321–330 of 371 posts
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The value of something is simply what other people are willing to pay for it.
By far the most valuable substance in the world is oxygen, without which everyone here would be dead within moments, and yet (nearly) nobody here has ever paid a single cent for it (apologies to scuba divers).
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I have contended that the only use for cryptocurrency which provides value for people is for anonymous transactions for which cash is not an option or a poor option. The only cryptocurrency that can do this that I know of is Monero. Therefore Monero will have lasting value. Whether you can make money speculating on it is dubious, which is probably why not many people do. * Note: I am speaking regarding the markets I…
Except that holding Monero is of rather less clear value. Sure, the ability to take $100, turn it into Monero, and turn it back into almost $100 that cannot be trivially traced to the original $100 is of some value. But this value is there for people who have no particular interest in Monero-the—asset. They want Monero-the-mixer. If I put $100 into Monero and hold it, I’m betting that Monero is still worth something…
One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…
> It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten. See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute…
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What I meant was, the definition of value is different for different people, as well as yourself in different situations. The magnitude of that value will also differ, of course. You're free to define value to always be price, it's a matter of opinion and by my own logic it's a valid thing to do, but separating the two concepts makes things much clearer when market effects distort the price of something who's value d…
Yes, every item has different value to every person. > market effects distort the price of something who's value doesn't seem to have changed. This is still making the mistake that value is independent of what people are freely willing to pay for it.
If these examples are too abstract for your taste, there are many other examples. No one pays for volunteer work (by definition), but there's lots of volunteer work that, if people stopped doing it, our society would grind to a halt. One example is open source software; most of the work which goes into it is unpaid, yet our industry cannot function without it. Another is parenting; most people aren't compensated for having & raising children - indeed, it costs them huge amounts of money - but there is no economy without people performing this function.
I submit there are more things in the economy than are dreamt of in this philosophy.
One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…
While I fully agree with your point, the next time I see some collective delusion of a pyramid scheme I’ll buy in early. It doesn’t matter that there’s no logic to it, as long as enough people share the same delusion it becomes self-propagating.
One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…
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Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency. You can store bitcoin in your brain, get persecuted by your national government for criticizing their actions, travel across a border, get kidnapped, offer up a decoy wallet, get released 3 years later, wander into a town with an internet cafe, and theoretically, you could have access to your funds within hours, without the consent of or depend…
>Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency This is an absolute farce. Maybe talk to us when there are no longer reports of being able to easily scam someone out of all of their money with a non-reversable transaction just by sending them an image with a script in it.
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At the 20th Century, when we got a book from some philosopher entirely written on this style, we didn't have to wonder that. Those were simpler times.
Yes and getting that or any book was so hard or impossible for the most of the worlds population. So much privilege, but let's compare wrongly that era to AI generated content era
But in case you still don't get the joke, no the OP is not written by AI. Instead, it is a common point of view.
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For this reason, I have tended to rely more and more on recommendations from obviously real people these days, e.g., as found in comments on Reddit, or in the New York Times's Wirecutter. The challenge with this approach is that Reddit seems to be gamed more and more by industry and other PR "bots", which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff. But if the subreddit is not on a controversial topic, it's still possible…
Maybe the way to go forward would be something in the vein of a book club? Delegating such a monstrous task to one person will just bury them in the sea of information, so parallelization looks like a good compromise (meet up once a week/month and share worthwhile books you have found). Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. )
I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.)
I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting.
I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is.
I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.