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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#611

Post by hellbannedguy »

mcguire wrote: post #435
delusional wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that all the things you are listing are also on the inside of the system. There's certainly an element of rebellion to protests for example, but it's also a consolation price. Elon Musk doesn't have to protest, neither does Jeff Bozos. They just call up their preferred politician and the system dances for them. Protests are an opium fed to the disenfranchised masses to keep them from fundamentally changing…

But grassroots campaigns and protests do result in change. Not quickly enough for many people, but if your alternative is burning everything down....

Nonviolent protests don't seem to get much change.

People get angry over years of absolute no change.

It seems like there's a happy medium, as long as no one is killed.

(The media usually sensationalizes the protest too. Hell---CVS planned on closing 200 California stores years ago. How do I know? I just know. I heard a spokesman for CVS claim that theft was the reason. When asked about which exact stores were hit hard--she didn't have an answer.

When there's a violent protest, and the disenfranchised guys break a window and steal. The tv stations play the same isolated incident over, and over again.)

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#612

Post by bb88 »

munificent wrote: post #388
delusional wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

That reminds me of an old joke:

Q: How does an engineer cure constipation?

A: He works it out with a pencil.

Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.

I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.

Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.

And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.

So in 2021 the joke is:

Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?

A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#613

Post by DenseComet »

fragmede wrote: post #544
UncleMeat wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would decentralized finance affect the advertising driven business model of web applications?

Micropayments have been suggested since Internet was young, but now that's available on top of the right cryptocurrent (eg SOL). Whether that's actually a model people want (vs saying they want) remains to be seen, but Substack seems to be doing well enough for their writers. 3 cents from each of 100,000 likes on Twitter/Insta/tt starts to add up for those with a large enough following to make several of those a mont…

Micropayments are an interesting topic. I don't want to pay 5 cents per article I read, I'd much rather pay $10 a month for unlimited articles, even if I end up paying more than I would with the first scheme just because with the first one, I make a decision to spend money with every click. I know there are projects trying to streamline this, but it really should be as close to the UX of the latter as possible, pay a set amount and never think about how many things I can read.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#614

Post by nfw2 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #594
nfw2 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, but I think focusing on one region over a limited time period can lead to incorrect conclusions. A single country is not a closed system. The working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, while the upper class gained tremendous amounts of wealth. One might assume the wealthy seized their gains from the middle class, and this may be true, to some extent. Howeve…

> the working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, Do you define regression as absolute position or relative position? For example does it matter if Jeff Bezos has 100 Ferraris if the middle class, on average, have .25 more cars per capital than 50 yrs ago? I would love to put some data behind this discussion because it's long been mixed up as to which case is the ethical…

What I mean is a regression of wealth and income relative to the cost of living for most young people (ie pretty much anyone who doesn't work in tech or other STEM field). I don't mean relative to the most wealthy.

Here is some data that compares the median income to the rising cost of living in the US. https://www.businessinsider.com/america-middle-class-living-...

I think the Bezos-Ferrari question is a good one. I feel it is personally unethical for Bezos to spend that amount of wealth on luxuries when the resources could alternatively be spent reducing the suffering of others.

However I also think it is impractical and misguided for a state to enact policies with the primary purpose of minimizing the number of Bezos Ferraris or to automatically attribute the lack of cars per capital to Bezos's excess of cars (although in some cases it might be)

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#615

Post by nfw2 »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #599
nfw2 wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of (most?) innovation is driven by problems that need solving. It's a lot easier to start a company if there is already a large audience that really wants a problem solved and are willing to pay for the solution. Having an amazing novel idea and then convincing people not having it in their life is a problem is way harder

Yes of course - problems, needs, not complaints.

what is the difference? isn't a complaint essentially just stating that you have a problem

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#616

Post by colonelxc »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #593
r00fus wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). How in the world is DeFi supposed to help this? From my POV DeFi makes it worse (advertising funding can now be untraceable/unauditable).

If the entire platform (gmail, etc) is funded by ads, then removing the ads destroys the platform. In that space, advertising is a necessary evil, and the best we can do it try to make it less onerous. But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or…

Advertising clearly wont "go die in a fire", no matter how frictionless the payments are. There was a conversation on hacker news just a few days ago about 'smart' TVs all getting ads, spying on the user, etc.

This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?

This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.

Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.

I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#617

Post by serverholic »

MauranKilom wrote: post #533
moffkalast wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me, but we all place an awful lot of trust giving vendors essentially all credit card details possible AND where we live so that they're capable of skimming a self defined sum off by themselves. It's like an inherently insane system. We're supposed to be the one wiring the cash, not the vendor themselves with our data.

By that notion, the fact that almost all home locks are easily pickable and glass windows breakable is also insane. There's tons of valuables behind almost all of these! We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing theft, which turns out to be largely sufficient even in face of fallible security. The exact same applies to card data in the hands of merchants.

"We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing X".

Take that logic and apply it to crypto and hopefully that'll help you understand why crypto enthusiasts believe in it.

The fact is that we can and do find ways around flaws in a system. Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#618

Post by mistermann »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #514
CTmystery wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Science is the only and ultimate final authority Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s. I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as a…

Utilizing data to continuous refine one's model of the world is the ultimate final authority. Some people call it science, some call it the scientific method, etc.

And some other people call it delusion, hubris, flawed epistemology, ironic, etc.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#619

Post by sangnoir »

zepto wrote: post #608
mcbishop wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hear "welfare queen," I think of a black woman. Because I'm racist (sadly). From that, the racist idea that free services (e.g. universal healthcare) are unduly exploited by black people (or immigrants).

I’m sorry you are a racist. How does your racism cause you to equate welfare Queen with black woman? I’d have thought that was more connected to the media using it that way.

Reagan pretty much popularized the terms ("welfare queen", "strapping young bucks") with racist intent[1]: those were the images he wished to conjure-up in listener's minds, and not a creation of the media. Just as the word "thug" is currently used by certain personalities/networks today.

1. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistak...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#620

Post by philosopher1234 »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #599
nfw2 wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of (most?) innovation is driven by problems that need solving. It's a lot easier to start a company if there is already a large audience that really wants a problem solved and are willing to pay for the solution. Having an amazing novel idea and then convincing people not having it in their life is a problem is way harder

Yes of course - problems, needs, not complaints.

complaining is talking about needs. i dont understand your distinction
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