was thinking this morning about how a cookout is supposed to be one of the few easy things left. Not fancy. Not curated. Not some lifestyle performance with a rented table setting and a playlist called “coastal nostalgia.” Just burgers, buns, chips, fruit, ice, paper plates, maybe fireworks, and somebody pretending they know exactly how much propane is left in the tank. The whole point is that nobody should need a spreadsheet to invite people over and burn a few hot dogs. Then the receipt shows up and ruins the mood like it was invited by the Federal Reserve. The American Farm Bureau’s 2026 Fourth of July survey puts the average cost of a 10-person cookout at about $73.82, or $7.38 per person. That is up about 4% from last year and the highest total since the survey began tracking it in 2016. BLS says overall prices were up 4.2% over the year in May, while food at home was up 2.7%. And yes, $7.38 per person does not sound like the end of civilization. That is not the point. The point is that the cookout collects all the little pressures people are tired of being told are “cooling.” Beef carries drought, feed costs, and herd rebuilding. Strawberries carry weather and labor. Buns carry wheat, fuel, packaging, and trucks. Even the cheap stuff has a supply chain now, which is a ridiculous sentence and also apparently the business model of modern life. This is why people can hear that inflation is improving and still feel like nobody in the official conversation has been to a grocery store lately. The rate can cool while the price level stays in the house. The chart can improve while the family trims the extras, asks guests to bring more, or quietly stretches the burgers a little further. The measuring stick is not only the CPI report. Sometimes it is a family trying to make a normal summer memory while the receipt stands there reminding everyone that normal got more expensive. #FourthOfJuly #Inflation #BentMeasuringStick

