CryptoPunk

The Republicans are not the party of liberty. Among senators, only Rand Paul, and Democrat Ron Wyden, voted against FOSTA for example:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

National security and suspicion of foreign nations is also why the restrictions Republicans support often relate to how people interact with non-Americans. This can be seen in Republican support for sanctions and tariffs.

But I was commenting about raw milk and how the Democrats' philosophy on personal rights to consume commercial products relates to it.

>>the necessary closures

Are you suggesting that the state needed to force private establishments to close, and that - putting aside the human rights implications of this abridgement of private-property/free-association rights - we can definitively say the net effect of these closures was positive?

I believe you are incorrect about the defections as well. One source supporting this notion is Adrian Goldsworthy's "The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265–146 BC", which, by way of Wikipedia, claims:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Punic_War#Hannibal_cros...

However, the majority of Rome's allies remained loyal, including many in southern Italy.

The fractious nature of Senate politics was a consequence of a culture and set of institutions that encouraged and allowed domestic conflicts to be settled within the confines of established political processes, so that the Senate as an institution, while often beset by bitter internal political strife, did not face challenges from external centers of power within Roman society. The power and resiliency that this gave the Senate allowed it to maintain control even when Rome was under extreme stress, like it was in its depopulated state during the Second Punic War when it managed to raise two dozen legions.

>>The only groups that remained loyal to Rome during the second Punic war were the northern Latin cities.

You're correct that there was a lot of defection, but most cities in the Italian peninsula remained loyal to Rome.

The Roman Republic, as a political entity, was able to muster enormous resources relative to its size, and in the midst of calamitious circumstances too. The best example is the Republic raising legion after legion with which to challenge Carthage, and maintaining the loyalty of all of the cities allied to it, after Hannibal's army had defeated it in a string of battles, and finally, killed a significant fraction of its male population at the battle of Cannae.

I assume it was the construction of the Roman government, with its elected leaders, and the political culture of the Roman polity, that viewed the people as the source of all power (as exemplified by SPQR), that inspired this cohesion and loyalty, and it was these qualities that were the primary and ultimate source of its power.

Roman generals in later centuries frequently seized power to become emperors, and this in turn undermined the basis of Roman power, which was a large subsection of the population and fraction of power centers being integrated into the political establishment through elected positions, and consequently having a stake in the success of the state. So the suspicion the elected leaders had towards generals may have been well-founded, and been the reason the elected government maintained power for as long as it did.

People don't listen to economists, and it's not "free markets" that are being tried. You're raging against a system where market rights have been increasingly encroached upon over the last century, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both.

Two major examples:

1. The rapid rise of social democracy:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of government workers:

https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...

To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it.

2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers in 2016:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...

https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/scandinavian-unexce...

Nima Sanandaji's argument is that Scandinavian success predated the emergence of an extensive welfare state, and that the region's trajectory worsened after its emergence, causing its lead over the rest of the world in a number of socioeconomic metrics to shrink.

When people are free to cross state lines, and when the poor are being pushed out of blue states into red states:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/democrats-most-alarming-probl...

that conclusion absolutely cannot be made based just on a simple correlation.

The paper closes with:

>>Although state governments have the right to set their own path and policies, the public should decide whether life expectancy should be part of the experiment.

Even assuming the causative associations claimed exist, this is a case of optimizing for a single metric, and ignoring all others. What if higher life expectancy is being attained at the expense of other, important metrics? An example of one such metric is fertility, with red states having higher fertility rates than blue states:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/republicans-more-kids-democr...

But the author, without even considering or contending with these points, is already clamoring to end state sovereignty and homogenize policy across the US.

If WWIII happens, there will be plenty of places people will survive. But in dramatically reduced numbers as, firstly, the people living in major population centers would have been killed en masse, and secondly, as a consequence of the first, global supply chains break down and food and other necessities become extremely scarce.

Technology would see massive regression and an extended dark ages as well, as much of the production base would be destroyed, and the people who predominantly live in large population centers and sustain it would be killed.

I only go into these extremely grim details because I'm seeing too many cavaliar attitudes on social media, and even from some officials and former officials (e.g. former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, saying it's "a question of time" until Russia does something to force a NATO response) about a possible military confrontation between the West and Russia.

However this seemingly happy story has a few important downsides. First, to a large extent these technologies do not create new markets as much as they disrupt or displace old ones, which is one reason why productivity gains are so meager.

No. They displace old industries by introducing technologies and processes that made them more productive. People use them because they provide a higher quality service at a lower price.

And all three of the examples he provided: Amazon, Google and Facebook, have been enormously innovative, and created entirely new markets. I could write a long essay on the markets that had their emergence faciliated by any one of the three companies listed.

What's worrying is that such an obviously misinformed article could be held in such high esteem by so many on HN.

Without bias means not taking the side of the unionized Vox Media writers over the hundreds of freelancers that Vox Media let go of to comply with the anti-gig-economy law that those unionized journalists advocated for in their articles.

Yes. Legitimizing unionization directly bolsters their market position. Anti-gig-economy laws can even cause their employer to totally cease reliance on freelancers, as seen in the example I provided with Vox Media.

This conflict of interests needs to at the very least be disclosed when they write about unionization and labor mandates.

