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echopurity

-16 karma · joined July 18, 2021

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echopurity··on I almost got banned from Hacker News
Zero left wing chatter. Instant ban by this fash site.
echopurity··on /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification
"Sanewashing" is a highly biased slur.

It's usually called "reformism" by people who support actual change.

echopurity··on Ask HN: Is HN becoming more an existential crisis echo chamber?
HN is a complete echo chamber that quickly bans viewpoints opposing the dominant techbro ideology which is hollow and induces existential crises upon the briefest reflection.
echopurity··on Mathematicians Transcend Geometric Theory of Motion
It's unfortunate that they omit Floer's suicide. Nobody wants to talk about the negative effects of a career in mathematics.
echopurity··on Uber and Lyft don't save money, time, or the planet
The fact that destroying the planet and ruining people's lives is "good business" is a major part of the problem.
echopurity··on Infinity Category Theory Offers a Bird’s-Eye View of Mathematics
All of math education is bad like this. We're taught the "ladder myth" that math is a linear subject leading to like multivariable calculus, not even real analysis.

It's a terrible waste of people's time, interests, and talents.

echopurity··on El Salvador’s new Bitcoin wallets could cost Western Union $400M a year
People generally do not go from $0 to $50,000 playing roulette either.
echopurity··on El Salvador’s new Bitcoin wallets could cost Western Union $400M a year
>El Salvador’s new bitcoin wallets could save Salvadorians $400 million a year

FTFY.

echopurity··on California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable
The whole movement to recycle plastic was an industry scam to knowingly profit from destroying the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dk3NOEgX7o

echopurity··on Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (2016)
Capitalism is anti-science and anti-progress. People are evolving around it.
echopurity··on Major Quantum Computing Advance Made Obsolete by Teenager (2018)
>Kerenidis and Prakash proved that a quantum computer could solve the recommendation problem exponentially faster than any known algorithm

That's not a proof. It's a few hopeful examples.

The current proof only appears stunning to those who were formerly satisfied with weak evidence.

echopurity··on How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
HN claims to be ideology free but every third article is this kinda nonsense from The Economist.

And they shadow ban anybody who dissents. Tech bro culture is the worst.

echopurity··on The Winners of Remote Work
Going out of business isn't the same as losing at working from home. Going out of business is usually not working.

Otherwise this article would just be the fairly obvious statement that people who kept their jobs are "winners" over those who lost their jobs.

echopurity··on Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks
Have you ever seen a historical chart of bitcoin versus paper? I dunno which week you're talking about, but Bitcoin is generally not the one falling.
echopurity··on Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks
"Hold this paper from the your local politicians rather than using an open ledger based on international cooperation and modern technology."
echopurity··on Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks
>New research suggests that ... the drop in interest rates has been caused by changes in population structure and by shifts in the distribution of income.... In most economies, baseline interest rates are “set” by central banks.

No need for quotes here. People at central banks literally set the baseline interest rate. There's not much evidence for attributing this straightforward bureaucratic process to vague trends in population and income.

>Central banks can impose any level of (local currency) borrowing costs on the economy that they want, which is why some say that “interest rates are a policy variable.” But central banks generally avoid exercising that power arbitrarily—and for good reason.

Wow bankers have reasons? It seems like this article is not just assuming market efficiency but also banker efficiency. Neither is a good assumption.

>the trends in inequality that have retarded growth and have pushed down interest rates were choices that can be changed.

This is a radical claim about cause and effect for which there is almost no empirical evidence. AKA pseudo-science.

echopurity··on The Winners of Remote Work
It's got to be clickbait. If there are winners, then how many workers are losing by working remotely? It seems obvious that the vast majority of people win big by not being forced to commute into a full day at an office where they would rather not be.
echopurity··on Launch HN: Lemonade Finance (YC S21) – Digital Bank for the African Diaspora
It's a very hot area in crypto.

- https://www.stellar.org/learn/stellar-for-remittances

- https://tracxn.com/d/trending-themes/Startups-in-Cryptocurre...

echopurity··on Launch HN: Lemonade Finance (YC S21) – Digital Bank for the African Diaspora
>Africans can pay up to 30% more than the global average to move money abroad

What gives Africans this amazing ability?

echopurity··on Climate change will alter where many crops are grown
Stage 5 climate denialism: "It's too Late!"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

Isn't HN an "ideology free" zone? Why do they allow nonstop ideology from The Economist? Not to mention the paywall.

echopurity··on Lebanon’s underground cryptocurrency market
People say this stuff as if the fiat system isn't a corrupt bomb that's constantly blowing up.
echopurity··on Fundamental physics sees worlds in grains of sand and infinities in hours
FWIW supersymmetry and string theory were never convincing to people who value science, empiricism, epistemology, etc. This sort of pseudo-scientific hype is necessary to keep the money flowing under capitalism. See also "artificial intelligence", etc.

https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2658

echopurity··on Almost all of the top subreddits are moderated by the same people
Most of the "free and open" internet is centrally controlled.

HN quickly shadow bans anybody who goes against the dominant ideology.

echopurity··on Will the rich world’s worker deficit last?
>employment in the rich world is 3% below its pre-pandemic high (see chart 1). That points to a deficit of about 18m people—a huge waste of talent, not to mention a hit to tax revenues.

It's telling how The Economist views lost taxes and lost "talent" as the worst effects of unemployment, rather than homelessness or hunger for example.

And apparently people using their talents for personal enjoyment is outside of The Economist's models. No surprise there.

echopurity··on The case against crisis-mongering
> privately owned business corporations (“capitalism”) have done a great job bringing down the cost of photovoltaic panels, developing electric vehicles that people want to drive, creating promising fake meat substitutes, and otherwise creating the building blocks of a sustainable economy.

Even if we attribute this stuff to "capitalism" (instead of "workers" for example), I'm pretty sure none of it is actually sustainable.

>Now of course we don’t have carbon pricing, and I think we never will because it’s hideously unpopular. But that’s the essence of the climate crisis — not an ideological crisis for liberalism, but tragically a crisis of mass indifference.

So we don't have carbon tax because of mass indifference to the planet being destroyed? Otherwise carbon taxes? Whatever, lib.

echopurity··on Illinois Is the First State to Have High Schools Teach News Literacy
One class probably won't undo a lifetime of being taught to be obedient, uncritical, etc.
echopurity··on Machine learning won't solve natural language understanding
Maybe AI hype won't ever solve natural language understanding, but it'll keep some cash and careers going.
echopurity··on American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)
We're not taught mathematics because we're not meant to think, criticize, understand epistemology, etc. We're taught to compute to make us useful and compliant, even if the computations themselves are useless.
echopurity··on U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry
Many people start coding at a young age. Imagine your kid having to report their dapp to the IRS. It's not about the money. It's about the control.

The situation is probably worse for adults. Why go through the hassle of developing dapps when it means dealing with the IRS and potentially jail, etc.? Personally I've abandoned working on completely harmless dapps because of threats from the state. It's stifling for independent development.

On the other hand, when people compare this to China banning mining, I think the USA is far friendlier to crypto than China, because, as the ascending fiat superpower, China has much more to lose. As the dollar continues to devalue, the USA would most likely prefer a future based on Ethereum rather than the Yuan.

echopurity··on The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
The great man theory almost always fails. The life of Pythagoras is largely myth. This theorem was most likely known and proven well before him. This is old news.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jt.2009.16

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