531–540 of 700 posts
There is a misconception that "Darwinian" is the same as "efficient."
Darwinian simply means "what can be sustained will be sustained until they can't be sustained anymore."
Which is exactly why layoffs happen in economic downturns -- those bullshit jobs just can't be sustained anymore.
A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…
I have been involved in crypto since the beginning and the least interesting things for me is about the value. It's just a savings account. All the fun stuff is what we build on top of that.
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RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better. Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too. My experience with RS led m…
> Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money) Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world ident…
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This is addressed in the original white paper. In a world where BTC is valued at 1M USD/coin you’d also expect a decent amount of day to day usage. Miners could still make decent profits based on transaction fees just from confirming blocks even once the Coinbase rewards stop. I’m not saying that’s currently the case, but that is the design. Also if miners are making a profit off let’s say $40k/coin and the price goe…
Miners could make a profit at $1/coin. The issue is that profit comes from somewhere. And that somewhere is new money being put into BTC. Hence, BTC is negative cashflow.
The value provided by a database such as BTC is that it provides a record of 'who owns what at what point of time in history'. I can argue separately about why the 'immutability' of this database itself is a value created by Bitcoin, for which holders can be willing to pay premium for.
Miners earn profit if Operating Costs > $ value of (Transaction Fees + BTC mined). Over a long enough timeline, Fees + BTC mined will ~~ operating costs of the rig. If not, more miners will continue to see economic opportunity, and keep joining the miner pool till that equation is balanced.
The other source of BTC value going up need not be more demand for it, let's say over next 12 months. The ~6% inflation could show up there too.
What am I missing?
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Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers. You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, wher…
David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism. There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.
This line of thought assumes three bold ideas:
1. that existing model is bad
2. that alternative model for airline (or any other industry) exists
3. that alternative model won’t suffer from similar issues
Re. 1
— author uses anecdotal evidence from friends who consider their jobs ‘pointless’: (talking about a friend) “*Now he's a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.*”
- author extrapolates this anecdote to other fields and people: “*it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit*”
- after establishing negative nature of these jobs on this purely anecdotal basis, author then proceeds to blame capitalism for creating them: “* making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen*”
— he concludes that “*the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.*”
- author provides a hypothesis for the root cause of the issue: “*if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else*“
I’m sorry, but this line of logic cannot be refuted. Simply because there is no logic, there is an emotionally charged narrative supported by anecdotes and directed at very broad and abstract problem (“ruling class”), with no solution provided by author. Anarchism is assumed to be a solution, but I hope at this point it should be obvious, with the level of problem analysis involved, we could also use a magic wand.
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I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
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This implies that anything that is scarce or requires labour to obtain automatically becomes desirable and rises in value.
scarcity is a necessary, but insufficient condition for desirability.
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While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile…
> Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial It's only artificial in a sense that it's one level deeper than our current economy (and is smaller and subject to the whims of the developers), but in the grand scheme of the universe our current economy is just as artificial.
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Just like herbalife or many of those MLM schemes, the initial entry fee does sound like scam. I wonder how long it takes to earn back the initial entry fee?
And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star Citizen. Bet another pandemic will come and go and that game will still be in alpha