>>And what a joke to bring up California, where Uber and all of these shitty companies lobbied to pass an unconstitutional law to their benefit.

You didn't even address my point. You just went off on a tangent, while falsely implying that it invalidates the point I made.

This attitude of extreme self-righteous bias and lack of regard for principles of professional and political integrity that you're exhibiting is the reason things have degraded to this point. Any one not in your ideological bubble that sees how prevalent your attitude has become amongst your political tribe is going to become polarized in opposition to it.

Making excuses for this kind of bias, which is motivated by a major undisclosed financial conflict of interest, and which completely undermines journalistic integrity, is the irresponsible attitude that has allowed the culture of professionalism and ethics to degrade to this point.

One can very reasonably critique Mearsheimer's analyses, but not on the basis of such a simplistic "left vs right" model of the world.

Describing mandatory benefits, as "rights", is an entirely ideological position, that good journalism would not pass off as fact.

Journalists using their platform to advance an ideological framework that advances their own narrow interests is a major cultural threat and deserves more attention.

Here is one example of the perverse incentives in effect:

Vox writers, who eventually unionized, spent years publishing articles arguing for laws limiting the gig economy, like this one:

"The gig economy has grown big, fast — and that’s a problem for workers" [1]

Three years after the above article was published, its agenda succeeded, and a new anti-gig-economy law, that was heavily supported by major unions, was passed in California. That law in turn forced Vox to let go of hundreds of gig economy freelancers, thus reducing competition to the full-time journalists who had, in articles like the above, used their media platform to lobby for the law:

"Vox Media to cut hundreds of freelance jobs ahead of changes in California gig economy laws" [2]

Circling back to my original point: the media being fully unionized means that it is extremely biased in its coverage of these kinds of stories.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/10/26/13349498/gig-economy-profits-...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/16/vox-media-to-cut-hundreds-of...

So the reasonable characterization of Taler's design is that it is backdoored, or as per your euphemization, "allows auditability" by privileged state authorities. Taler cannot remove that feature and still possess its defining qualities.

>>That has nothing to do with whether or not it's a "backdoor",

It has to do with the point you made, which is that Taler could remove that feature. It cannot, and I explained why.

>>I think you're being disingenuous in implying that a non-backdoored version of Bitcoin wouldn't allow double-spending.

Bitcoin is not backdoored. You're completely misdefining the term 'backdoor' now. This is a very bad faith argument from you.

>>Theoretically Monero might fit the bill, but given that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum have adopted Monero's transaction model, it's pretty obvious that the maintainers/community don't view plugging that hole as a priority.

1. Not making plugging that hold a priority is absolutely not the same as providing state authorities with a backdoor as part of the design goals.

2. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin's LN has all transaction onion routed now. Ethereum has no need to take Monero's road to achieve privacy, as its Turing Complete program execution environment enables private transaction programs like AZTEC Network to run on top of it.

>>What you're arguing to me is that Bitcoin is more private because it exposes my information to literally everyone, and not to a limited subset of people.

I didn't say Bitcoin was more private. I said Bitcoin, Ethereum and other permissionless blockchains weren't definitionally backdoored.

We hold elections to put every one on an equal playing field, where each person has the same amount of say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

and Ukraine has been forming deep military ties to the NATO states since then.

This move to alignment with the West is popularly supported in Ukraine mind you, but the reaction it would elicit has been anticipated and warned about for years.

Canada locked down nursing homes completely yet 98.5% of COVID deaths were in nursing homes.

After a year, a hundred and fifty thousand nursing home patients were still confined in their room in the province of Ontario:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...

What has been done to so many people, in the name of safety, during this pandemic, is obscene, and an affront to the principles of liberal democracy. This episode in our history demonstrates the utter inhumanity and banal brutality of anti-libertarian ideology.

>>did you take care of her and talked to her everyday, or maybe taken her home? Otherwise at 95 she could end up like this with and without lockdowns.

When you advocate for a forceful intervention, it's your responsibility to anticipate how the target of your intervention may fall short in adjusting to it.

Your argument is reminiscent of neocons blaming the post-invasion chaos in Iraq on the people of Iraq not forming a civil society and functional democracy quickly enough.

>>I find it funny that you bring numbers into this (at her age she had only 3.4 years to live but only 11% chance if dying of COVID). You cannot mix emotional and cold like that in the same post...

You can absolutely mix emotions in with numbers. In fact, you should. Emotional reactions should be informed by facts.

The projections on the completion date of the switch to PoS is now far less speculative / more reliable.

No offence.

A bunch of automated nodes, strewn across the globe, and connected via the internet, maintain the network, with the network being able to seamlessly/autonomously manage nodes joining/leaving.

There are no legal contracts that need to be drawn up, filled out and signed for someone to start submitting PoW, or validating and propagating transactions, to the network. There is no HR department. No payroll. Just machines, and a deterministic compensation mechanism, managed by a fault tolerant network of machines.

I still prefer Ethereum's variation of Proof of Stake over Proof of Work, but it's by no means clear to me that Proof of Work based blockchains are less resource-efficient than traditional financial systems, and I would wager a comprehensive analysis would show in fact that they have the potential to be vastly more efficient, if they're allowed to scale up their transaction throughput to amortize their energy consumption across more numerous transactions.