imustbeevil

> the rewards earned (whatever token on offer) can be traded outside of the game ecosystem.

This is vaporware though, real game companies will never create content for tokens they've already sold. The only game I know of that had anything like this was GW Hall of Monuments giving some kind of bonus in GW2, and that obviously didn't require a blockchain, because the company running the game has your account data in a database. And obviously no third party company would ever develop content for a token they didn't sell.

It seems like a lot of the blockchain stuff is like "You give me USD and I give you this stupid dream", instead of looking at it from the other side "why do you want my USD?"

Malice is just the intention to do evil, it depends what you categorize as evil.

If the bar is "primarily intending to hurt other people", then I would agree this wouldn't qualify. If the bar is "primarily intending to enrich oneself, knowing that enrichment comes exclusively from hurting other people", we hit that one.

Yes. The plan my employer had in Hawaii was $700/mo for pretty average coverage. On Healthcare.gov the best possible plan I could get, $0 deductible, full coverage, etc, was $510/mo.

I think the difficulty is that most people who have employer healthcare have never checked healthcare.gov because they didn't need to, but it's hard to keep seeing people perpetuate this idea that hasn't been true for over a decade.

Healthcare.gov. We've had that system for 12 years. I've never had employer healthcare, it was way more expensive than private insurance in Hawaii, which anyone can get and you auto-qualify for enrollment if you change jobs or move.

https://www.navapbc.com/insights/twelve-years-of-healthcare-...

In the context of what that person was saying, they certainly just mean "cancelling" and misused "verbing" to make their communication more difficult and less succinct, defeating the entire purpose, yes. When you use "verbing" the actual verb is assumed, not explicit, so it's not specifically "engaging in cancel culture" so much as it is "the existence of cancel culture in the context of someone doing something".

In conversational English, you can turn nouns into verbs by adding "ing", similar to a contraction.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/the-basics-of-verbing-nouns/

"Cancel culture"-ing means "engaging in cancel culture". (Which, to be clear, optimizing ad spend is not).

They pre-sell ads every year. They fucked it up for next year. It was a very easy read.

> Did we shut down people saying smoking is good for you?

Yes, 53 years ago.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1089/public-hea...

The first result on Google for "how many birds are killed by domesticated cats" is a scientific article from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

Another interesting thing is that many countries are experiencing lower inflation than the US, but their currency is getting weaker, so the USD's purchasing power is increasing two-fold. I've been planning a trip to Malaysia because while their exchange rate against the dollar has fallen, they've only experienced ~3% inflation, so not only are all of their products 22% as expensive, they also haven't meaningfully changed in price since 3 years ago (from the dollar perspective), whereas the dollar's purchasing power in the US is basically down 25%.

> Seems likely it's a genuine mistake on their part

A genuine mistake like saying "this bottle will cure any ailment", or "our machine can test blood with a single drop".

They are lying about the money being safe to trick people into mispricing the risk.

Yes, increasing costs of necessities is regressive. Charging everyone the same fee costs poor people a larger percentage of their income.

> A regressive tax is a tax applied uniformly, taking a larger percentage of income from low-income earners than from high-income earners.

"If there is a url, text is optional": https://news.ycombinator.com/submit

They're doing business in the US. Only their US business is directly affected. Most crypto sites have different operations in the US because different countries have different laws, and you technically have to follow all of them.

Median total compensation for a senior software engineer in the US is $138K on glassdoor, and I'd wager even that is a bit inflated.

There is no reality where most engineers expect to be paid 200K+. I really don't understand technical people perpetuating this idea when you can find data pretty much anywhere that indicates otherwise. There is just no reason to inflate this number.

The US has financial laws. Enforcing those laws is not tyranny.

The simplest way to understand this is that money from crime is tracked so that investigators can follow it to the bad guys. We have laws that financial providers have to keep records so we can find the bad guys. A tool whose explicit exclusive purpose is to obfuscate bad guys money will not satisfy the legal requirements of operating financial services in the US. No one should be surprised by this.

> Finally, to reiterate, bully voluntarily foregoing coercion on occasion is not a subsidy.

I just have to go with the definition. Part of the brevity of the original communication was that semantics shouldn't really require discussion, as words have meanings. Even if your position is believed, and taxation is coerced; "subsidy" is defined as including tax breaks. You might think it sounds weird that a bully giving the money back is a subsidy, but that's what that word means. I can find opinion pieces making the case you're making, but that's not the definition used by the majority of other publications.

It also really shouldn't matter either way. Whether the government is "subsidizing" a Library or "not bullying" a Church, the original point was that they are receiving special treatment from the government.

It sounds more like you disagree with taxation, rather than the semantics around subsidization. We can't really continue this line of dialogue if you disagree that taxes are payments for services rendered. It's like saying Burger King is stealing my lunch money when I buy a Whopper. It's a really bad analogy.

Alternatively, here's a definition of subsidy:

> A subsidy is a benefit given to an individual, business, or institution, usually by the government. It can be direct (such as cash payments) or indirect (such as tax breaks).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subsidy.asp

Yeah I'm talking about taxes in the United States, not continuing that strained analogy.

