251–260 of 338 posts
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Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. It might get you a lighter sentience, but don't count on that. You are expected to know all the laws that apply to all the activities you do.
*Except if you happen to work for the government, then it's totally ok.
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It is not in any sense a USA-centered opinion. Look at the list of countries and supra-national organizations which have comprehensive sanctions in place against North Korea: which include not only the US, but Japan, the European Union, Australia and Taiwan. You can adopt whatever degree of moral relativism suits your purpose, but there's basically not a lot of people anywhere in the world who are looking at what's h…
To be fair though, those are all Western-aligned countries dependent on US force. They'll typically go along with whatever the US says. They're not exactly vassal states but close enough. NK is just another tiny country caught in a proxy war between imperialists. Look at China, which I think is bigger (or nearly so) than all those countries combined, and they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do. I'm n…
Compare the actions of France and Germany in the first Iraq war with the second. They don't always agree with the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_positions_on_th...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not in any sense a USA-centered opinion. Look at the list of countries and supra-national organizations which have comprehensive sanctions in place against North Korea: which include not only the US, but Japan, the European Union, Australia and Taiwan. You can adopt whatever degree of moral relativism suits your purpose, but there's basically not a lot of people anywhere in the world who are looking at what's h…
To be fair though, those are all Western-aligned countries dependent on US force. They'll typically go along with whatever the US says. They're not exactly vassal states but close enough. NK is just another tiny country caught in a proxy war between imperialists. Look at China, which I think is bigger (or nearly so) than all those countries combined, and they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do. I'm n…
This is a comical overstatement. If you followed the ins and out of international relations you'd know this is far from true. The health of those relationships (and any security arrangements included) is constantly debated up and down, and there are periodic crises of various magnitudes that kick up conversation of security arrangements ending.
If you think those countries are not acting in their own carefully-measured self interest and just show up blank faced to support the US... you have a very uninformed notion of the reality.
"they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do."
You're really shooting from the hip. China has enormous problems with North Korea, which it primarily solves by appeasing them and working with them because it's easier than fighting them. As long as North Koreas spends most of it's energy being an active and passionate combatant against democracy and human rights, that suits China just fine.
"That we use our military and propaganda to coerce our allies doesn't mean we automatically get the moral high ground."
Every political regime tries to play these narrative and influence games. And every political regime will gravitate towards what works for it. It's an absurdly myopic American delusion to think that America is pulling all the strings among a world of puppets. That's not serious stuff.
But what you are failing to consider is that there are regimes willing to be far more horrific than whatever failures you see in American behavior. Criticizing America's faults is good. When you end up at "shrug is North Korea worse?" then you've ended up lost.
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"machine enforced plutocratic system where early adopters and syndicates have absolute power" Also applies to, e.g. USD spent on amazon, casting votes in bipartisan elections, paying taxes, etc. It is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalist organization of wealth. It is worth assessing the rate at which it is being concentrated, which for USD is a historically unprecedented rate.
>It is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalist organization of wealth. In a functioning system it's a property that reflects the time-value of money. In cryptocurrency, there is no need for such a property. Any altruistically-designed cryptocurrency would have inflationary tokenomics.
It's easy to believe in M1 and even M2 USD, but when you look at M3 and FR policy driving continuous unending inflation, I think you'll find proof-of-stake to be Robinhood level egalitarian by comparison.
Btw you can stake less than 32 eth on plenty of services.
>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
Reasonably good censorship resistance in general is a design goal shared with pretty much all decentralized blockchains. Without that, complaints about proof-of-stake being oligarchic rule would have a lot more legitimacy.
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Generally we've described this sort of research as "review resistant", rather than being secure in some classical sense. How Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies actually work is often eagerly explained but completely unfathomable on closer inspection. Concerns raised are fixed with additional complexity repeatedly until the reviewer grows weary of attempting to piece it together. Consequently there's sufficient confl…
That's a gross misrepresentation of how it works in the real-world. Do you believe the same about cryptography? Since you can't understand it, and few really understand the full system, algorithms and functions, it must be "review resistant" rather than actually safe to use?
I wager Ethereum would be much the same if a researcher came around to say "This is actually wrong." It would be happily ignored by the authors.
>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
I think what you're missing is that this is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. To be decentralized such that governments, banks, central authorities, cannot stop them. No laws, sanctions, rules, taxes, can force the crypto system to do anything. Imho, they are inferior to real currencies at everything except for that . Now, if you want to discuss whether that makes crypto a good or bad thing, oh, I'm with you, let…
Add to that list the transaction speeds for just about any PoS cryptocurrency. A new transaction is visible to others on the network within seconds, and is fully validated within a few minutes (as I just observed moving some Cardano around last night). That first metric is on-par with your average credit/debit transaction while the second blows it out of the water (credit/debit transactions can take multiple days to actually move out of a "pending" state). The only thing other than a PoS cryptocurrency that's even theoretically faster on both points would be a payment app like PayPal or Venmo, and that's only if you're maintaining a balance in those apps (otherwise they fall back on credit/debit or bank withdrawls anyway).
There are other possible superiorities or inferiorities which are indeed a matter of opinion (for example, IMO the inability to reverse a cryptocurrency transaction makes it superior to a credit/debit charge or wire transfer or payment app, and the "downsides" are better solvable with escrow anyway; as another example, IMO the ability to send arbitrarily-large-or-small amounts of cryptocurrency makes it superior to said alternatives), but transaction speeds are factual and readily observable.
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On the other hand, North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology. I think much like TOR did for Iraq this would actually move them away from China and closer to us. EDIT (out of comment quota): I'd hope not but I'm not convinced they aren't. It sure seems to degenerate into that more often than not.
> North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology I don't think the dystopic human torture camps are a necessary part of "rejecting the neo-liberal ideology".
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Be nice to people and don't drop so many bombs on their country they'll live in poverty for decades?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea "During the campaign, conventional weapons such as explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings" No idea why they have bad infrastructure and hate the west
Where it started going seriously off the rails was in the '80s when they adopted a policy of radical self-sufficiency. Unfortunately they can't really be self-sufficient, at least at their current population levels, because the climate and geography limit the amount of arable land and limit how much can be grown on it. They get winds from Siberia bringing bitter cold and heavy snow, making it so they can usually only get one crop per year (compare to two crops per year which is possible in much of South Korea).
So they remained heavily dependent on Russia and China. When the Soviet Union broke up they lost most of their Russian aid, and that really hurt. They never really recovered from that, and their infrastructure suffered as part of the general poor economic conditions.