beaconstudios

I know this place skews libertarian/neoliberal, but I try to inject a little spice where I can ;)

To take a minimal case for an example - if I hire two people, pay them $20,000 each to produce widgets and then sell those widgets for $100,000 a year respectively, and keep the remaining $60,000, would you consider that exploitation considering that I contribute nothing to the continued economic activity? This is the form of exploitation I was referring to.

For a contrasting example, I prefer cooperatives where the people involved in the business control it democratically (which can still include directors and managers).

It's a classic "great man of history" narrative, painting a Randian picture of the world being pushed forward by the overwhelming efforts of a few people. The reality is that nobody works hard enough to earn a billion dollars - that amount of money can only be made by short-changing the people who do the work.

Does Anybody actually use milliard? Here in the UK million is a thousand thousand, billion a thousand million etc. I always assumed that was the same for our mainland cousins.

> "Figure it out" mentality. Even if there is a national or even global trend, responsibility to solve the issue is pushed onto the individual. Or worse, global mentality shifts to accept what is going on. "Yeah buying was normal back in the day, now you rent. Get over it."

This is a symptom of neoliberal ideology - the acceptance of any market outcome, no matter how negative, as "natural" and to be accepted or at least left unchanged. That's the predominant narrative, but I think that could change. The reason I have some hope for a social-democratic turnaround is that the US has cultural hegemony, what happens there is broadcasted across the world through American media and other cultural exports. Currently, younger generations are engaged in a revival of left politics; this will almost definitely influence American politics in the coming years, and I'm hoping us Europeans (I'm from the UK) see some downwind benefit from that. There's already some smatterings of progressive politics in the UK, for instance - probably on a level comparable to 2012-2016 in the US. We even had our own Bernie in the form of Corbyn, and our far right resurgence is running low on steam thankfully.

I can see a resurgence of social democracy coming soon as the problems with things like real estate investment and unrestricted emissions come home to roost. We've already seen a little bit of that with Bernie Sanders.

Plus you want to encourage models like a housing co-op - they're pretty good for keeping people's housing costs down and building community relations.

Well, thanks for fighting for standards adoption, even if it didn't work out. It's always good to have interoperability represented on the inside.

Quite a few!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative

I think it's a valid concern to ask about incentive alignment - if you're wanting to do a tech-for-good project, you probably want to make sure that profiteering doesn't become the primary driver at a later date by making a Ulysses pact [1].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact

Yup, my family minecraft server fell victim to that. Thankfully it was a new map with only a couple days' work into it, but annoying nonetheless.

Whitelist your private servers!

Cash spent on an activity does not reflect the time that it takes, doubly so if you were able to reduce the administrative layers involved in eg health insurance.

I think he's trying to differentiate between intrinsic desires (creativity, passions) and compulsive desires (spiritual junk food of various flavours). I do think he goes too deep into purple prose though, forgetting that poetic language in philosophy is usually either referential or narrative, but this article is using purple prose in an explanatory fashion which often reads badly imo.

A small percentage of today's work goes towards these things (except the Internet, which is an endless sinkhole of mostly pointless labour).

There are a couple of issues with UNDO too:

- (not intrinsic) many interfaces only give you a few seconds to undo your action, which wouldn't help in this case

- (intrinsic) some events can be layered on top of your change, meaning that you have to either block the undo or reverse all the subsequent events too. This wouldn't be the case for this HTTPie incident, but does prevent UNDO functionality from being a silver bullet.

I agree 100%, material conditions are the initial cause, but that outside the affected area that simply causes disaffection - terrorist propaganda directs that disaffection towards killing civilians. Given that far right radicals are created by the material conditions of late capitalism and misdirected towards hating minorities by propaganda, the only thing we can really do about that (aside from trying to change those conditions, which we should already be doing) is to try to avoid them being contacted by fascists looking to utilise their anger.

Wealth distribution is not the same as class conflict, it's an effect of it, but yes class division has existed since civilisation began (not so much beforehand though).

In feudal times it was between the aristocracy and the peasantry, now it's between business owners and investors, and employees.

Yes the problem is class conflict, not a handful of people. The handful of people are just a sign of how badly the capitalist class are winning the conflict.

The author did exactly that:

> “I’m committed to that 99 cent price — when things go against you, you tighten your belt,” Vultaggio said on a Zoom call in early April from his headquarters on Long Island, N.Y.

It's not quite that simple - not only can absolute free speech be absurd (a condition I don't really care about to be honest, untruth will always be prevalent), but it can be actively dangerous: free speech can include terrorist radicalisation, trying to convince people to join perform suicide bombings or shoot up churches. Much of the far right radicalisation in recent years has occurred in Internet forums.

