After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

a lot of people who have worked terrible jobs during the pandemic didn't have an opportunity to retrain and rethink about things, they were still working, the whole things are gonna change crowd were those who had the privilege to wait things out from the safety of their computers, they could order doordash or amazon groceries and drink their home made espresso while shopping for a cute new mask to show everyone how much they cared about being safe. the people who made the mask, worked in the food supply chain, delivered your groceries and doordash food kept their 60-70 hour a week job of hopelessness, had zero opportunity to shift away from that. while people were talking about how things are different now, many americans were dealing with the same, except they were now in an extremely dangerous situation (according to the experts) but, in many cases did not receive anything other than "thanks", and maybe a dollar or two more in tips, if they didn't forget anything.

what the pandemic has taught me is that we are not some civilized, future minded society, we are a bunch of naked apes with pitchforks who like to hoard for profit and fight over which candidate sweet talks better but offers zero solutions other than creating race/freedom/whatever division you can think of... culture war. do we have a chance to make things better? yes, when we stop looking at the world through a political lens, and start looking at it from a humanity lens.

"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%. But what's going on here is that about 60% of criminal cases in Japan get suspended without going to court; prosecutors only proceed in cases where they are nearly certain of getting a conviction, so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).

(It may also be true that that 99.9% is artificially high, that substantially fewer than 99.9% of accused criminals who go to trial in Japan are actually guilty despite prosecutors' attempts to proceed only when sure of conviction. But even if say 10% of those convictions are wrongful, that's a much smaller effect than the fact that 60% of cases are abandoned without going to trial.)

"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.

(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)

"Why? They implemented loads of socialist policies and blew up their debt."

The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012. But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).

(I shall not try to adjudicate whether Japan's big increase in public debt is the result of "socialist policies".)

"The only thing holding Japan together is the government slaves."

About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".

That some people can not save up for various reasons does not imply the people who did save for hard times are to blame.

If it angers you, don't work for door dash. Odds are, the people who worked for door dash were actually happy they had a job during the pandemic.

One of the fundamental reasons this is the case is because trading requires enforcement of property ownership, whoever is doing the enforcing is de facto the government. Private keys and smart contracts allow for ownership which need not be defended, though admittedly only over things in a limited sense. Your keys mean you own your wallet, but an NFT of a bridge doesn’t mean shit.

Most crypto volumes aren’t drugs at all, but are people buying and selling other cryptos using cryptos.

It’s going to be interesting to see if web3 bears fruit but so far that has largely not happened