beaconstudios

I think most transactions made with those coins are speculative, yes.

Perhaps my original formulation was insufficiently precise to get my point across - I mean that crypto is rooted in scams and pyramid schemes and whatnot in the sense that the nature of the industry makes it a magnet for those kinds of schemes and they are the primary driving force behind the money flooding the industry. That doesn't mean that the exchanges themselves are explicitly doing these things, or that all the businesses are either directly engaged in or materially supporting this behaviour (though I think the majority are), but that it's the driving force of the industry in that transportation drives the oil extraction industry.

Okay to clarify, I meant the excesses of the age. It was also a time of expansion driven by the inventions and discoveries of the industrial revolution and the discovery of oil. But when people make the argument that libertarian policy would lead to the market moderating companies' and entrepreneurs' worst instincts, I think the Gilded Age shows otherwise.

It doesn't look like it, no. But what about that is actually using blockchains to solve a problem? They mention Web3 but I don't know if it's a requirement of some feature or an opportunity for a marketing buzzword.

I don't deny that there are some companies that are trying to do real things with blockchain tech - but most of the money and effort appears to be going into speculation and/or scamming. Which isn't very productive.

This is what I've observed, it's not a prima facie assumption. I was initially optimistic when bitcoin came about. Most of the industry seems to be based on speculation and selling "x but on the blockchain" solutions to nonexistent problems. I also know people who are trying to use blockchain tech to solve real problems, but they're in the minority.

I did address this in a sibling comment - the exchanges are primarily used to buy and sell crypto to greater fools, and thus they are rooted in a greater fool scheme. The vast majority of use for crypto is speculation.

I don't think most exchanges are rooted in scams no - I'd say they're rooted in a greater fool scheme, given that the main purpose of buying crypto is to sell it for profit and it isn't really used for exchange outside a few niches like darknet markets.

> The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.

During the industrial revolution? I would expect so. At this point we're on the tail end of those improvements.

> Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness.

Life expectancy has been going up for a long time, but on the obesity front the advent of highly sugary foods thanks to food giants is a result of profiteering, not regulation, and people driving everywhere instead of getting exercise is not because of regulation (though it is due to city planning).

> So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.

Are you sincerely arguing that modern medicine isn't much of an improvement over snake oil medicine? The discovery of penicillin alone has saved literally billions* of lives, to say nothing of painkillers, modern surgical hygiene, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, just so so many improvements in healthcare. I can't take this argument seriously I'm afraid, I can only assume it's a post hoc rationalisation.

* hundreds of millions, I misremembered the number.

Based on both my observations of the space and interaction with crypto people and the crypto market. I know people who work in crypto too.

Your defensive kneejerk reaction doesn't serve as an opposing argument - if you think differently, all you need to do is provide some evidence.

The experiment wasn't even necessary - the Gilded Age was a libertarian's paradise with the gold standard and very little government regulation. What do we most associate with this era? Robber barons, utility monopolies screwing people over with ruthless business practices, confidence men and literal snake oil quack medicine.

I genuinely can't think of a good (ie moral) reason to support the idea given how it is predicted to, and has been shown to, play out.

I honestly think you'd be hard pressed to find a crypto business that isn't rooted in some kind of scam, greater fool scheme, pyramid scheme, or the like. The whole industry is a mess.

That makes sense, by post war socialism are you thinking the Warsaw pact countries or the more social-democratic elements of Keynesianism? Either way, makes sense given most development is done privately for profit now. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

That sounds like architects have been tempered by regulations moreso than having changed ambitions though, am I missing something? My understanding is that the modernist and postmodernist icons were not academics but practicing architects, sometimes both.

This also ties in to the cybernetic concept of the law of requisite variety, where adaptable entities need to be able to compress their sense-data about their environment into an internal model that corresponds in complexity to their need to act - this necessarily involves compression as the totality of reality is effectively infinite and can't fit between your ears.

There's also the Hutter prize that ties data compression directly to intelligence through Kolmagorov complexity.

Information and cybernetic theories cut pretty close to a general theory of intelligence in my opinion!

Manufacturing hasn't been automated as much as it's been outsourced to cheaper countries with less workers' rights and union membership. Automation has only really hit a select few industries like car manufacturing and warehouse picking, compared to the number of blue collar jobs that have disappeared.

There does seem to be a strong cultural thread in architecture that views the profession as more art than design. If I have to live and work in a building, I would much rather it was designed with me in mind than being the architect's expression of personal style.

Edit: to be fair, this criticism could also be levelled at programmers and interface designers.

There's a fundamental conflict of interest between workers and managers, and given that managers have all the power, they usually win. Workers want control in the form of autonomy, managers want control in the form of bureaucracy. A good manager, in my mind, devolves as much control as they can down to the workers while maintaining enough bureaucratic control to satisfy those above them.

Of course, that only applies to the traditional hierarchical organisation - there are much more worker-friendly organisational structures organised around autonomy for the individual and democracy for the collective, like the VSM [1] and cooperatives [2]. Of course, we don't see them very often because people usually found companies to control for themselves.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

There's also the advent of the political dogwhistle, which is a pretty effective form of doublespeak invented by the right to court fiscal conservatives and racists simultaneously [1], that's done tons of damage to discourse. Part of the reason many on the left are trigger-happy with accusations that seem to come from nowhere is because Trump mainstreamed far right dogwhistling into American politics.

1: this has been explicitly admitted: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)

There's also reactionaries who want to run the clock back - traditionally these would take the form of loyalists after a monarchy was already deposed, like the Bonapartists in France.

Well our train service is highly privatised, and in a way that does not engender competition.

You probably just travel more than most people. Also, America is much bigger than any given European country and that leads to greater travel distances.

they weren't forcing Etsy to only play with them, it's not like they're striking for Etsy to become a closed shop with only those sellers.

it shouldn't be! From an ethical standpoint, housing should be guaranteed as a human right. Obviously if you're living in a mansion paid by an executive job and you get laid off you might have to downsize, but nobody should have to fear homelessness in the wealthiest countries on earth.

I hope we can return to the social democracy of before the 1980s soon in the West. Austerity politics hurt everybody except the ultra-wealthy.

doctors would be responsible for your medical care; taxes would foot the bill. The primary involvement of the government is the logistics involved in getting from A to B.

if it was a bad place for other people to work at.

That's probably a good way to avoid people poisoning themselves by "innovating" on a process that, though time-consuming, is very reliable.

I wouldn't describe it as market forces when the organisation they're opposing is a platform with monopoly power. Etsy has fiat power over anybody on their platform.

If we're talking about the generic concept of a cartel that encompasses basically all special interest groups, then yes they're a cartel - but they're not a business cartel in the same way that Phoebus group were. The power imbalance puts them in a position more comparable to a labour union.

Capital strike is a strike by capital. There can be typical cases, but fundamentally that's what this is - though under platform capitalism, I think platform residents hold a much more precarious position than traditional capital because they answer to more than just the government and the market - the platform forms a second government for them.

A cartel is a group of businesses who collude to take market power as an oligopoly. That's not what this is, because these sellers are striking for platform changes, not consumer domination. You can keep saying it's cartel behaviour, but you're working with a different definition of cartel to the mainstream one. They're colluding yes, but they are not warping market forces the way a business cartel does (the typical example being the lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel).

This is a capital strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_strike

Though, many Etsy businesses are sole proprietorships or family businesses, in which case capital and labour are the same, and it's also a labour strike.