756 karma · joined August 10, 2017
Disclaimer: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.
The most totalitarian states were the most anti-capitalist.
Capitalism means tolerating the emergence of independent centers of economic power, which is a threat to totalitarian control. That is why the PRC has been arresting wealthy tech founder-CEOs in China.
>>it's especially unhelpful when "tough on crime" policies have been shown repeated not to fix homelessness either.
Where has it has been shown? Singapore and Tokyo are extremely tough on crime, as any sanely governed society is, and probably spend much less on a per capita basis than Vancouver on social services. Certainly no more. These cities have very little visible homelessness and open drug use, and are extremely safe in comparison, especially with regard to street disorder, property crime, etc.
Limiting the comparison to Canada and the US: Republican-run cities have far less visible homelessness, open drug use, and street disorder than cities run by Democrats, or in Canada, the NDP/Liberals. The contrast is even more stark when you compare places in North America with very left-wing attitudes toward drug use, homelessness and petty crime, like the West Coast, to regions of North America with more traditional attitudes, like Texas or Florida.
Left wing policies in general are wholly ineffective, as evidenced by the fact that there is a huge migration of people from New York stare and California, to Florida and Texas:
https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map
In Canada, BC has the most natural advantages of any region of Canada, and managed to have negative inter-provincial migration during the 1990s when governed by the public-sector-unions/NDP.
Their ideas have been tested, and have utterly failed in the West Coast, yet the political left's base of support hasn't wavered. This to me shows the power of narratives (e.g. "Don't Say Gay"), where they can totally distort reality for the masses.
Despite the narratives about the folly of Republicans/"right-wing" policies, it is exactly those policies that the West Coast needs.
It's important to note that the aforementioned are all extremely mainstream, with leading academic and corporate institutions adopting and promoting them.
https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/is-detransition-the-...
>>The way this question is written makes it very clear that they were primarily expecting to get answers related to “pressure” and what are sometimes called “external factors.” Of the options given, only one option is clearly an internal factor (“I realized that gender transition was not for me”).
>>However, the primary reason that this survey cannot be used to draw conclusions about the number of people detransitioning and their motives is because the 2015 US Transgender Survey was distributed amongst the trans community. It didn’t seek responses from people who detransitioned and never reidentified as transgender.
What exactly does he not understand, that his betters do?
Moreover, the article cites the crime-mitigation effects of transparency, which requires invading more than just privacy of income.
There is no evidence that laws instituted ostensibly to stop money laundering, like the warrantless financial mass-surveillance mandates of AML regulations, have done anything to reduce crime:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
All these laws do is concentrate power in the hands of the regulated financial sector, which acts as the deputized agent of the state's AML apparatus, along with financial surveillance agencies, who together are privy to the enormous amounts of private financial information gathered via AML mass-surveillance.
>>it’s been estimated that up to half of bitcoin transactions could support illegal activities4.
The methodology for this study is absolutely absurd:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6H8ue6X0AorZB5?format=jpg&name=...
"For example, we measure the extent to which individual take actions to conceal their identity and trading records, which predicts involvement in criminal activity"
Taking actions to protect one's privacy is NOT an indication of criminality.
Moreover, this study collected data in 2017 and was published in 2019. I'm a bit puzzled why the authors of this article didn't look at the much more recent Chainanalysis study, which estimates that 0.64% of cryptocurrency transactions are associated with illegal activity:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/cryptocurrency-crime-2021...
>>CBDCs have the opposite problem. They could allow central banks and governments to track everyone’s transactions — a digital panopticon. However, if implications for privacy and rights were addressed, such transparency might deter and expose crime, as well as increasing tax revenues and diminishing black-market trade.
This is completely absurd. "Transparency" is the opposite of "privacy". You cannot have transparency in private financial interactions, without tautologically invading privacy.
I think you're confusing the freedom of the majority to repress the rights of the minority, with "contract freedom", i.e. the right to free assocation.
There is nothing of note that unions could do, that isn't enabled by contract-liberty-violating labor regulations and wouldn't break the law. Picketing Amazon's premises, and beating up replacement workers, as the illegal strikes of the past did, was justifiably punished by the state before the labor regulation era, and for that reason, unions had very little power.
All the power they acquired came from laws that abridged the freedom to contract.
>>The economic power of the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker's Society came from the ability to quit - collectively.
Industry would gladly give unions the power to collectively quit, if it meant they too would have their contract liberty restored, so they could choose to not employ unionized workers, or to replace them without government punishing them.
>>I'll counter when a decidedly not benign - the Ludlow massacre, where companies worked with the government to attack striking coal workers, including firing MACHINE GUNS at them and their families.
This leaves out a seminally important precursor to the attack on the striker's camp:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre#Strike
>>When leasing the sites, the union had selected locations near the mouths of canyons that led to the coal camps in order to block any strikebreakers' traffic.[17] The company hired the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency to protect the new workers and harass the strikers.