PRINCIPLES & PROOF The Price of Time — Week 019 “It is an empirical fact of undoubted universality that present goods are valued more highly than future goods of like kind and amount.” — Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk wrote about capital and interest, but the truth beneath his sentence is older than economics. Human beings live under the pressure of the present. The meal in front of us is easier to value than the harvest next year. The money in hand feels more real than the savings it might become. Relief available now speaks more loudly than a burden that may arrive later. The future matters, of course, but it does not arrive with the same force as hunger, fear, opportunity, pleasure, crisis, or need. That is what gives Böhm-Bawerk’s insight its power. He was not merely describing a financial calculation. He was naming a permanent fact of human life: the present has an advantage. It is visible. It is urgent. It can be touched. The future must be imagined, trusted, protected, and sometimes sacrificed for before it can reward anyone at all. As Jefferson reminded us last week, the present can hand costs to people who were not there to object. Böhm-Bawerk helps explain why that temptation is so persistent. A generation does not usually burden the future because it openly despises it. More often, it burdens the future because the present feels more vivid, more sympathetic, and more politically alive. The future is real, but it is quiet. The present is always making noise. Nearly everything durable requires people to resist the full appetite of now. A farm requires seed not eaten. A business requires savings not spent. A bridge requires materials and labor devoted to people who may cross it decades later. Education requires years of effort before its value is clear. A family requires sacrifice for children who cannot yet repay it. A culture requires habits preserved by people who may never personally receive the full benefit. Civilization is built by people who do not spend everything the present asks of them. That is why time preference matters. It is not just a term from economics. It is a window into the moral structure of a society. High time preference pulls life toward the immediate: consume now, borrow now, escape now, satisfy now, let later handle later. Low time preference makes longer forms of life possible: save, build, repair, teach, plant, invest, restrain, preserve. The difference is not only financial. It shows up in families, institutions, cities, habits, and character. Böhm-Bawerk understood that capital is bound up with time. Tools, machines, knowledge, infrastructure, and institutions do not appear instantly. They are accumulated through delayed consumption and ordered effort. Someone must choose not to consume all available resources now so that more can become possible later. A society does not become wealthy merely because it desires abundance. It becomes wealthy when enough people and institutions can carry resources across time without consuming them too soon. This is easy to admire in theory and hard to practice in life. The present always has arguments. It points to pain, need, unfairness, opportunity, emergency, and the fact that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Sometimes the present is right. A starving person should not be lectured about investment. A genuine crisis may require immediate action. Human beings do not live as spreadsheets. But a society that always obeys the present will eventually consume the conditions that made its future possible. The old virtues were built around this problem. Prudence, thrift, patience, fidelity, restraint, stewardship — these are all ways of honoring the future before it arrives. They are not glamorous virtues because they rarely produce applause in the moment. They ask people to accept limits now for the sake of possibilities later. They are easy to mock during abundance and easy to miss after they have been weakened. Money sits near the center of this because money is one of the main ways human beings move value through time. To save money is to trust that present labor can be carried forward into future choice. To lend money is to trust that future production can honor present confidence. To invest money is to commit resources now in the hope of larger future capacity. When money is sound, these acts become more intelligible. The saver can believe patience has meaning. The builder can plan. The family can imagine a future that is not constantly being repriced by forces outside its control. When money is unsound, time becomes harder to hold. The future does not disappear, but it becomes less trustworthy. Savings feel less like stored labor and more like melting ice. People are pushed toward risk, leverage, speculation, and immediacy because waiting feels punished. The culture adapts. Spending now seems rational. Borrowing seems normal. Owning assets becomes more important than producing value. Financial maneuvering begins to replace patient accumulation, and what looks like sophistication may simply be a response to a corrupted clock. A society with weak money may still praise responsibility while quietly making responsibility harder to practice. It may praise saving while punishing savers. It may praise families while making long-term household formation more expensive. It may praise work while forcing workers to chase a moving standard. It may praise prudence while rewarding those who understand how to live closer to credit, leverage, and monetary expansion. Over time, people learn the lesson the system teaches, not the lesson the speeches recommend. Debt becomes especially tempting in such a world because debt lets the present borrow credibility from the future. It allows people, institutions, and governments to enjoy now what must be justified later. Used carefully, debt can build. Used habitually, it trains impatience. It teaches a society to experience limits not as reality, but as obstacles to be refinanced. Jefferson saw the moral danger of handing the bill forward. Böhm-Bawerk shows the human tendency that makes the bill so easy to hand forward in the first place. The same pattern appears in politics. Elected officials operate inside short time horizons. Voters feel present pressures. Institutions prefer solvency today over discipline that may only be appreciated tomorrow. The future has no lobby strong enough to match the urgency of the present. So public life drifts toward promises with immediate benefits and delayed costs. The arithmetic is not hidden because no one can understand it. It is hidden because too many people have incentives not to look at it until later. But later always arrives. It arrives in weaker balance sheets, thinner savings, reduced trust, lower birth rates, fragile institutions, neglected infrastructure, and the strange exhaustion of people who feel they are working harder to inherit less. It arrives as a society gradually discovering that the future it discounted has become the present it must now live inside. Bitcoin belongs naturally in this conversation because it is, at its core, a monetary challenge to the tyranny of the present. It does not make people patient by magic. It does not eliminate uncertainty, guarantee prosperity, or remove the need for judgment. Its importance is more specific than that. It creates a monetary environment less hostile to patience. Its fixed supply means a holder’s share of the monetary supply cannot be diluted simply because the present finds dilution convenient. Its predictable issuance and distributed verification express a discipline rare in modern monetary life: the refusal to flatter today by weakening tomorrow. That is why Bitcoin is often described as encouraging a lower time preference, but the phrase should not be treated as a slogan. The deeper point is that monetary structure shapes the habits people can reasonably practice. If saving is punished, fewer people will save. If leverage is rewarded, more people will lever. If monetary rules are constantly adjusted to relieve present pressure, the culture will learn to expect adjustment instead of discipline. Bitcoin does not abolish human impatience. It simply stops the money from joining impatience so eagerly. Seen through Böhm-Bawerk’s lens, this is not a small matter. A society’s ability to value the future depends partly on whether its institutions make the future worth valuing. Sound money gives patience a fairer field. It allows sacrifice to carry meaning across time. It does not promise that every saver will be rewarded or every plan will succeed. Life is not that tidy. But it removes one of the great modern insults to patience: the quiet reduction of future claims by those with authority over the unit. This is also why Bitcoin feels strange to people formed by elastic money. It refuses to behave like a political instrument. It does not adjust itself to elections, emergencies, budget needs, banking stress, or public impatience. That can look harsh if one assumes money should be a tool for managing every present discomfort. But the harshness may be another word for honesty. A ruler can promise relief by altering the measure, but the cost does not vanish. It moves. The question is whether a society wants money that helps it face time honestly, or money that helps it negotiate with time until the bill is larger. Böhm-Bawerk still matters because he reminds us that the present will always command a premium. That is not a defect to be eliminated. It is a human reality to be governed. Civilizations do not endure by pretending people naturally prefer distant goods to immediate ones. They endure by building habits, institutions, and measures that help the future survive the bargaining power of now. THE CALIBRATION Time is one of the deepest tests of a society. Anyone can honor the future in speech. The harder question is whether its money, laws, families, and institutions make future-oriented life possible in practice. When the present is allowed to rewrite too many rules, patience begins to look foolish and debt begins to look like wisdom. That is why Böhm-Bawerk’s insight reaches beyond economics, and why Bitcoin belongs in the same conversation. The future will always be quieter than the present. Sound money cannot make human beings immune to impatience, but it can refuse to make impatience the governing principle of the measure itself. — Principles & Proof

