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"The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process."

You can always start your search on matters like this on Wikipedia.

Anyway, the reason they wrote that paper is probably because they are talking about extreme hypotheticals themselves. Notice how their comparison is that it's twice as likely as a 2km asteroid impact, which are once in every few million year events. So we're still dealing with something extremely unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.

No, Tesla is still very overpriced for a car company based on hype.

Yes, the stock/bond markets resemble ponzi schemes particularly for certain securities (cough Uber cough), but the existence of other things being sorta ponzi schemes doesn't remove or forgive all the evidence of deep-seeded ponzi schemes throughout the crypto ecosystem.

Lithium-ion is a great comparison to because we should, even though there has been adoption of Li batteries, still be willing to say that massive scale lithium strip mining might be worse than having electric cars and it might be worth regulating away. Even if crypto was highly used, doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate it, particularly if it's externalities are worse than the alternatives (and they are).

Even if crypto did reach 50% of transactions or any of your other examples, and it can't, trustless environments demand waste so that kind of scale isn't possible without earth shattering waste, but for the sake of argument let's say it did, I'd still argue for it's abolishment at a societal level because it does transactions WORSE than everything else. Higher risk, fewer safeguards (oops wrong address, now my money is gone forever vs oops, I'll just call my bank), more emissions, more dark money, more money laundering, more room for scams... I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.

Who is the government to say otherwise?

Oh yeah, that's right, the government SHOULD actually make policies to cut down on negative affects of things that some people want to do. You know, because that's the whole point of government.

Plus, the people who would vote less obstructionist policies often are the ones who live out in Oakland or something and commute in to work, and thus can't vote on the SF policies, so those people get shoved out even more by the high costs. It's a vicious cycle and there's probably no answer to it besides state/federal intervention to force lack of obstruction (e.g. making certain zoning requirements like "single family home only" illegal). For now, the incentives of local voters are stacked in the "we'll take literal shit on the streets if it means higher housing prices" camp.

Blockchain, for all it's promises of decentralization, has rapidly centralized on a few players who's interpretation of the chain are practically law, and thus, is subject to the same problems as any other centrally governed system. The many differences include that stripe (and it's competitors) can handle millions of transactions whereas bitcoin struggles on a few thousand.

Then we started violating those processes and cracking down on immigration, which actually increased illegal overstays because people stopped going home after their short term visa jobs because they knew they couldn't come back next year to pick strawberries if they left. This isn't wokeism, it's just history.

Quote from Fryer: “I apologize for the insensitive and inappropriate comments that led to my suspension, which I regret deeply and which brought shame on the department and disrepute on me personally,” Fryer wrote. “I didn’t appreciate the inherent power dynamics in my interactions, which led me to act in ways that I now realize were deeply inappropriate for someone in my position.”

Failing to mention any of that is 100% journalistic malpractice and should immediately tip anyone off that this is not a real piece of journalism, it's a quick, hacked together culture war piece. It even says this "Gone are those such as Roland Fryer who sought to inquire freely into the most important questions facing society today through well-gathered evidence and rigorous logic." one paragraph after talking about how Fryer was welcomed back. Truly masterful levels of journalistic trash.

The rest of the article is just your standard fox news CRT bait piece about how every classroom (including, somehow, all the engineering and maths classes) are teaching your kids that America is bad and racist and only you can save them by teaching them the lost, forgotten idea that America is actually exceptional and never once destabilized a South American government to make bananas cheaper. There's no real evidence in the article to support this, you just have to take the author (who has already established themselves as someone willing to hide information to make a point).

If you want to criticize Harvard and other major institutions, I have no problem with that. They are institutions that admit legacy candidates by the boatload despite what often is a lack of merit, for example. But this isn't criticism here, it's just culture war. Its just "cultural Marxism" but avoiding saying that so that it can appear credible. But read any article about cultural Marxism and you'll find practically copy pasted content. What's cultural Marxism? A conspiracy theory that was originated by the Nazis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism) and is being peddled by neo-nazis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_...) try to justify the idea that people are actively destroying "culture". The Nazis did it to justify the most industrial genocide ever committed. Please don't buy into genocidal conspiracies because of hacked articles like this.

The only time where I'd recommend a checksum over TLS is when you're dealing with a very large download, like a Linux ISO or something. The TLS encryption would cause a noticeable slowdown, so in that case a checksum may provide the best user experience.

Your assertion that "if your server gets hacked, so do your customers", also applies to a checksum, as the hackers would just change the checksum listed on the website.

If you have a problem with piping curl to bash, then you can just not do so, you can download the bash script, see what it does, and modify it before running it. It's only 140 lines and it's fairly simple.

Further to your point, the bash script also does checksums internally!

Putting releases up on github isn't a bad idea, but their github account credentials could also be hacked, so it's no more secure than this really.