I don't mean to be flippant, but engaging with a disconnected hypothetical takes away from the discussion of reality. In my original comment, I believe I sufficiently communicated that I disagree that taxes are extortion. In the context of funding libraries and churches, I don't think that disagreement is going to lead us anywhere.

That's not how taxes work.

Churches owe taxes because they conduct business in the United States. The government pays those taxes instead. That's a subsidy.

> When DMO issued the letter on October 29, 2014, it took a no-action position with respect to the operation of a not-for-profit market for certain event contracts and the offering of such contracts to U.S. persons by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand without registration as a designated contract market, foreign board of trade, or swap execution facility, and without registration of its operators.

> DMO has determined that Victoria University has not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter and as a result has withdrawn it.

https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8567-22

For the "other side". They got a waiver to operate an unregistered securities market, as a non-profit University-based organization. They allegedly did not operate it as they said they would, so they are losing their waiver. If companies want to offer these services, they are entirely within their American rights to do so legally.

> Closing schools had no impact on virus

This is what I mean by framing things as black and white. Why would you make such an incredible claim? How could you possibly support a claim that reducing community spread in schools (where children are around 50% as likely to spread the virus, not 0% [1]) has "zero impact" on community spread outside of schools? How could children at home equally spread covid to other childrens homes as if there were 30 of them wearing poorly fitting masks in a closed room?

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/we-now-kn...

> The role of young children in transmission seemed logical to some experts who have been tracking the evolution of the pandemic. “I think what was more surprising was how long the narrative persisted that children weren’t transmitting SARS-CoV-2,” said Sam Scarpino, PhD, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation.

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210817/youngest-kids-more-...

> Nearly 1 in 4 COVID-19 deaths (5868 [CI, 3584 to 8171]; 23.2%) was potentially attributable to hospitals strained by surging caseload.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34224257/

I've been working remotely since the pandemic started. I haven't gotten sick once. Not a cold, flu, covid, strep, bronchitis, nothing, for two and a half years. You get sick from contact with sick people. Reducing your contact with all people reduces your contact with sick people, reducing your likelihood of getting sick, becoming a sick person, and making other people sick. You could, as many do, make the case that we don't need to reduce contact that much, and that closing schools costs more than it returns. You cannot make the case that closing schools does not reduce contact and spread of sickness and death.

> anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school

Or like, not seeing everything as black and white. We had to do something because the hospitals were overflowing. When all the hospital beds are full of old covid patients slowly dying, every other person who gets injured is receiving treatment on the floor in the hallway, or not at all. You can have all the nuanced discussion you want about the degree of which any of the controls were implemented, but your position cannot be that we should have done nothing.

What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up.

It seems like a common misunderstanding because the reporting around this is so bad.

> Musk and Twitter agreed to a so-called reverse termination fee of $1 billion when the two sides reached a deal last month. Still, the breakup fee isn’t an option payment that allows Musk to bail without consequence.

> A reverse breakup fee paid from a buyer to a target applies when there is an outside reason a deal can’t close, such as regulatory intermediation or third-party financing concerns. A buyer can also walk if there’s fraud, assuming the discovery of incorrect information has a so-called “material adverse effect.” A market dip, like the current sell-off that has caused Twitter to lose more than $9 billion in market cap, wouldn’t count as a valid reason for Musk to cut loose — breakup fee or no breakup fee — according to a senior M&A lawyer familiar with the matter.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk-awa...

> Also, pretty embarrassing that this was published by University of Chicago and not the University of Washington meteorology department. I guess the relevant UW profs should spend more time doing research and less time complaining about “wokism” or whatever nonsense they’re on about this week.

Almost as embarrassing as thinking the University of Washington wouldn't have hundreds of people studying this.

https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=nav...

I think you may have gotten lost in your communications.

You responded that you were surprised that something high risk / high reward was compared to a junk bond, and then compared it to a CD. It's obviously more like a junk bond than a CD, for exactly the two reasons you now mention.

To anyone else (like me) wondering why the Mormons maintain a genealogy database:

> Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For Latter-day Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit.

https://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/genealogy.html

The reason we have to force states into the 21st century is because they are holding the cities hostage. Local government only works if you keep going all the way down.

If Austin can't make abortion legal, Texas can't make it illegal.

They took the jobs people would have had, they didn't take the jobs people currently have.

Amazons factories would have employed every human on Earth if they had to use humans. That's what happened to the robots taking our jobs. They took them from the future, decades ago, and you didn't even notice.

Since I don't want to have to respond to all of the cryptos misunderstanding what staking means, you can also just google it:

https://www.coindesk.com/learn/crypto-staking-101-what-is-st...

> Similarly, when you stake your digital assets, you lock up the coins in order to participate in running the blockchain and maintaining its security. In exchange for that, you earn rewards calculated in percentage yields. These returns are typically much higher than any interest rate offered by banks.

https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/f...

> The unstaking process may not be immediate; with some cryptocurrencies, you're required to stake coins for a minimum amount of time.

https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-staking

> Enter Proof of Stake. The main idea is that participants can lock coins (their “stake”), and at particular intervals, the protocol randomly assigns the right to one of them to validate the next block.