javert

Nobody's arguing that.

Flagged.

You're being aggressive. Please stop.

I wouldn't contest that more people die from alcohol than marajuana. That wasn't the issue under discussion. The issue is, which is worse for society.

Part of why I find your comment so aggressive is because you're being very sharp with me, but you don't realize you aren't talking about the same thing.

> This is blatantly false. Find me 1 study that shows definitively that MJ is worse than Alcohol for society.

Having worked in academia as a researcher, I don't actually believe studies can reliably be understood by anyone other than those who conducted it and their immediate peers in the field.

A weaker form of that, which I also agree with, would be, "studies are rarely definitive." But you're asking for a definitive study. That doesn't seem fair.

Anyway, it isn't incumbent on me to do the work for you that you are asking me to do.

> Without opinion on the relative damage of both, I'll note that considering this a logical statement is really flawed.

I can't understand what you are saying here.

> You can pretty much always find "studies arguing for both sides" on an issue, but that doesn't mean much in and of itself.

Just trying to cut off the expected "studies show X" comments before they get started. Because if studies aren't definitive, which they rarely are, there isn't any point in raising that. And a simpler way to explain this is "studies conflict."

> The societal risks are the same and additional worse ones with alcohol

I don't think this is correct, personally.

(I'm pretty sure you'll find studies arguing for both sides, so we can only go on personal wisdom.)

This suggestion amounts to letting Ukrainian citizens die to avoid a miniscule chance of getting a Russian citizen arrested.

> "there is no section of the PATRIOT Act that includes..."

DHS often flouts the law. (You aren't wrong, but I'm just saying.)

> That would go even beyond the wildest accusations of domestic dragnet surveillance

I definitely would not agree with that.

They might not quite have this level of surveillance, but they're probably not too far away, either. And there will be actors within the bureaucracy pushing to increase surveillance as far as they possibly can.

The US Federal bureaucracy is grossly out of control and serves its own interests, which aren't those of the citizens or the states.

When you look at tax policy in particular, you see that the states are effectively colonies of the Federal government and bureaucracy.

> The idea of a currency which has value because people give it value makes sense

As a BTC proponent, I just want to say, I don't think this is what gives BTC value.

Everybody is saying "ask your lawyer." Good advice, but lawyers can be wrong. You know who's seen this a million times before and isn't going to be wrong? YC. So this is a valid question, assuming OP gets a response from actual YC people and not just internet randos.

I want to echo what a [dead] sibling comment is saying:

It's a problem that you get the "posting too fast" error only after you have typed a comment. Maybe a long and well thought-out one that took a lot of time and effort.

I've had cases where I've saved the comment in a .txt and gone back to post it later, but of course the discussion will have moved on.

I think the site should not even let you start typing if you are going to get the "posting too fast" error.

> I simply offered a counterexample.

That isn't true. You offered a counterargument.

> This is not relevant since the teaching is abstinence until marriage, not abstinence until college.

A common effect of religious influence is delayed sexual exploration (i.e., later than what's natural given human biological development). The fact that you need this to be explained to you shows that you aren't aware of the phenomenon we're discussing. It's something that's very hard to understand if you haven't lived it.

If I had to pick which better exemplified post modern society and absurdity, I'd pick unlimited government money printing by the Fed, over bitcoin.

Weimar Germany pretty much defined what it means to be "post-modern," and they printed themselves into extinction (admittedly, that's not the whole story).

> Would love for you to point me in the direction of the supporting evidence.

There is scholarly work arguing for this. George Selgin comes to mind as someone who I believe has written about this. There's probably also scholarly work arguing the other side. I can't take the time to dig this up for you right now.

> But it's absurd to think that money supply should be fixed to the arbitrary quantity of a random element that we can dig out of the ground.

It certainly isn't absurd. There are lots of people who think this is a good idea, with good reason. Plus, it is historically precedented, and for good reason.

Economic progress was actually far better under the gold standard. That was the time of the industrial revolution. That was the first time great masses of humanity were lifted from poverty.

This is an incorrect view. When you rule out anecdotes, you're ruling out specific cases. But specific cases are how we learn. You can absolutely learn from specific cases.

Moreover, specific cases are what studies are based on. And studies are often flawed, wrong, or misleading. You can often learn more from a few honest, specific cases than you can from studies.

People who work in modern academia can attest to the fact that studies aren't reliable in general. Individual studies can can be reliable, but you have to really know the field and sometimes the specific researchers in order to know what's reliable and how to interpret it.

There should be a name for the fallacy that wrongly absolutely rejects specific cases in favor of "statistical data," but I don't know if there is one.

I'm sorry, but there are tons of young people from religious or conservative families who wait until marriage to have sex and marry young, and/or don't begin their sexual exploration until well into college. Your anecdotal point notwithstanding. All human beings are equally sexual in terms of their drive and interest, but religion can and does alter psychology and behavior.

There are places where religion is common but isn't taken that seriously, and then there are places were it's common and it is taken very seriously. Sounds like your school was the former and that's fine. It doesn't preclude the existence of the latter.