"block any strikebreakers' traffic" means viciously attack and sometimes murder strikebreakers, who were there to replace them.
The strikers were a violent force, engaging in aggression. The only basis for their actions is a victimhood narrative that argues the employer and replacement workers do not have a right to their contract liberty when workers strike. If you accept this illiberal premise, then of course any violence that strikers engage in is justified, and any response is a "massacre".
I am not against government. The US had a government, with police, firefighters, an army and roads, in 1890, and no labor regulations that violated the freedom to contract, because during the Lochner era, the Supreme Court consistently struck down such laws as violating the Constitution's guarantee of substantive due process.
That you equate the provision of government services that are pure public goods, with restrictions that prevent people from exercising their contract freedom, shows you fundamentally don't understand the objection to these types of laws, or what "contract liberty" even means. I imagine you see "contract liberty" as synonymous with "anarchy".
Government mandating tech companies to censor information is supported by a far higher percentage of Democrat voters:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/18/glenn_gre...
And the problem of identity being linked to payments, and the risks this can engender, is not a solved problem in traditional finance.
With government mandates against them, Amazon is fighting with both hands tied behind its back, and it's only a matter of time before social activists will succeed in putting the company's US based sites under the control of unions, as we saw happen to the Big Three automakers.
In comparison to what Amazon is up against, which is blatant violations of its contract liberty by the state and its apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons that compel compliance with state injunctions), these tactics by Amazon are extremely benign.
I suspect cryptocurrency will be a store of value far further into the future than gold. Gold becomes plentiful once extracting resources from asteroids becomes economically viable.
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
And there are highly qualified experts in the field who view GoF research as the most likely source of COVID-19, so on what basis are you so confident that it doesn't pose a major risk?
"COVID-19: Schools for more than 168 million children globally have been completely closed for almost a full year, says UNICEF"
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/schools-more-168-milli...
"30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns"
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
"We find that the pandemic led to 97 million more people being in poverty in 2020." - World Bank
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19 years, the rate of body mass index (BMI) increase approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a prepandemic period. Persons with prepandemic overweight or obesity and younger school-aged children experienced the largest increases."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
"Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds"
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031
And the civil liberties of literally billions of people were curtailed. Just India and China, which both imposed severe lockdowns, collectively have a population of 2.8 billion.
In Canada, thousands of people were locked in their room in their last year of their life:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...
Yes, it is for the fringes. One day Alibaba could find itself on the fringes, as collateral damage in some geopolitical dispute that locks it out of the centralized global financial system, as a result of which country it is based in.
I have no idea if this concern motivated Alibaba's reliance on crypto though.
It is far easier to donate from your browser, using your MetaMask wallet, than by visiting your bank branch to effect an international wire transfer. It can potentially also be safer, in letting you not have your identity recorded anywhere in association with a donation to a party to a conflict.
People cannot be made to become perfectly incorruptible. Look at what happened in Canada, with the federal government envoking emergency powers to shut down bank accounts without due process. Look at the "haircuts" during financial crises, where states have seized citizens' funds held in bank accounts, to bail out troubled banks.
Look at Hong Kong after the protests, where some of those involved in the protests were prevented from opening bank accounts.
https://qz.com/2147694/ukraine-is-selling-nfts-like-war-bond...
Beyond the state's fundraising efforts, many in Ukraine were only able to take their wealth with them when they fled the country because they had it in the form of crypto.
>>* Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.
And encrypted chat applications give criminals and scammers the ability to coordinate their scams anonymously.
Centralization via mass-surveillance (Total Information Awareness) is not a solution to social problems. It's putting all of society's eggs in one basket, and hoping the basket doesn't fall into corruption.
>>* Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people
And according to this pro-centralization philosophy, a million people dying in Iraq due to sanctions is "worth it".
So are all the people who "starve" due to this philosophy's AML mass-surveillance laws:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-...
That's entirely false. The study provided the framework, which is a map and graph showing the countries of Europe and both their population weighted density, and their COVID mortality rates, respectively:
https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/popul...
https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/swede...
It's plainly a statistical outlier.
>>The case for its inclusion is the fact that it's a country in the region, and we're comparing countries in the region.
There's no accompanying analysis to support grouping all countries of a region together for a comparison.
You need a good reason to include it, given you're using it a reference point to criticize a partricular country's response.
Yet many school districts shut down in person schooling altogether. The notion that they'd be willing to acquiesce to this very extreme demand from teachers unions, but not much milder demands like those you mentioned, is hard to believe.
>>I mean, we're talking about an entire state here.
You can find an outlier state for any given statistic, so it is in fact an anecdote.
>>It's more than an anecdote is an ever-growing list of obituaries.
It's an anecdote.