That's not to say that the answer is obvious, but the current setup that we have where only the most egregious speech and harassment is explicitly banned and social norms are enforced by social pressure seems to work. I think a lot of people advocating for free speech are ambiguous as to whether they're arguing against explicit censorship or against social pressure, which can obscure the conversation.

Interestingly the Russian dashcam phenomenon is similar to "florida man" - it's availability bias. Florida has more published wacky crime stories partly because of their public records policy, and Russia has a lot of dashcams due to there being a lot of insurance fraud with pedestrians being "hit" by cars.

Polio was solved by vaccines, and sepsis was partly solved by hygiene and partly by antibiotics. Modern medicine has helped with many conditions.

They limit trade with NK, unfortunately that probably does contribute to impoverishing the people, alongside NK's own practices doing so, but as I understand it the point of sanctions is to stop material aid (trade, gifts, tech sharing etc) that would be used to empower the NK, which includes their military and nuclear capabilities. I don't know if the US itself allows food or medical aid to be sent, but I do know that NK receive a lot of food aid.

Honestly I don't know how to feel about sanctions more generally, whether they help or harm the citizenry - but I'm not convinced that enabling the NK government to transact with crypto would lead to improvements in the regular people's lives, compared with them having greater access to military equipment.

There are sanctions that are worthy of criticism - the decades-long sanction on Cuba, for instance, even though I disagree with their regime - but North Korea is pretty transparently a despotic regime that should be opposed.

He's helping an enemy state to avoid sanctions - countries will always prosecute cases like that.

If he didn't want his mind locked behind bars, he probably shouldn't have done what he did. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but this was not a smart move.

If you want to say I have no proof that's fine, but I draw the line at sarcastic insults. So don't do that and I won't insult you back.

I haven't collected evidence for my point because I'm not trying to make a court case - I've observed that most people seem to use crypto as a speculative investment, buying coins just to sell them to somebody else who's doing the same. Have you seen otherwise? Like, I don't want to have this negative perception of the industry, I generally prefer to see positive outcomes from these things, but I haven't observed much positive being produced from the industry. Surely if you're a big fan of the industry, you can demonstrate something good about it?

I guess that depends on the point of the community - to my understanding, the point is to discuss. Reasoned discussions are based on arguments and observations, not just evidence and citations. I don't even know what kind of evidence you can bring up for something of this scale - it's not like the are metastudies on where people allocate capital within the crypto market, and what the outcomes aside from wealth transfer. It's a more systemic thing.

I don't even understand how people can argue against this. Do you have the perception that most people are buying coins for reasons other than to sell them again for profit? The only types of studies I find are self-referential in that they report on market size.

The reason I discuss the subject at all is I'm hoping that one day somebody gives me the piece of information I'm missing that shows that the crypto industry isn't just everybody trying to get rich while burning tons of fossil fuels, that there are reasonably positive outcomes from it. So far I just get a lot of angry reactions and accusations of having no proof, despite this not being a court case. Like, show me something good that's been made because of crypto! It's the easiest argument in the world to win.

I'm glad you understand what I'm trying to say, even if "speculation" isn't quite the right term for it.

I think scams are an obvious harm, but the highly financialised and speculative nature of crypto is a more subtle harm: most investment produces positive material side effects like products or services, but because the main selling point of crypto is to continually pass it around in a circle, a lot of money, time, and expertise is wasted on something that is completely unproductive. To be fair, I think this criticism mostly applies to Wall Street too, but most people no longer try to argue that Wall Street is a source of meaningful innovation. To say nothing of the proof of work model leading to ever increasing energy consumption during climate change.

I just don't see much real upside to the crypto industry, and quite a lot of downside.

Why would you make a personal attack based on a discussion about an industry? I didn't think this was a flame war, more a discussion about the crypto industry - I'm not upset, I'm just bored because I'm stuck in hospital with little to do. This is a tech forum, so is it not the right place to discuss tech industries and opinions thereof? I'm not even in the minority in thinking the crypto industry is unproductive and largely centered around scams and greater fool schemes.

I'm not sure what your personal attack has to do with this discussion - I guess you could have that opinion if you wanted.

HODLing is also speculation. I'm saying that crypto isn't driving useful economic activity like investing in startups or small businesses can do. It's all just people trying to make money by finding a greater fool. Even speculation in a normal market can drive /some/ innovation through capital allocation.

I don't claim to have the evidence, I claim to have made an observation. If the parent wanted to make a counterargument they could do, it wouldn't have to be concretely evidence based because I'm not holding a forum conversation to the epistemological standard of a formal paper or proof. Just a good example or argument would be more compelling than just calling my opinion a kneejerk reaction.