What he said is true in rural America. In the religious areas, which is most of 'em. This is a divided country. You'd be shocked at how seriously people take religion and how it affects views on sex.

> Coinbase isn't doing this to be evil or centralized or controlling, they're literally just following the law.

Nah, they're definitely in the business of regulatory capture. But they have to be. If they don't capture the regulators, someone else will.

I don't think so. I think you're likely to get tainted coins out of lightning, even if the coins you send in are untainted.

> This usage and definition by NHTSA predates the colloquial definition

I don't think that's right, because countries could "recall" ambassadors, or parliament could be "recalled." Essentially, "recall" means "to bring back." If you aren't bringing something back, it isn't a recall. I don't have time to do the etymological research, so this could be wrong, but it isn't likely. (IIRC I used to be able to access the Oxford English Dictionary for free online, but I'm finding that now I can't.)

What you are describing is a recall in a regulatory and legal sense, but not in a common English sense. In common English, a recall is when the product has to be returned to the manufacturer or taken to a dealer for a fix. In other words, "recall" implies physical movement of a product. I guess you won't agree with me on what "recall" means in common English, and that's fine. And we probably have a deeper disagreement on where words get their meanings from. But I would maintain that a software update is not a "recall." If it is, Microsoft performs a "recall" every time it issues a security patch for Windows.

Sorry to hear that. This practice degrades the signal to noise ratio of the language and in my view is absolutely indefensible. It's possible for languages to evolve in ways that make them objectively better or worse; we should strongly resist the latter. If we are sloppy and lazy, we make the language sloppy.

It isn't a "recall" in common English. So, the title and story are wrong. Very disappointing on the part of Reuters. This is not quality journalism.

Since they wrote it the way they did, I would guess there is some regulatory document that causes this to be classified a a "recall" for legal purposes. But it's incorrect to substitute legal language for common English language when there is a conflict between the two, except in legal contexts. That rule goes for technical language in general.

Is this practice more common in British English? I feel that it seems to appear more often in writing by British people, but that's anecdotal and could be incorrect.

> I'm not sure what you mean when you say that Bitcoin can scale by using 3rd party payment providers?

Try thinking about it. It would work the same way PayPal works with USD. Bitcoin payments simply don't need to happen on the blockchain. Similarly, I can buy gold in my brokerage account without any actual gold moving between warehouses.

> Of course proof of stake can be decentralized! I think what you mean is that it's not clear whether a widely adopted PoS based blockchain will end up centralizing power in the hands of a few whales. This is a legitimate concern

That's right, which is why it probably can't be decentralized. Even if the majority of holders are small individuals, the coins still end up on exchanges, which become whales.

> however, this threat is no different than the threat of centralization of computing power in Bitcoin.

This is a common misunderstanding of Bitcoin. Bitcoin miners do not "vote" or participate in governance. Thus, bitcoin does not have vulnerabilities that proof of stake has. Bitcoin's decentralization does not come from miners. It comes from users who run nodes and enforce the rules of bitcoin by not recognizing illegitimate protocol changes, invalid blocks, etc. Market forces also play an important part: Bitcoiners would not pay for coins from a block that breaks the rules of bitcoin, because those coins will not be recognized as being bitcoin.

> I don’t want to turn this thread into a crypto version of Wall Street Bets where people are arguing over their favorite coins

it seems like that's exactly what you want. Given that you are spreading lots of misinformation and don't seem to be trying to understand the other side's point.

It is not clear that proof of stake can be very decentralized. Proof of work, however, can be.

Bitcoin can scale using 3rd party payment providers . That's exactly how fiat currencies are made to scale. We use Visa, PayPal, Zelle, ACH, Swift, etc. We usually do not talk to a ledger at the Fed or ECB, even though they do have those (for huge banks or wire transfers).

If you don't even have a compiler, it's easier to patch a binary that's already running than make one from scratch. That's a closer analogy to the situation under discussion.

I don't agree with that, but let's not litigate it.

I only still reside in the US because I don't want to pay the exit tax to expatriate. I'm being kept against my will. But I'll make it out eventually, when I can make it make sense tax-wise. Good riddance.

By the way, I live in a US territory, so I have no federal representation, even in theory, personally, even though I pay federal tax. Which is OK, since when I lived in the states proper, my "countrymen" never elected people I believed to be reasonable.

If it's a just war, it could be. Depends on the specific case. For instance, it was moral for European countries to fight the Nazis.

That's incorrect. The will of the people cannot necessarily be expressed when it has to be channeled through exactly two parties. The fact of there being two parties is dictated by the first past the post system.

More detailed explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo (this is the famous CCP Grey video with the animals, for those who have already seen it).

Also, even if it WERE the will of the people, it's still wrong, and immoral.

Democracy is only as good as the demos is moral. I judge the American demos to be insufficiently honest and thus insufficiently moral. Basically, each half of the country thinks that about the other half; I simply agree with both sides.