51–60 of 72 posts
It talks a lot about shame and misogyny and abuse of power, but doesn’t actually report on any instances of it other than “they hired pretty girls to party on the boat”, which I can assume were consensual transactions those women engaged in voluntarily. Where is the big dirt she keeps alluding to? Are we just supposed to hate them by default for being rich and white and male and schlubby and tasteless?
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Since when has it been the case that the far-right are never drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, or money launderers? I thoroughly enjoyed this piece precisely because she did describe the dystopian soup of all of the above that decentralisation and distribution has given us. If anything you should have walked away from this article with the realisation that, thanks to it all, we can no longer truly organize ourselves…
I'm not a fan of the far-right, but this begging the question/false equivalency doesn't sit well with me: > Since when has it been the case that the far-right are never drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, or money launderers? Since when has it been the case that the far-right are always drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, or money launderers? The political inclinations of these people are a factor, but not the sole rea…
But these things are not incompatible. Far-right scammers, drug dealers, scammers, etc. exist. So do far-left versions of the same. So it really isn't relevant to their (shshhdhs) criticism, and thats the point I wish to make.
It seems to me that shshhdhs is only complaining about the authors political views with regards to this cruise, because they are incompatible with shshhdhs's views of the same, and that shshhdhs is making the statement that crypto- is more the domain of drug-dealers, etc. therefore "it can't be all far-right people in the scene". I merely wish to point out that if you're left-, or if you're right- wing, you can still be a bad person for other reasons: drugs, ransom, scams, etc.
Crypto- is an equaliser, and that is really the big point. Ones political ideology is irrelevant to the technology - its just as useful for people who wish do good, however they define 'good' as it is for those who do things others think are 'bad', for whatever that definition may be.
The authors own conclusion - the very last sentence of the article - demonstrates that she gets it: it doesn't matter what your political views, crypto- is going to let you continue to espouse them, whether they are good or bad. Maybe thats offensive to some, but it doesn't seem to me that it bothers the author that much. What seems to bother her, is the rampant sexism that she observed, and I concur with her statement that it seems technology is never going to solve this. Only humans will.
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As software developers are paid to write code. And yet I couldn't begin to tell you the difference between Node and Angular.
You haven't been paid to specifically research that difference.
Instead, the point seems to have been to pay a writer who didn't know much about it to go on the cruise and write about what happened. The only real qualification needed for this sort of piece is being able to talk to people and write well.
Don't read this looking for insights about Bitcoin, any more than you'd read DFW's article for insights about being retired. This is a fish-out-of-water story, and those kind of stories are best when they're about the fish itself, not about the water of lack of it.
> I knew about bitcoin only as an investment vehicle favored by several essentially sweet nerds close to my heart—and I knew, too, that cryptocurrencies are the pet untraceable funding model of the far-right. The author really hasn't been paying attention if she failed to realize it is the pet funding model of drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, and money launderers, and only instead opted to use it to mock the politi…
Authors nowadays have the tendency to (ab)use their own articles as vehicle to talk about themselves -- and it's ever too often either completely unrelated to the content or some superficial, forced connection. It's quite annoying.
This provides a condensation of what I’ve experienced visiting Silicon Valley as an outsider.
Authors nowadays have the tendency to (ab)use their own articles as vehicle to talk about themselves -- and it's ever too often either completely unrelated to the content or some superficial, forced connection. It's quite annoying.
I know. Like when Mark Twain visited Germany in 1878 and then used his report ("A Tramp Abroad") to talk about his own feelings rather than objectively describing the fascinating arts and crafts of Prussia.
Other people, however, may hold journalism to higher standards than those of infotainment that falls terribly short of the "info" part of the portmanteau.
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>> I can't believe someone paid the author to go on this cruise and to write such shoddy work. This is how this level of journalism works: CyproCruise has a promotion budget. That budget includes "free" tickets for journalists. They offer these tickets to hip/cool outlets but, as this is a cruise, they need the name of the journalist before actually sending the ticket. So hip/cool outlet sends bio/headshot of the jou…
no-one looks at the Laurie Penny types and their "cool hair" and thinks they'll portray a positive (or even neutral/journalistic) image of libertarians.