Bent Measuring Stick Your phone’s ad trail became a government shortcut. AP reports that the ATF canceled a contract for WebLoc, a tool that let investigators track phones using commercial phone-location data from consumer apps and ad networks. Read that slowly: not a phone-company record after a judge signed a warrant, but the data trail created when ordinary apps and websites try to know where a phone has been. Lawmakers said ATF ran more than 300 warrantless searches with WebLoc, including more than 200 tied to active investigations. ATF called it a pilot and dropped the contract after questions from lawmakers, a prosecutor, and a judge. That sounds like the system worked, until you notice the store is still open. AP reports the FBI and Homeland Security still buy commercial phone-location data. The FTC has already taken action against data brokers accused of selling sensitive location data tied to health clinics, houses of worship, schools, shelters, labor union offices, and military sites. In one case, the FTC said companies claimed to process more than 17 billion signals from about a billion mobile devices each day. This is the quiet trick. Privacy gets measured by consent screens nobody reads, while power gets measured by who can buy the trail later. The warrant used to be the gate, but the market has been busy building side doors. #Privacy #Surveillance #BentMeasuringStick

Bent Measuring Stick A phone ban is a strange way to find out who owns the classroom. In one Texas district, nearly half of high school discipline referrals were not fights, cheating, or skipping class. They were cellphone-ban violations. Conroe ISD tried to pull phones out of the school day, and more than 6,500 students were disciplined under the policy in its first year. That is not just a school-rule story. That is what happens when a school finally counts the thing everyone has been living with. Pew says 95% of U.S. teens have access to a smartphone, and nearly half say they are online almost constantly. AP reports that New Jersey just became the 37th state, plus D.C., to enact school cellphone restrictions, with 19 states and D.C. requiring bell-to-bell bans. Teachers are not imagining the problem. Parents are not imagining it either. The phone is social life, camera, group chat, status meter, parent tether, entertainment, emergency plan, and boredom escape in one pocket-sized machine. Banning it may be necessary. Students probably need a few hours without being measured by a screen. But the ban also tells on the world that built the dependency. Schools are being asked to enforce attention after the rest of the culture spent years selling distraction. The phone ban may not be the cure, but it is giving schools the first honest count of what they are up against. #PhoneBans #Education #BentMeasuringStick

Bent Measuring Stick The audit is coming for the grocery cart. A SNAP “payment error rate” sounds like a government problem for someone else. That is why it is easy to miss. Public systems usually reach ordinary life this way: first as a number in a report, then as a rule, then as a budget problem, then as a cost somebody has to absorb. AP reports that states with SNAP error rates of 6% or higher could eventually have to pay part of the benefit cost themselves. The higher the error rate, the larger the state share: 5%, 10%, or 15% of benefit costs starting in October 2027. States are also set to pay a larger share of administrative costs beginning in October 2026. Accuracy matters. Waste matters. A program this large should be measured honestly. But USDA says SNAP payment errors include both underpayments and overpayments. That means the number is not just fraud. It can also include paperwork mistakes, income changes, missing documents, overloaded offices, and systems that already make poor families prove the same hardship again and again. The scale changes the meaning. More than 37 million people received SNAP benefits in March, according to preliminary USDA figures cited by AP. That is not a side program. It is a major current running through household budgets, grocery stores, food companies, state offices, payment systems, and local economies. When that much money moves through a rulebook, the rulebook becomes part of the market. If states suddenly owe millions, the money has to come from somewhere. Taxes or fees. Cuts somewhere else. Stricter offices. More forms. More delays. Fewer grocery dollars moving through local checkout lines. This is why a story that sounds like it belongs only to “someone else” rarely stays there. Once the number becomes the rule, the cost starts looking for a household. #SNAP #FoodPrices #BentMeasuringStick

Bent Measuring Stick Amazon made up a holiday, and America brought a cart. Prime Day is a strange modern achievement. One company created a sale, gave it a name, put it on the calendar, and now millions of people recognize it almost the way they recognize Black Friday, back-to-school season, or a long weekend. Imagine Kroger announcing a national grocery-cart day and everyone quietly building it into the year. That alone says something about Amazon’s place in American life. Prime Day started in 2015 as a one-day event for Amazon’s 20th birthday. In 2026, it runs four days, from June 23 through June 26, with millions of deals across categories that sound less like splurges and more like household inventory: clothes, kitchen supplies, groceries, electronics, school items, and the things families kept meaning to replace. This year, the cart tells the sharper story. Reuters reports shoppers are expected to focus more on basics, household goods, children’s clothes, back-to-school needs, and delayed purchases. Bank of America estimated the event could reach about $21.6 billion in goods sold. A sale used to feel like permission to buy something extra. Now it can feel like the week normal purchases finally become possible: detergent, sneakers, dog food, paper towels, a backpack, a charger, the thing you put off last month because the grocery bill, gas tank, and credit card had already spoken. That is a lot of power for a sale that started as a birthday party. #PrimeDay #Inflation #BentMeasuringStick

