621–630 of 700 posts
At this point, I'm starting to think our species had a good run, but it's time to replace it with a more evolved one. And just like dinosaurs were wiped by a global catastrofe and left room for mamels, it's time for homo sapiens to leave room for a new species.
The silver lining? We don't really need to do anything, just watch for our self-made catastrophie to unfold.
Popcorn anyone?
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Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.
Gold has a usecase for jewelry, manufacturing electronics, dentistry and glassmaking. Yet not even the sum of these applications can justify its market cap of $11.73T, so the difference must come from speculation. I suspect the same is true for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is in contrast a pure fiat currency with very weak backing. Nobody has a need for it which can’t be satisfied at least as well by alternatives and it requires a very expensive always-on network to perform transactions. The floor is zero and liquidity is a very real concern.
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If your argument hinges on the premise that being either a police officer or a politician makes someone either a paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.
My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts. All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Inter…
Speaking of nothing being added to the conversation, it’s somewhat conspicuous that you are attacking the source rather than engaging with the argument. His criticisms are valid and shared by many technologists of all ages and skill levels, surely you can explain why they’re mistaken — for example, you could point to extensive use of Bitcoin in a legitimate non-speculative economy. You’ve been promoting it for many years, surely you must have examples?
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My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts. All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Inter…
>as it appears obsessive Do you see the irony here?
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My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts. All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Inter…
> Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation. Speaking of nothing being added to the conversation, it’s somewhat conspicuous that you are attacking the source rather than engaging with the argument. His criticisms are valid and shared by many technologists of all ages and skill levels, surely you can explai…
Tracking the making of negative generalized statements using FUD techniques is something I have been involved in algorithmically tracking professionally and am countering not in the pursuit of karma or sycophantic agreement but simple public commons maintenance. (The data was often used to identify FUD campaigns of short sellers in finance forums and resulting sentiment analysis feeds are available via subscription through financial data providers.) These comments never mention the continual reigning supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and never provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher crime usage ratio than the dollar with less prosecutability. This is because law enforcement generally haven't advanced that position while enforcing and in earlier posts I've explained my extensive experience in detail as to how and why they haven't. There has been no direct engagement with this factual information.
In my view some on this forum are intent on spreading classical FUD on the subject and countering FUD is an occupation for some. After a decade of particularly questionable behavior coming from the technology sector involving unfathomable amounts of US dollars, we run the risk of portraying an image of incumbent ideological corruption instead of supporting meaningful technological discussion. This slide has been happening for years IMO and it saddens me. Younger technologists have considerably less opportunity than we did, not more, and the frontier is much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't serve them.
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You aren't talking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. You are talking about it's value relative to USD. These are completely different things. Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. It can be used entirely independent of fiat. Whether that will become common is another matter, but the value of Bitcoin does not have to depend solely on it's value relative to USD.
Money doesn't have an intrinsic value. Money is just an accounting system, it is a balance sheet. People used physical gold as tokens or entries in that balance sheet. Ultimately you are depending on another human who is actually doing work. This is why the credit theory of money is so appealing. Money has value indirectly because someone obligated himself to give you value equal to the money created. When you add up…
But more to the point, when I said "intrinsic value" I meant value relative to goods/services. Where as when I used "extrinsic value" I meant relative to other "money" such as fiat. Maybe it was a poor choice of words.
As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers? These classes represented a small part of most societies in the past, though not always that small. In any case, it's obvious that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't underestimate culture. Money is a cultural c…
In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks about is how most of the things people would write to him about being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of bullshit jobs. He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs, because it's easy to see what was…
> how useless hairdressers were
Graeber's notion of "caring work" -- in contrast to "service work", "knowledge work", etc -- really changed my worldview about labor.
> canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a large administrative bureaucracy
My own archetype is healthcare accounting in the USA. Like "prescription benefits management". Hits all 5 categories of bullshit.
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Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn’t that the whole point of investing in anything?
Actually, originally no; stocks paid dividends.
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Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia at least) although modern idle games are probably influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well. I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.
I'm pretty into the idle/incremental game concept, though they're rarely implemented to my taste. It's difficult to quantify what makes a good one, but my favorite is Universal Paperclips. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html