javert

The idea that government management of the economy can do better than private management and allocation of capital is utterly preposterous. This has been proven many times over by 20th century history, and is also immediately obvious if you've ever been to the DMV. Or if you know anything about the inner workings of a complex modern state apparatus, such as the US federal government. You might as well be calling the sky red.

(And I know that's what you're advocating from a different comment you just made about the New Deal.)

In a free market, the best allocators of resources are rewarded with more resources to continue allocating; the worse allocators are punished by losing their capacity to allocate. This is called capitalism.

Contrast that to a system where goverment eliminates inequality: Government allocates resources, meaning the worst people, people who are best at graft and pull, are rewarded. This is a disaster. We can already see this happening in the US. One egregious offender is the Dept. of Homeland Security which is siphoning off more and more national resources and growing like a cancer. The university system (which is in reality Federally managed) is an egregious offender. The medical system (which is Federally managed but run for profit through graft) is an egregious offender.

The latter system---the system of "government management," where the government doesn't let people receive unequal rewards for unequal success---is a path straight to the butcher's block.

Whether it's OK for a company to co-opt an English word for its name depends on how much confusion and inelegance it causes. I didn't have a problem with their original name.

That said, "facebook" was not in my vocabulary as a native American English speaker, and I'd wager that was true for over 99% of Americans. My impression is that it's something that only existed at Ivy League schools. Perhaps regular colleges also had them? Maybe someone could fill me in on that.

We don't have to let them steal a word from the English language, that belongs to all of us. We don't have to let them cause confusion. Just don't call it the name they want you to call it.

The author doesn't seem to have much in common ideologically with most bitcoin people or to have a similar analysis of bitcoin to that of bitcoin people. So calling himself a "Keynesian bitcoiner" seems incorrect.

It seems that he disagrees with certain fundamental intellectual premises of bitcoin.

You don't get to call yourself a member of a movement if you fundamentally disagree with it. No; you're somebody criticizing it from the outside. That's fine, but don't conflate the two. You can't be an anti-bitcoin bitcoiner, an anti-left leftist, or an anti-Nazi Nazi.

Bitcoin people are not "crypto bros." Bitcoin people hate "crypto." You are conflating two opposing movements.

edit: but it turns out the article author is a crypto bro, not a bitcoin person.

It would be interesting to build a model of specific HN users who downvote unpopular but true statements, and then use that to search for comments that may contain unpopular truths. Could be useful.

I guess we'd need access to data about how individual users vote, but it could be anonymized.

A typical company is having a positive impact on the world, because it's providing some good or service to people that they are willing to pay money for. The global economy is built on this. It's why we have material and ultimately scientific abundance as a species.

I get that casinos, cigarette companies, Google, and Facebook (and others) appear to be in a different category. But my point is that those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Getting a PhD for this reason is an absolutely terrible idea. A PhD is an apprenticeship to be a university professor. It's only sometimes, incidentally, helpful for the would-be engineer, and it's very rarely more lucrative than staying in the job market. And, it's generally absolute hell for a few years. Most people don't make it through.

If the OP had any business doing an PhD he would already know it---he would either have a burning desire to become a professor, or he would have a burning desire to do intellectual research. In the latter case, a modern PhD will probably still be a huge disappointment.

There are tons and tons of pieces online arguing exactly this; I would encourage anyone considering a PhD to seek them out and consider their observations carefully.

This comment is pretty US centric, but also applies to some extent to other countries.

> A mentor has advised me not to become "boring" and wants me to try to stay entrepreneurial

Be what you want to be. Do what you want to do.

There is really no other option. You won't have the psychological energy to succeed any other way. Doing what someone else wants leads to a wasted life.

There is no such thing as "being boring." Boring is relative. Subjective. If you do what you want, you won't be boring to you, and that is all that matters.

The advice you've received, in this particular instance, is very toxic. Unless your mentor is saying: Don't do what is boring to you. Then, maybe it's valid.

I don't see why that would be the case. Enlighten me.

If the market will pay yield X for a long-term bond of a certain duration, banks can make money by offering mortgages for X plus some margin.

The Fed selling MBSs should just depress yields in general.

Kind of a silly article. When the Fed sells enough bonds, interest rates go up. It doesn't matter if they sell mortgage-backed securities or something else.

Selling these does not effect the housing market any differently from the Fed selling some other bond.

I wish we had more of this kind of content on Hacker News.

There are lots of scenarios where the Luna becomes somewhat valuable again. A truly major crypto coin like Luna has never truly disappeared. Probably someone will make a fork like "Luna Classic." There are lots of these things (ETH classic, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV) that have zero rationale for existing, but are still traded with a high valuation.

tl;dr people will attempt to reflate their bags; some moderate success cannot be ruled out.

Still not acceptable. It would be hard for me to buy a ThinkPad (I have bought many in the past).

Obviously Lenovo has zero integrity and will spy on us or cheat us in some other way if they think they can do it without getting caught.

Sad that nobody else makes laptops with the little nub for pointing the mouse.

> but why do bitcoin proponents always assume people to be ignorant on a website with some of the smartest people on the planet?