Bent Measuring Stick The Ministry of Truth does not need a printing press anymore. The UK is considering rules that would require social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook to give more visibility to “trusted” news providers, including major public broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4. The justification is easy to package. Misinformation is real. Fake clips, bot sludge, panic headlines, and algorithmic outrage have made the online news environment worse. Some legislators clearly believe the answer is to make “trusted” sources more visible. But the measuring stick bends when “trusted” becomes an official category. This is not happening in isolation. The UK has already moved through online safety duties, age-assurance rules, under-16 social-media restrictions, illegal-hate enforcement pressure, and criminal communications laws that can bring police into online speech disputes. Each measure arrives with its own justification. Together, they point toward a larger shift: the internet is being treated less like an open public square and more like a managed environment of approved access, approved identity, approved visibility, and approved trust. The old fight over speech was about whether something could be published. The new fight is about whether it can be seen. Ranking, recommendation, search placement, crisis labels, feed priority, and platform rules now decide what reaches the public square before most people know a decision was made. A government does not have to ban every disfavored voice if it can help decide which voices are made prominent, which are buried, and which are treated as safe enough for the public. Trust cannot be manufactured by giving it a reserved lane in the algorithm. Once official visibility becomes a policy tool, the feed stops being a messy public square and starts looking more like managed attention with a login screen. #FreeSpeech #Media #BentMeasuringStick

Bent Measuring Stick — Monday’s Straight Measure A thing you can’t fix is something you only rent. There is a quiet kind of freedom in being able to repair what you own. Not romantic freedom, not flag-waving freedom, just the ordinary kind that lives in a garage, a farm shed, a neighborhood repair shop, or a kitchen drawer full of tools that mostly still work. Washington is debating right-to-repair rules for cars, with lawmakers and independent shops pushing for access to the diagnostic and repair data needed to keep modern vehicles working. Deere also agreed this spring to a $99 million settlement tied to farmers’ claims that repair access had been restricted on agricultural equipment. Consumer advocates say state right-to-repair laws already cover roughly 80 million Americans. That may sound like a fight between manufacturers, dealers, mechanics, and lawyers. It is really a fight over what ownership means after software gets inside the machine. A tractor that can only be fixed by permission is not quite the same tractor. A car that hides its diagnostic data from the owner is not quite the same car. The old question was whether you had the right tool. The new question is whether the company will let the tool talk to the machine. This is not nostalgia. Modern equipment is complicated, and safety matters. But complication should not become a permanent excuse for turning owners into dependents. The world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, much of it from products that are replaced faster than they are repaired, reused, or understood. The repair shop, the farmer with tools, the mechanic who knows a machine by sound, and the teenager learning to take something apart without being afraid of it are not leftovers from an older world. A society that still teaches people to maintain, mend, troubleshoot, and make things last has preserved something deeper than thrift. It has preserved a working idea of ownership. #RightToRepair #Ownership #BentMeasuringStick

Exactly. That’s the heart of it. Protecting children is a worthy goal, but real-name authentication is the wrong instrument. Anonymity is not a defect in online freedom; it is part of the architecture that makes dissent, exploration, privacy, and honest speech possible.

Bent Measuring Stick The ID checkpoint is arriving dressed as child safety. Ohio can now enforce parental consent for children under 16 to use social media. Florida is suing TikTok under its child-safety law. The UAE just set a minimum social-media age of 15 and says platforms will need real age checks, including digital identity and AI tools. Britain, France, Australia, and the EU are all moving in the same direction. You can understand why people support it. Nearly half of U.S. teens say they are online almost constantly, and parents are tired of watching phones become slot machines for childhood. They are tired of strangers, adult content, addictive feeds, and algorithms that seem to know exactly how to keep a kid scrolling when the kid should have gone outside, read a book, or gone to sleep. That is why this is such an effective doorway. It begins with a problem decent people can see. But there is a category mistake hiding inside the solution. A problem of parenting, platform design, addictive business models, and family judgment is being converted into a government-approved identity system. A law written for children does not always stay inside childhood. To prove a child is a child, the system often has to verify an adult, check a document, scan a face, trust a third party, or build a permission layer between ordinary people and the open web. In Europe, age verification is already being tied to the broader digital-identity wallet project. This is how liberty usually gets tired: not through one dramatic surrender, but through small reasonable concessions, each attached to a sympathetic case, each leaving behind machinery the next emergency does not have to build. A free society can take childhood seriously without sleepwalking into an internet where every door has a checkpoint. #Privacy #SocialMedia #BentMeasuringStick