jkepler

If its an open secret (like the open mystery in Ephesians 3:9,10), can you provide some sources to substantiate your claim? Thanks!

Did you run generate this comment using social-comments-GPT? https://social-comments-gpt.com/

Just because someone's post is clear, well-structured, and includes a final recap doesn't mean it was AI-generated.

Then again, maybe I'm a cat using CatGPT.

Isn't the root of this problem bigger than Amazon? If we had a fixed money supply and the federal government wasn't printing money all the time, Amazon (and other mega corporations) wouldn't have such a compelling target for regulatory capture, which bestows on them the Cantillion effect of access to lots of newly-created money... while downstream of them everybody else ends up holding the bag through higher prices and cheaper quality.

The real source of the enshitification Doctorow writes about is the fiat US dollar, not necessarily Amazon. Amazon is just one of the more successful at sucking up that monetary creation. Remove the money creation and the opportunities for regulatory capture, and competition becomes a much more viable option to prevent the abuses Doctorow describes.

> [1] Or, more specifically, the consumer dollar is impulsive.

This exactly. When folks buy the idea that their primary identity is as consumers, they loose the ability to resist all the psych-ops marketing constantly thrown at them (at least at those living in Occidental countries).

In contrast, people who consider themselves first as creators---those who work to produce something of value, out of a desire to serve others through one's work (this is broader than just the 'creative class')---may be much more restrained and selective in their purchases. "Will this tool enable me to work more effectively?" "Will this item last long enough?"

Are you talking about drivers or riders using multiple platforms? Or both?

Also, assuming you're writing from a United States perspective, part of the reason so much of our manufacturing sector was outsourced to China (and other nations) is that since 1971 the US dollar has been our primary export, as the global reserve currency among all the fiat currencies. This is starting to change, so I think we'll see more and more manufacturing returning to the USA as the dollar looses international reserve status. And I wonder to what extended Chinese copying our technologies is connected to macro monetary realities.

It will be generally good for the world, for American manufacturing, workers, businesses, and families---pretty much for all except Wall Street banks and those close to the government money spigots.

My comment is regarding whether ideas fall in the same category as physical goods. Ideas are fundamentally different, in that they're non-scarce unless we make them scarce via intellectual property laws. And I question whether those laws really promote human flourishing, or whether they simply protect whoever is close to the government.

Regarding China, copying without attribution should be prosecuted as a form of reputational or brand fraud, as it fails to give credit to others for the idea. And sure, under existing intellectual property laws many Chinese firms ought to be prosecuted and held accountable---I don't advocate breaking existing laws.

I simply think that the laws out to be brought into better alignment with reality, and ideas simply aren't scarce (at least in how economics considers scarcity).

Imagine we're a primitive people in a forest village. If I steal your ax, that's theft. However, if I see your ax, and make my own ax based on your idea, did I steal anything from you?

In the 2nd scenarios above, you may have to work harder in your woodchopping business, as I'm now competition, but doesn't that mean that the villagers benefit from better access (cheaper prices) to wood-chopping services?

We currently define ideas as property. But is that ethically defensible? Now, if I claim to have originated the ax idea, I'm maybe stealing your brand or reputation. I should have to give credit to you for the idea of an ax, but I don't see how making a copy is theft. Ideas are not scarce; they're inherently shareable.

Generally, technology is reduces prices, so if that were commercialized the prices would come down... provided the growing money supply doesn't negate tech deflation.

For basic office tasks and browsing the Internet, Debian stable won't waste your time: it should just work.

"J" = jour

The Fed printing money affects the whole world as long as the US dollar is the global reserve currency.

I'm not sure its fair to say inflation is falling. Across Europe at least, I keep hearing about rising inflation in food prices---and that affects the most poor among us the most.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35290460

But at least according to La-Croix.com, the supposed 14% increase in food thefts doesn't bear out in the data.

https://www.la-croix.com/France/Inflation-vraiment-hausse-vo...

I really appreciate seat61.com when I need to book train travel. The site is full of info as to when and where to book to get the best price, as well as what level of service various trains in various countries provide.

Not disagreeing with your sequence of events, as reduced energy production and wars do send prices higher. But, there's another sequence to consider that I think is simultaneously happening:

economic production makes a widget representing 100,000th of overall economy > prices set based on 100,000th of all money in existence > the banking system quadruples existing money in the system > the widget's price (eventually) quadruples as people realize there's a ton more money chasing the same number if goods.

And, at least according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve bank's numbers, the US Dollar money supply has increased some 13x since the 2008 financial crises, and 5x since the beginning of 2020. Ballooning the world's reserve currency like that will have disastrous inflationary effects /at some point/. The fact its happening now, while tragic, seems wholely foreseeable.

Dropping your cynical take, and for reasons other than buying illegal services, bitcoin plus strong privacy tools provides a path towards eventually separating money payments from identity.

Money is a form of speech, in that it communicates values. Sometimes freedom of speech requires strong anonymity. I see no reason money shouldn't have the same characteristics. The alternative---that governments and other entities get to surveil all our monetary speech/actions---will only have further chilling effects on freedom and civil society.