Uh... because your comment is just straight up wrong?

For instance, miners don't have a vote or a say at all, unlike proof of stake systems. If a miner changes the consensus algorithm, that is forking bitcoin, but bitcoin itself goes on unchanged.

> Proof-of-work requires, by design, that the electricity value expended on mining is proportional to the total market cap of Bitcoin.

This premise isn't true. Funny you have this big confident argument when you're wrong about the basics.

The electricity expended is proportional to the value of mined bitcoins plus transaction fees. Note that the mining rate goes down over time, approaching zero.

There is no such thing as a "miner takeover" because miners don't vote. Unlike with proof of stake.

The only powers they have are to censor transactions, conduct denial of service and (if they have over 50%) conduct a double spend attack.

What you are describing in #1 is a government takeover of miners.

Definitely a nit pick, but what are we here for if not for that?

Sic semper tyrannis.

It is only a shame that the Republic was not restored after Caesar, but that instead another tyrant arose.

If you were wondering what inspired the accents of fictional pirates and witches in movies and TV shows, now you know.

> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.

I think this is a misleading cliche. I seem to have a lost a significant amount of weight just from eating less, without exercise. Which makes sense.

It's amazing how many miles you'd have to run to burn the calories you get from a Big Mac. Basically, our food is super dense in calories, and our bodies are extremely efficient machines (meaning, they don't burn as many calories as you'd think when exercising). So, it should be much easier to lose weight by eating less than by exercising more.

> Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.

Most people aren't motivated enough. But "willpower" is a misleading and thus destructive way to describe motivation.

You increase motivation by thinking about whether the positive thing you want is "worth" whatever you're doing to get it. In other words, staying focused on the value. You don't increase motivation by "exerting willpower." That whole concept for motivation is a recipe for failure.

It was a slave pen. But that's neither here nor there.

Luna tried to make itself look better by "affiliating" itself with bitcoin, that's all. That is the attempted laundering of integrity and prestige. It failed.

Then you don't want to live in a society, you want to live in the Soviet Union. Because nobody can tell you if a business is a fraud in advance. There is no all-seeing, all-knowing bureaucrat that can detect Ponzi schemes. You just have to take away people's permission to do stuff. Which is ridiculous---Ponzi schemes only hurt people who are reckless. Why punish and impede all of us for the sake of reckless people? Your viewpoint is literally uncivilized.

As someone who spent many years in academic computer science, I have zero confidence in the peer review system. Zero.

Hoskinson talking up peer review for Cardano makes him look, to me personally, like more of a fraud.

My micro-specialty was worse than some others, though. The quality of peer review is not a constant across all of computer science.

> But without some form of regulation, either by the broader crypto community itself or by governments around the world, situations like the LUNA/UST collapse will keep happening.

That's right, and that's OK. Capitalism allows failure. A free society allows failure. This is healthy. Luna was not a systemic risk. There has been no contagion. Nobody has lost their house or their job. When you don't allow failure, you get Lehman and the 2008 crisis. You get the Fed inflating assets to the point that it's actually dangerous, because they won't let the stock market fall.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with Luna. They are as similar as two unrelated Internet companies, like Google and eToys.

Inflation doesn't dilute the economy. Rather, it grossly distorts resource allocation. How do we pay for endless wars? Fiat funny money. How do we pay for $110 Luna? Again, fiat funny money. Luna is actually a symptom of our underlying system being broken---the system you are kind of defending.

Is there evidence for that?

You have to wonder. But Michael Saylor comes across as a true believer in bitcoin.

> I'm picking up a lot of subtle things that make the whole experience more interesting.

That's a common experience. It's like some people are reading the books in low resolution. That's why they think the characters are simplistic. If you re-read, you start realizing that all the little details matter and are part of the story.

> Moreover, her take on female sexuality must have been revolutionaire at the time

It was. What other work of art published in the 1950s or earlier has a female protagonist, a businesswoman, with multiple lovers?

Not to disagree with you, but to put a finer point on it...

I feel like the characters are not "paragons of virtue" because they are not meant to be imitated. That is a common mistake by both fans and detractors of Rand. Nor are the characters meant to be representations of abstract ideas. They are just characters, complex ones. But like any good writer---say Hugo or Dostoevsky---the author is putting part of himself or herself into the characters and thus the characters have a morality to them that reflects the views of the author.

I feel like calling the characters "problematic examples" may be overstating it a bit. For example, Jean Valjean in Les Miserables is a heroic character who has a character arc where he learns from his mistakes and his character becomes more heroic over time. Rand's "good" characters are like that. Her "neutral" or "bad" characters don't learn from their mistakes. (edit: Well, some of the relatively neutral ones actually do, and have positive arcs.)

FYI, Rand hated libertarians and rejected libertarianism.

Still, a lot of libertarians claim to like her, and don't understand that their political views resemble only a small subset of her overall philosophy---and even then, it's more of a resemblance than actual agreement.

How are they spending so much that they have a $430M loss with $1.165B revenue? I don't mean that as a judgement, I'm just actually wondering.