If somebody is vulnerable, I'd say it seems like a very bad thing to make them work by threatening them with homelessness and poverty, enforced by men with guns.
So no, I don't think it is.
1,611 karma · joined July 27, 2015
So no, I don't think it is.
Do you know that's the case, or do you just mean "that's what they said!" It's in their interest to say they just can't afford to treat their workers better- that they'll be forced to shut down- regardless of whether or not they can afford to.
Context and thinking about things- they're important! You really don't need to rely on this stuff to criticize Hillary Clinton, of all people, for being out of touch. Honestly, it almost comes off as downright malicious sometimes.
I sort of feel like this is just a nitpick, since it was one big rant, but re: the cell network thing- we already have a mechanism where you can use data (and be billed for usage) on networks you don't subscribe to: roaming. The problem is the network operators don't really have much reason to allow other phones to roam on their network for cheap- they're selling data plans, and competing against others selling data plans. If a Network A customer can roam on Network B towers for not much more than the cost of data on Network A, Network B can't say "hey, customer, come switch to us, we have better coverage". So roaming costs are rather nasty.
This doesn't have to be the case, of course! They could certainly provide roaming at cost instead, so the user pays one flat price, almost like mutual peering in internet exchanges. The point is, even if there was a zero-fee, zero-latency micropayments system, this wouldn't really affect the dynamics of the market for mobile data- it's neither necessary or sufficient for the ideal world where a cell tower is a dumb RF-to-packets gateway that any device can use for a reasonable per-kilobyte fee.
But again, that's just one paragraph. I really appreciate the insight into some of the problems you had to deal with. And I can definitely see how - even regardless of the merits of a token itself! - the disruption it brings could cut out a lot of middle-men who are there just because they've sort of always been there. I just hope the practices that come with switching to a token don't have even worse downsides.
I.e. "Hooray! Now my code can control the flow of money, authoritatively, and nobody can override it!.... Oh, shit. My code controls the flow of money, authoritatively, and nobody can override it..."
Reminded of those AWS billing horror stories- when you can do expensive things with just a few lines of code, you can do expensive things with just a few lines of code.
They say up to 2 trillion could be getting laundered annually- at that point, Bitcoin's entire 2019 transaction volume could be money laundering, and it would be no less true that "criminals prefer fiat over cryptocurrency for money laundering." Obviously, this is absurd- the point is the article doesn't tell you what you actually want to know (how prevalent is money laundering in cryptocurrencies compared to legitimate transactions in same?)
I sort of felt like there was a missing step here- your arguments are supporting the statement "the government SHOULD NOT have the power to seize all your assets and savings", which doesn't necessarily imply "and therefore, cryptocurrency is good"- but then I looked at the parent posts and remembered I asked (approximately) for an answer to the former. So, yeah, you gave a good answer to the question you replied to, my bad.
Well, hmm, I guess I still do sort of object to this paragraph-
"If you believe the government cannot be tyrannical, aren't bothered by high taxes or inflation, aren't concerned by waste or corruption, then I could understand why you don't see the value of a currency outside of the jurisdiction of your government."
I actually do think you can believe/be bothered by/object to all of those things, except possibly inflation, and still not see the value in a currency outside the jurisdiction of your government- currencies don't really have jurisdictions, banks and financial systems do. People and assets can be in jurisdictions, though- so let me just steel-man you a bit here, if you don't mind:
If you believe the government cannot be tyrannical, aren't bothered by high taxes or inflation, aren't concerned by waste or corruption, then I could understand why you don't see the value of a currency that is harder for the government to track at scale, and more resource-intensive to seize.
I think that's even more reasonable, but let me know if I'm misrepresenting your argument at all.
And thanks again!
At least thinking about it myself, it seems like the conversation with an investigator might go something like this-
"Where did you get this money"
"I made this art, and then bought it from myself."
"Why?"
"No comment."
"...okay, where'd you get the money to buy it from yourself?"
...and now you're in the exact place you were before you tried the art thing, except you now look extra suspicious. There may, however, be some emotional benefit from letting your creative juices flow and expressing yourself, so I guess it's not all bad.
Or did I misunderstand what you were asking? Sorry- getting a bit late here.
There was a reason Poloniex pulled out of the US last year, right? What was that reason?
And remember- if your paycheck depends on this technology- or, particularly, if you hold lots of cryptocurrency- it's easy to be willfully naive about its potential.
Also- are there defenses against physical seizure/confiscation under duress of e.g. the bit-coins used for Ethereum, built into the protocol? If not, how can it be free from government interference? Unless you're paying entirely for digital goods which can be delivered anonymously, wouldn't you still have to interact with the physical world at some point? Is the idea just that it makes it harder for the government to stop money laundering and so they'll hopefully give up?
I mean, look at your examples, Uber and AirBNB. They moved fast and made lots of money for themselves... And, what, changed the world? Eh, not really. As they matured, governments caught up with them, and now they're collaborating more and more. Uber and AirBNB aren't subversive anymore- they've done their disruption, had their fun, made their money, and now they're just another app. And looking at the bitcoin space, I see similar movements- miners are big conglomerates now, major exchanges roll out more and more invasive KYC protocols, the IRS releases guidelines describing how to declare these on your taxes...
You think AML enforcement won't be coming? "Hey, where'd you get that Ferarri?" "Uhh, well, somebody must have just accidentally sent the money to my Monero address, and it's untraceable so I can't send it back, so..."- you're not going to have a great time fighting that! Sorry if you can't handle the facts- but if you actually want to fight a government (whether or not that's a good thing for society) you should really think about what you're dealing with! In terms of enforcement, even a perfect privacy coin doesn't seem much harder for a government to handle than cash or precious metals.
