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It's days like these where you really wish there would be some sort of legislative body that could do something about this sort of thing.

Hey, at least we have a good example of what "voting with your wallet" actually looks like if brought to it's logical conclusion.

"boost liquidity" what a wonderful euphemism

I think a similar thing as with the ICO boom will happen: The current mechanisms of fraud (ICOs) will become regulated, so the industry will move on and create new ones (NFTs, DeFi/"yield"). This cycle will continue until the SEC stops listening to smoothtalking lobbyists fearmongering about the SEC blocking "important innovation" and decides to fully pull cryptocurrency into the banking regulatory framework. At that point, lacking the ability to do things that are illegal to do for good reasons, cryptocurrency becomes pretty irrelevant.

People say this as a gotcha but it's really not, "small government" has always just been a euphemism for austerity and anti-welfare politics. It's like "family values" or "states rights", you're not really going to get anywhere useful by taking these euphemisms at face value.

Indeed, but it's been steadily deliberately undermined as the idea that a government has no responsibility to it's citizens except to keep the line going up and trickle down economics took root. It's easy to see how pension funds play into this. They are a tool that ties up millions of people's future and savings into the stock market, providing the financial sector with a huge number of retail investors who can be made to hold the bag for financial crashes. Under this angle, it is not at all surprising that they would end up investing into incredibly risky ventures.

I personally have a lot more trust in the competency of a central bank than some random, unchangeable numbers an anonymous person pulled out of their hat in 2008. Or the gold mining cartels, for that matter. At least the central banks have some vague semblance of democratic control.

Alternatively, one could imagine a pension system where the state gives one money to ensure one can continue living, paid for by taxes, without inserting a casino in the middle. But perhaps that's a tad radical.

As far as I can tell, the ASF is just where many companies send their failed Java projects for palliative care.

> they are entirely public

Yes, you're just not clever enough to understand all of the jargon I just invented and refuse to explain, audit every line of code, audit the organization that actually controls the project, spend a month brainstorming all of the possible failure modes and get a PhD in multiple disciplines to discover if any of my claims are deceptive.

The answer even according to this framework is pretty much a blanket "yes, unless it helps you buy illegal drugs", considering that's the only thing you can really purchase with cryptocurrencies that has any value outside of the network.

Ah, that makes sense. I'm curious though, how would auditors ensure the asset is marked to reflect the risk? If one organization thinks the risk is substantually lower than another, what do they mark? Or is there generally enough arbitrage that this doesn't happen.

I'm not very well versed in how selling debt works, but the way I assume it works is the following: Say someone still owes me $1M over the next 10 years, but I think that there's now only a 50% chance of the debt being repaid. It would make sense for me to try and sell that debt for at least $500k to get a guaranteed immediate return, right? And then that person could say that they hold $1M dollars, even though it's only worth half that much if they priced the risk into it. I may be misunderstanding things though.

I have absolutely no way to substantiate this, but I feel like if you needed to be able to say that you technically had a few billion in reserves as cheaply as possible but didn't actually think you'd ever need to liquidate it, buying the riskiest debt you could might be a great way to do that.

> What are the practical implications for internet users and infrastructure maintainers?

For users: the widespread deployment of NAT has eliminated global end-to-end connectivity of the internet. That drives further centralization of the internet, as offering services requires expensive purchases of IPv4 space, big central NAT gateways and makes p2p applications difficult to impossible.

For infrastructure maintainers: the increased address space makes it possible again to allocate addresses as you wish. There's no need to architect your network around IP address scarcity. You can allocate pretty much as many networks as you want, for whatever you want, without worrying it's going to be too small.

Making such a requirement sounds like a very speedy way to find yourself suddenly very restricted by US sanctions and notice a mysterious uptick in discussions about the democratic illegitimacy of your last election.

Of course the World Bank and IMF will be happy to help you out of you drop them again though.

That is to say, very few countries actually have a choice on agreeing to "free trade" policies, local laws aren't really enough to resist that.

I'm personally happy to mess around with docker for an hour once if it lets me save 50%+ on running it.

It's true that Heroku has a better experience, but that doesn't matter if the NRE for making it work on a cheaper platform is recouped after barely a month. I think the fact that these services are able to be successful despite having a worse experience shows how uncompetitive Heroku's pricing is.

It was also a great disaster for the thriving and competitive asbestos industry. The number of new applications for it have dwindled ever since.

Child Labor Laws and the Lost Generation of Innovative Coal Mines

I feel like people are less getting worked up over Hare itself, and more what it represents. It is very much a reactionary language, defined less by any grand new ideas or visions and more by rejection of things that many people see as valuable progress over the last few decades. It doesn't help that it is being pushed by an already highly notable and controversial figure. The language just happens to be a convenient vehicle for arguing about these engineering (and personal) values.

I feel like not running a datacenter on backup diesel generators is going to have a slightly bigger impact than cutting back a few VMs

This list is actually quite interesting for a few reasons.

One is that a large fraction of these security issues are not real, potentially exploitable vulnerabilities, but merely the fact that it is possible to abuse an API to subvert Rust's safety guarantees. These are things would, by the standards of other programming languages, not be worth even reporting and be considered user error.

The other is that a surprisingly large fraction of these are not from regular unsafe Rust code, but from misunderstanding the guarantees a C library makes when creating bindings for it. This is to be expected, as fully understanding those as a library is pretty difficult.

A total of one memory safety issue reported for an entire ecosystem this year so far also seems pretty good.

All in all, I think these are both pretty promising signs that the safety guarantees Rust provides working as intended.

Sorry that was unclear. I mean that by claiming that PoS is ready and just around the corner, one can have the cake and eat it too by claiming that the waste issues will be solved soon, without actually having to make the risky political decision to do so. Just delay it every half year to allay the concerns of people that are considering buying in, and hope nobody cares anymore by the time the bubble pops.

Or perhaps the bust is a great time to generate some credulous positive news coverage.

> The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

That's not completely true. The amount of resources wasted per hour are proportional to the value of the coin. Lacking any genuine uses for for cryptocurrencies, people determine coin value by things like transaction volume, market capitalization, influencer endorsements and active wallets instead. Thus every additional user, transaction and especially the common million-dollar wash trades designed to pump their respective projects, contribute significantly to the waste that is generated.

At this point I can't help but feel like the main deliverable of "ETH going PoS" is being able to dismiss claims about the obvious wastefulness of the system, not the actual transition.

As everything in this measure, the point is to make the whole procedure as useless for independent repair shops as possible. Independent repair shops desperately want these tools and that's exactly why Apple isn't giving them to you.

You need to know the serial number of the phone before ordering the components. That means repairs will for most people take two to three visits to the repair center over a week, whereas apple can do it in one visit.

They know this makes independent repair uncompetitive, which is why they do it.

> But this program is rather clearly not aimed at repair shops but seems much more for the retail DIY crowd.

Yes, which is the point. They are offering a compromise for a tiny market (self-repair) in hopes of this distracting from and preventing laws that would benefit the market that actually matters (independent repair).

It's like throwing your underpaid demoralized employees a pizza party so they don't quit, nothing but a damage control gesture that deliberarely doesn't actually help.

I totally agree with you, however when society at large is built on the back of such a belief, you can't just pull it out from under everyone overnight without major collateral damage.

Bailing them out does not mean bailing them out with zero consequences. Regulators have a lot of levers to pull there and should have used that. Splitting them up, taking them over outright, strengthening postal banking, loan forgiveness, banning instruments, they could have easily used the chance to negotiate the banks into making painful compromises that would have greatly benefited society. But they didn't and just gave them free money instead.