ls15

During the pandemic, some shopping centers in my area started to measure wrist temperatures. Once, my wrist was still cold from winter temperatures outside:

"28.5, ok, next"

> the scams are completely devoid of any sophistication

Some scams, sure, but those really baffle me. If you are kind of smart and you know that you are scamming people and these people know who you are, while you are in a country that prosecutes scammers, I would think that at the very least, you'd want some plausible deniability in the form of "We tried our best, but our goals were too ambitious and unfortunately the market decided against us".

I suspect that many other scams tried to construct this form of plausible deniability.

The Bitconnect scam for example was pretty straight-forward, but these guys at least were smart enough to be anonymous when they forwent plausible deniability.

Even though it is not an official service, in Germany there is Abgeordnetenwach [0](Translate: representative watch), where citizen can ask parlamentarians directly. Some parlamentarians are great at answering questions, while some never reply and some only let their offices copy & paste standard replies. I wish politicians would be forced to make an effort to reply to their sovereign. Certain reasonable anti-spam and DoD measures granted.

[0] https://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/

With cryptographic signatures I could at least verify that something stems from the same account that I previously agreed with, but this would require people to be able to manage their own private keys.

Actually nothing would stop people from signing their own comments today and sometimes it is done.

With e2ee messengers I feel pretty confident that a message comes from the right / real person after I verified their public key.

> But then again it's a bit dystopian

I am having a hard time to imagine a scenario that is more dystopian

Create a crypto project, ideally a premined one, delegated PoS or so with outrageous performance claims. With non-premined PoW coins it is much harder. Ideally with a huge supply of tokens. Let's say 100,000,000,000 total supply.

Form a foundation and talk to the media. Sell some at a sub-cent price during multiple ICO rounds, but make sure to keep 70-90% (tokens for team, advisors, runnning costs, token burns, security claims that are baked into the protocol and whatever other reason you can come up with).

Sell some to yourself for free. Use money from the first round to pay for marketing and exchange listing - yes, most projects other than Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero need to pay to be listed, even though exchanges make money from trading fees. Ideally also run your own exchange, which gives you more creative freedom and may save cost.

Talk to the media again and spam all crypto communities.

Use the tokens that you sold to yourself for wash trading on multiple exchanges. Since you sell to yourself, your main costs are trading fees. Use ICO money for that and for buying some tokens from others.

Market price is the latest price that someone paid for the token. Market capitalization is Market Price x Circulating Supply. Increase market price by wash trading at higher prices, you control the price, since you own the most tokens. Some ICO customers will sell their tokens back to you, but the majority of them will wait for much higher prices.

Spread rumors about possible 1,000% price increases when the token gets adopted by the masses. Some new buyers will obtain some of your tokens as your token is rising on websites like coinmarketcap.com because of the rising market capitalization.

Do more marketing, spread memes and rumors about partnerships with FAANGs and governments, as well as potential 10,000% price increases.

Monitor the price. Wash trade higher. Monitor price and order books. Once the price is high enough, start to sell more to other buyers. When the orderbooks are full of other people, dump more and let it cool down afterwards.

Repeat until you are rich enough or until people aren't buying the token anymore.

Exit.

"Whiskey and cigars for me and my friends please"

Education does not start at the age of 21 though

Isn't it uneconomic for a country to educate young people and then deport them as soon as they (are old enough to) start working and paying taxes?

> It's worth noting that almost all of this is still the output of the 9/11, where US and Saudi systems did not communicate and resulted in known terrorists in Saudi Arabia being able to travel at will into the USA.

> I don't like biometrics, but the hyperbole needs to be tuned down a bit here.

The entire official response to 9/11 is the hyperbole, not the criticism of those measures.

I think at this point, Europeans should be allowed to vote in U.S. elections.

Or 1959-12-31, so nobody has to guess if it is yyyy-MM-dd or yyyy-dd-MM

> google-lite life

I like that term. I am a happy DDG user who uses Youtube without an account and typically avoids everything else by Google. Sorry for not clicking the thumbs up button or subscribing to your channel - I would if it would not require a Google identity. I also use Firefox and would prefer if Mozilla would find a way to diversify away from Google sponsorship.

If your survey is a Google form, I am not participating. If your document is on Google behind a login-wall, I am not reading it. If your email account is on Google, I will ask you about other channels. I think my data is worth much more than Google is willing to pay for it and they don't deserve to get it in exchange for a couple of candies or glass beads.

Better have a gasoline generator with you.

I'd say n mandatory coding days per month for every software manager to keep them on the ground.

> With your logic, EU and all other government should ban facebook, twitter as there is high probability that US companies supplies data to 3 letter companies.

As a EU citizen: Just have a very close look at Facebook and TikTok and determine if they really follow our laws. If not, fine them into the ground.

How many?

Where Germany certainly fails is providing energy at consumer-friendly prices. We pay almost three times as much for electricity as people in the U.S. on average. Close to Denmark, who lead that ranking. Japan has to pay about half as much.

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

You may be surprised to see that Germany is a net exporter of power:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

The main issue with green tech is that it sometimes doesn't produce electricity, but when it does, it is great. I think Germany has to import electricity for about 8 days/year.

With a bit of nuclear this could be brought to zero, now that natural gas is not a cost-effective option anymore.

From the first link:

> For business workers, drinking is non-negotiable. Drinks after work strengthen relationships with colleagues, and an invitation to drink with an office superior is a great compliment that should not be turned down. The drinking etiquette, which requires that a person’s cup never be left empty, increases the pressure to drink. Constant topping up makes binge drinking the norm, while refusing drinks is seen as rejecting generosity or denying someone who is trying to help you have a good time.

I've seen that form of institutionalized alcoholism in other countries as well and in many areas up to high-ranking public officials. I wonder what the long-term costs of this culture are.

They can close if it is too expensive to run.

> enthralled

I never heard that word. Is that an euphemism for "corrupted"?

Which is weird to me, because MM in latin numerals is 2,000

There is a way to express one million as M̅ (horizontal bar above M for M * 1,000), but I think this was a later addon that was not used by the Romans. They probably rarely had to deal with numbers in the millions and if they did, they could just express them as a product like M * M

> she may have barely understood

Mathematics degree. Both parents economists.

How do I know that it would not even worsen the situation, as it clearly would introduce other inequalities?

Frustrated German here, hoping that the government will at some point realize that investing in nuclear is more useful than dismantling the German economy, so that others will burn the fossil fuels that Germany does not need then anymore.

The tokenomics are important. They could create as many PoW blockchains as they wanted without the coins being securities. The important part is that they created all tokens themselves and then sold them via ICO with funding rounds to investors who expected to make a profit from it.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ftx-token/tokenomics

I think it is more of a stretch to call FTT a cryptocurrency than calling it a security.

Exchange tokens are amongst the more obvious securities IMO. I think they tick all marks of the Howey Test:

    - An investment of money
        (Send money/BTC, get token)
    - In a common enterprise 
        (the exchange)
    - With the expectation of profit
        (Token burns)
    - To be derived from the efforts of others
        (Exchange pays with profits for token burns)

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp

But what are the downsides?

That restaurant at the corner that never has guests, but doesn't go bankrupt, is probably the same.