The big exceptions are those working in areas where their local governments turn a blind eye- e.g. ransomware gangs. So, if you don't have to fear the government asking questions, but the people paying you might (or if you want the people paying you to not be able to find you), there could be a reasonable use case.
When you don't have the constraint of making good decisions, or popular decisions, you can make decisions very efficiently!
1. No set of coordinated attackers with significant (state-level) resources- think, say, Manhattan Project- exists. If this is the case, the network is not a serious threat to existing power structures. And, at that point, why not just use a system with a diverse set of trusted coordinators?
2. The total resources used on PoW are less than any such set of attackers can collectively use. In this case, the network is insecure.
3. The total resources used on PoW are more than any such set of attackers can use. In this case, the network may be secure, but the resource usage is also incredibly high- again, we're talking about trillions of dollars a year- what a set of coordinating states and big banks could plausibly spend to stop something that actually threatened them. And it's worse than that, actually- the network must spend that much all the time, but the attackers only need to spend that much when they want to attack.
And this isn't even considering that an attacker may be able to appropriate, or even nationalize, large mining farms.
So any PoW network, as far as I can tell, must either be no more than a relatively minor annoyance to world governments and those in power, be insecure, or consume resources on an almost unimaginable level- and have all the users of the network pay for those resources.
That clean, unused, overprovisioned hydro power? Yeah, it's also cheap. That means, to maintain a given security level, you need to use more of it- an attacker has access to the same cheap power legitimate users do, and may well be able to shut legitimate users out!
Please let me know if I'm wrong, but the choice seems to be "boring, insecure, crime-against-humanity- pick one."
That doesn't seem to be the case here- Amazon's (and thus Bezos's) dip in early 2020 is practically invisible compared to its growth since then March, from what I see on https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN?p=AMZN
So...
Imagine you own a modest $300,000 house. A city inspector comes by and finds that your property is located on an old toxic waste spill- its value drops to $225,000. A week later, the city finds that they've made an error, and there is no toxic waste- and, in fact, that in doing the testing, they discovered deposits of incredibly valuable minerals on your property, so now your house is worth $450,000. A month after that, you get a tax bill in your mailbox for $45,000, 30% of your $150,000 asset gain. (These numbers are based (rounded) on the actual data.)
For personal projects, it's not often the case that you need to get BOM cost as low as possible and disregard other factors (like debuggability, or having enough DSP available to run the FFT for tuning calibration (though I suspect they'd be better off with autocorrelation...), or room for future expansion (adding multiple channels, adding a sequencer, adding control over the filter, implementing envelopes, running the Pi's audio output through the filter too...)
Plus, they might have had the Pi before, and still have it afterwards. That's the nice thing about general-purpose computers- you can put a whole bunch of different software on them, and then switching between uses just involves moving the board itself and plugging cables in.
Or else what? You don't seem to actually be concerned about anything happening to you for saying this, it sounds like you're just unhappy people don't agree with you. Now, that's only human- but come on, my good dude, chill out.
Doesn't seem like you're using a throwaway for this. Why aren't you concerned for your safety?
Forever? Is there no bandwidth so great that most users would be happy with it? Can new uses for extra bandwidth always be found, and do at least some of those uses always significantly improve the user experience?
> Remember this the next time you try to do a video call / watch an HD video / etc. If we had stayed in 3G, you would not be able to do any of these
I wouldn't? News to me! I just disabled 4G on my phone, which fell back to HSPA+ with a fast.com result of about 7mbps. I then successfully tested a Zoom test meeting with video (worked fine) and watched a YouTube video at 1080p (buffered for three seconds at the start, noticeably longer than usual, but then played fine).
So what's going on there?
Sure- in China. I'm not in China. Censorship might be a problem, but outside of that, I'd much rather have the Chinese government (and even Chinese local police!) have my metadata, and even data, than give the US national security apparatus the same access.
Corporate IP is another exception to this- it's pretty clearly better that the US, rather than China, have access to my work data.
But for, say, a Snowden-esque whistleblower in the US- can you really say they'd be better off with, say, DHS having access to all their data instead of the Chinese government? Obviously ideally nobody would, but for them, a system whose failure mode is "China can associate your IP and email address" is, I believe, dramatically better than "DHS/NSA can associate your IP and email address".
Of course- there can be no well-considered arguments for things like prison abolition. No, even considering the idea of such a thing means you're too naive. When people break the rules, they need to have consequences- and, of course, those consequences must be "being locked in a cell". Nothing else is possible. Don't show me the data- don't show me the recidivism rates- don't show me the thinking. That's all just crazy. Grow up. Nothing can ever meaningfully change. We must only fine-tune our existing system- the structure, the heart of it all, is unquestionable, absolute, no less so that the divine right of kings. Can't you see that? After all of human history, we've finally figured things out. Don't question it. Moloch is powerful hungry, after all. We need to do what we've always done. Everybody agrees on that. Better things are childish fantasies. Don't dare question the hegemony, kid. Be realistic, we say, closing our eyes, developing new adaptive noise cancellation to blot out the sounds of the child in the basement, God have mercy we need to be realis
But maybe in a few years we'll, say, legalize weed. Would definitely keep a lot of non-violent people out of jail, and that's definitely something. Maybe by 2050 we'll have cut inmate labor by 10%. I think that's a fair compromise.