We need monetary privacy to preserve ordered freedom in society, not to buy criminal services.

I'm glad police are trying to reduce DDoS crimes.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous, its pseudonymous. Unless one is extremely careful and takes a number of secondary steps, bitcoin won't protect your identity.

About 509 years ago the Dutch invented common stock in companies, creating a new way for humans to work together. That had long-term sociological impact in society.

Today, there are people who have created new ways of working together by building on top of bitcoin, where its not a company or a legal entity of any king, but people who may not know or trust each other in meatspace are collaborating and getting paid for their work as they deliver products and services. And their collaboration is governed by humans, not a smart contract, but in a decentralized manner to protect their project. They're developing software, providing customer support, tutorials, project management, etc, and all of it being paid for by the project---all without bank accounts, a corporation, or geographic dependency.

As far as I'm aware, https://bisq.network/dao/ is the only running project that gas built functioning governance on top of bitcoin. I know that the MakerDAO (that runs the DAI stablecoin) and ShapeShift (altcoin exchange) have been built and are running in top of Ethereum or other altcoins. So that's at least three separate projects creating value in historically new ways.

When I explained this to a sociologist friend of mine, she was amazing, asking who's studying and writing about such historically important innovation.

I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Its trailblazing, hinting at the new possibilities that combining the Internet with programmable decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant money could bring to humanity. Only time will show which approaches bear long-term fruit here, but there's a lot of potential.

> A Ponzi scheme pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.

You just described how Social Security in the USA is funded. Its billed as government-run social insurance, but funded as a ponzi.

I agree. However, it can be tough finding documentation how to use plain TeX. I find that increasingly I'm using OpTeX, which is a much smaller set of macros than LaTeX, simpler this use, understand, and reason about.

https://petr.olsak.net/optex/

I heard a researcher speaking on how litigation against playground owners in the 1970s in the USA over injuries and in one case a child fatality drove the more stringent playground regulations. However, the unintended consequence was an increase in children's long bone injuries, and her research suggested that this is due to kids not learning to navigate risk on the "safer" playgrounds and eventually getting injured elsewhere where the ground isn't forgiving like all the artificial playground surfaces.

Take you kids to play in the woods!

The difference I've seen between these in Paris (and elsewhere in France) and the few I saw in Berlin was that nearly all the French playgrounds have that spongy artificial ground, while the German playgrounds more often have a natural surface---sand, wood chips (as in the photo), or dirt.

Can anyone who's played with this let me know if its something a 7-year old who has ideas about game making could try out?

Biometric phone security is only secure until a judge or police officer compels you to unlock your phone; and legally you must comply, because your face or finger aren't speech. However, if you use a passphrase, (at least in the US and other countries with string freedom of speech laws) you can't be legally compelled to unlock the phone, as that would impinge on freedom of speech.

I never use biometrics to unlock my phone or computer for that reason.

No, SMS-based 2FA is the security problem due to SIM-swapping attacks.

Loss of a phone with a 2FA authenticator app isn't a security problem, unless one failed to make backups of the 2FA secrets for restauring.

The fact that Coinbase offers 2FA via an app is already potentially more secure than most US banks.

It would be far better if Coinbase defeated to TOTP for 2FA.

My bank still forces me to rely on 2FA via SMS. I would live to find a US bank that would let me use a OTP 2FA app. Any suggestions?

Keep your money in a bank and basicly they owe you a debt. If the bank goes belly-up, you stuck hoping FDIC insurance covers you.

Not your keys, not your coins. If one has significant savings in bitcoin, one needs to hold the private keys oneself, not trusting any third-party like Coinbase or a bank. Ideally in a geographically distributed multisignature setup to mitigate against loss, user-error, or theft.

Do we know if the OP's 96k was coins sitting on Coinbase, or if he had a linked bank account and the attacker used the SIM card swap attack via Coinbase to drain his bank account?

Perhaps Indian author Vishal Mangalwadi's example of the mathematical theory behind the mechanical clock would illustrate the flow of ideas well. He wrote (I'm going my memory here, so I don't have his exact dates) that an Indian mathematician came up with the theory for a mechanical clock in the early 11th century, but didn't try to build one; 50 years later middle eastern Muslim scholars were debating and studying the theory, but didn't try to build one; another half-century later the idea had come to Europe, and it was there in the early 12th century that the bishop of Paris suggested to his monks that building a mechanical clock would improved their ability to organized their communal work and worship in their monastic communities.

Mamgalwadi also asks the question of why neither the Indian nor Islamic cultures tried to build a mechanical clock when they knew of the theory. He suggests that the Indian Hindu belief that reality is /maya/ or illusion (and one meditates to escape the illusion) prevented them from trying to make a clock; in the middle-east, he suggests that the Islamic rejection of possibility of God becoming incarnate in the person of Jesus prevented them from trying to flesh out the theory, while in Christian medieval Europe their belief in incarnation primed the culture for trying to work the theory out in practice.