>>The shortages are not an anecdote, it's a systemic failure of which we can identify the cause. And the solution isn't "Let's just get back to school"
There is no analysis done to see how much of that could be attributed to in-person schooling leading to COVID deaths among teachers, and the comparing the social/human cost of that to the cost of children missing out on in-person schooling for a year, because the teachers unions are interested only in advocating for their employees, not in genuinely searching out to find the best policy for the public interest.
They have already made their mind up on what the correct conclusion is, and they are just searching for arguments that could plausibly support it.
>>Even if that were true, if a teacher gets covid outside of school and can't come in to work, who is going to teach the class that day? Please just answer that question, keeping in mind there is a substitute and teacher shortage due to covid.
I don't understand why all in-person schooling has to be shut down because some teachers cannot attend class. There are still many teachers available that can do in-person schooling. Why not at least have them do in-person instruction?
>>The link you provided does not say that 30-40% of minorities students are not learning due lockdowns. That may be one aspect of it, but it also goes on to note that black and Hispanics
It says specifically that they were not learning via remote instruction. Here's a graph that lays it out:
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...
So you're mischaracterizing what the linked page is asserting. It is absolutely claiming that remote education led to massive education losses for a significant fraction of minority students.
This is absolutely for the school shutdown position, which makes it unsurprising that you're not willing to accept the conclusions of that analysis, and are even mischaracterizing what they are.
The rest of your arguments are just rehashing points I've already rebutted, or more of the case of you demanding definitive proof from every conceivable indication of damage from lockdowns, while accepting every claim of harm from the absence of a lockdown.
>>I don't know what you're trying to say here. You're just minimizing people's stated reasons of grievance.
I'm not even commenting on their stated reasons, which are orthogonal to my point about what triggered the riots. I'm pointing out the fact that the riots were triggered by the George Floyd video. That's not a disputable fact.
But any fact that shines poorly on the lockdown, you feel compelled to dispute. This is the typical case when debating unionized teachers who argued, under the lockdown philosophy, that schools should be shut down for a year or more, in favor of the disastrous remote learning that led to so much educational loss for children.
I find that extremely hard to believe, as pressure from teachers unions successfully kept schools closed for over a year in many jurisdictions. The political cost to political leaders, and welfare costs to society, of simply accepting some demand for more safety measures in schools would have been far lower than keeping schools closed altogether, yet the latter is what happened.
>>I had specific people in mind when I wrote that sentence.
What do you mean? You made an allegation of a causative link, with no evidence provided beyond an anecdotal correlation.
I'm not going to evaluate your claims more closely when I see very elementary mischaracterizations of the paper in your initial comments, showing you didn't make a genuine effort to appraise it.
But there is a mainstraem consensus, and Marxism is entirely outside of it. It is quack economics. For example, Marx believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
>>Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
This is just the mainstream narrative. The real powers in society, which revolve around the state, have for 50 years, spun a narrative of an ascendant libertarianism (e.g. "neoliberalism"), when all broad-based measures of the centralization of society shows rapid transition to a more controlled and restricted market with more power in the hand of state bodies and industries tightly intertwined with them.
>>I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there):
The reason union membership rates declined is that unions bankrupted nearly every industry that was amenable to unionization. The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.
The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.
Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year, and the average government worker in California now makes over $140,000 a year:
https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
>>Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed.
The historical revisionism + ideologically-motivated naivety is in thinking that child labor could be eliminated without the economic development that free market capitalism fostered.
Child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. If you prohibited child labor in the poorest countries in the world today, you would cause an increase in malnutrition and extreme poverty, because productivity in those societies is so low that children working is often the only way every one in the family can afford to eat.
Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
Focusing on child labor is another case of you focusing on an outlier scenario where libertarianism doesn't apply as a matter of principle, as you attempt to rationalize your anti-libertarian principles.
>>Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
And you're completely ignoring/depreciating the significance of creating and expanding productive enterprises, which is what the market right to own a company as a founder and investor incentivizes and sustains. You will see dramatically less new business creation if you abolish these rights, for the sake of forcing society to use coops.
>>I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up,
I spent many many years completely discounting what libertarians online had to say. I only feigned debate with them, when in reality I dismissed them as simplistic ideologues, blindly parroting a narrative concocted by corporate-owned think tanks and media (e.g. Fox News) to trick the masses into fighting against their own interests, and never actually evaluated their arguments with an open mind.
Libertarianism is actually just a basic understanding of economics, devoid of ideological narratives alleging exploitation in certain types of voluntary interaction, that are advanced to rationalize restrictions and special privileges imposed and bestowed by the state, respectively, to allegedly combat these invisible chains of oppression.
>>because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth.
Arguing that market rights cease to apply in extreme circumstances for which market rights were not designed is entirely reasonable, and for you to critique capitalism, and argue for the social democratic anti-libertarian order, which in most countries of the world, gives the state control over at least 40 percent of the productive output via taxation and regulatory gatekeeping, based solely on appeals to these fantastical outlier scenarios, shows bad faith debating.