Viewing profile — magicsmoke

The state could already force people under their control to sell commodities to their soldiers for clay tokens. Why switch to gold, a much more difficult resource to obtain and pro…

You should rethink that phrasing. That's a heads I win tails you lose kind of proposal.

This was a really enjoyable read and actually helped plugged a few gaps I got from Graeber's work. I personally think his model for where money originated is very solid. Early huma…

There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advance…

Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NY…

There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper an…

If you're in a situation where a state is after you, cash or bitcoin isn't going to help. If they decide you owe them hundreds of millions, they'll claw it from you when you try to…

If you subscribe to MMT, the IOU here is that the government promises not to throw you in jail for failure to pay taxes if you give them some tokens every year. If you own land wit…

On the one hand, they're right to cringe at the tone-deaf socialist era government communist propaganda. "How do you do fellow kids" with a communist flare. Clearly produced by cad…

The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south w…

Using drones wasn't going to dramatically increase the damage someone like the Boston Marathon bomber did or decrease his chances of getting caught. Would be domestic terrorists ar…

Depends on what is considered a loss. Bombers flying towards the political capital = launch the nukes. Navy sunk and the enemy is setting up a blockade = maybe we'll go be north Ko…

It might also be instructive to compare with medicine or law. These practitioners are also liable for their actions, have to be licensed by a professional organization, and can hav…

It's weird that most of the discussion is focused on a false dichotomy between a single universal language for all humanity, and preserving every single language that exists today …

Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some…

As someone who speaks a language that may be going the way of the dodo in a couple of years, watching his family back home decide not to pass it onto the next generation because it…

Astronaut: English Cosmonaut: Russian Taikonaut: Chinese Spationaut: French Vyomanaut: Indian Based on their entries on wikitionary it looks like most phonetically written language…

The confusion over Chinese names and logograms is pretty funny considering that in Chinese, western names are written with a set of phonetic logograms and losing that spelling info…

Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese. https://en.w…

Contractual penalty clauses are activated: Good luck collecting, get lost. Credit rating is dinged: In the eyes of the lenders that debt trapped you. Why would you still want to be…

Nationalizing the infrastructure is always an option. Unlike the US, China can't send marines around the world to seize the property.

There's a kind of twisted logic to it. If your construction techniques are constantly improving and the high volume of construction incentivizes you to develop more cost efficient …

Looks like Kylin OS uses the Linux kernel. While not impossible to use in a real-time application (SpaceX Falcon 9 uses it) there's definitely work involved in stripping it down en…