nootropicat

Not paying taxes is the single best thing anyone can do. You can get an average market return and you will still move up, relatively, because most people pay taxes. Often it's the difference between having to work or not.

Old money doesn't pay taxes through international arrangements. It's only for the working and lower middle class. Gifts from foreign people, companies and trusts are completely tax free in America for example. It's not talked about unlike bullshit minimum taxes on new money because same people controlling the media use it.

Income tax is primarily designed to keep elites in power and to prevent social mobility, they don't have to do anything special, not paying taxes over decades is an incredible advantage. If you start poor the only realistic option is to risk evasion until you make enough to start not paying legally, and the limitations period on tax evasion runs out.

No they don't, banks have accounts with the central bank. They also have their assets and liabilities. They have to manage the system so that they can manage external withdrawals. When assets outweigh liabilities it's a bankruptcy. When current demand for withdrawals exceeds short term liquid reserves it's a liquidity issue. At no point do banks create base money. A balance in a bank is just an iou for base (central bank's) money.

The only entity that creates money is the central bank. They may even accept mortgages from banks as collateral (including repurchase agreements) to inject new money into the system.

Regulations are supposed to prevent bankruptcy and liquidity issues, but even without any regulations regarding asset ratios, banks can go bankrupt or illiquid.

What he wrote is a popular myth that originated in a misunderstanding how fractional reserve works, it just means they have long term assets to cover short term liabilities. There's a lot of this stuff on youtube.

If it was true no banks would ever fail, qed.

Ultimately being fundamentally wrong in how the financial system works is extremely unlikely to impact anyone's daily life.

There's a type of people that considers good living a sin and they invent 'solutions' like these. The solution to water shortages is to build desalination plants. They are surprisingly cheap - $0.28 per m³.

https://www.meed.com/desalination-tariffs-and-the-race-to-th...

I used to be optimistic, but it's 2023 and the only non-ponzi use case of crypto are stablecoins. What people actually want is to easily trade and transfer US dollars.

Some tokens are pure ponzi schemes (like shib, btc) some are ownership in something that could have productive use (eth, some other smart contract platforms tokens). Yet that use isn't actually happening, so from a general pov it's all a ponzi. The most likely outcome is that nothing productive happens at all.

For an average buyer (esp. btc) mark-to-market returns are already underperforming stocks for years when looking even at previous ATH. So many people own some crypto there's no possible separate source of greater fools elsewhere - most current crypto owners will end up at a massive loss. The long-term underperformance compared to other assets will get even worse.

From the pure hype perspective, I think there's room for one last bubble. There's an army of bagholders (of every token) that will throw good money after bad when prices are sufficiently high again, giving up real wealth (again) in exchange for virtual tokens of either zero or much lower value. They still hold hope of at least going back to 0, or maybe even making money. After the next one, they won't. It will get really depressing.

A ponzi is any system in which the only way for older buyers to cash out is at the expense of later investors. How is 'supply is fixed' relevant?

The only issue with central planning is making people behave according to its rules - it's a problem of motivation. The calculation side itself is evidently better under central planning. Free market is an optimization algorithm and many other exist. It's extremely unlikely simulating prices is the most effective way to allocate, but even if it is, it can be done more efficiently by simulating the process without real world waste.

Everything is slowly centralizing already - some markets remain to provide motivation, but the trend is in the central planning direction.

Given better technology, free markets will definitely die. It could be solved as directly as by overwriting the internal motivation through some brain implant, making people happy to work for the good of the system.

Eip 1559 saved eth holders billions of dollars. It's not possible to perfectly design a system from the start, and in fact ethereum was explicitly started as a work in progress.

Bitcoin would need massive changes to even have a potential to become money. Currently it's the antithesis of money - not backed by anything, in fact the opposite - requires billions per just to function.

The actual cost of running ethereum is negligible, about $5k/day at the upper end. It's just the cost of running thousands of staking nodes.

I would have agreed with you in the past. Now, I have to disagree.

>the web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.

This is exactly why internet was decentralized. A network of social connections between small online spaces people congregated in was essential to find what you wanted. It was somewhat of a replication of the old world - where in order to find an answer, you first had to get into relevant circles (eg. a local club, university, etc). You didn't just get an answer to your question, you inevitably had to sift through a lot of other content and learn about new places.

Google cut through all of that. Ideally, you could just get the answer you wanted, and not even see the rest of the site. The first order effect was that everyone's life get better. The second order effect is that it killed the old decentralized web, because random discovery nearly died down.

LLM are only the next step on this, but I don't think they change much. I think it's mostly going to damage reddit. A lot of reddit questions are an attempt to find an answer to something that google is too dumb to find - but llms may be able to.

The defense to this - are chatrooms, like discord. Sometimes I see people complaining that so much information is now 'hidden' on discord. But that's the exact point. Making information hard to get means people are forced to interact with each other. This creates incentives to contribute.

That's the future. Chatrooms may be replaced by voice based vr, hard to say. We already passed the peak of public information dissemination, and are going back to old style "ask at the university", just more decentralized and online.

>ETH/BTC reached 0.1515 in June 2017

Yes, there were few weeks when ethbtc was higher, but that was over 4 years ago.

There were 6 months of free money during the second half of 2020 with three digit APR. Most active people in defi multiplied their eth holdings several times (4-6x). There was no risk because tokens to dump were received for free.

>Slow and steady wins the race.

No, it doesn't. Yield wins the race. This cycle had a once in a lifetime free money period. There's not making up for missing that. Current yields are single digit but still good.

Bitcoin has been an absolutely terrible bet for the last 4 years. On top of that most people in eth multiplied their holdings during defi summer.

Humans didn't change at all since tests like cruentation were an accepted method.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruentation

Fortunately it appears ai will soon enough act as a modern version of God's judgment, which while still not perfect, should be significantly better than some random cop's gut feeling.

All those arguments reduce to "humans have a soul, computers don't, checkmate atheists". Ironically, soon AI will be able to generate articles arguing that AI can't ever think, automating yet another job.

Any model capable of executing a turing machine (given infinite resources, so in practice bounded of course) can emulate another program, even if inefficiently. GPT empirically can execute a simple vm. At best the 'wrong model' argument would have to point out that specific design collapses once the program to execute becomes too big - no matter how much compute/memory is available, but then, it's only a technical claim about one specific design.

This specific article has another problem - it handwaves the definition of consciousness. It has to do it, because any attempt to actually define necessarily either defeats the whole argument (it's some property of a computable system), or reduces it to a magical claim about an external soul.

Those historical returns are ridiculously optimistic. In fact stocks aren't great once you look globally. Imagine investing starting from 1900 Germany or Russia. In both cases you would be zeroed out. It's a form of survivorship bias to look at American stock markets only.

I think a 0% after-inflation return for a normal investor (ie. no specialized domain knowledge, no insider info) over the next several decades is already mildly optimistic.

Relying on constant insane returns isn't financial independence. Considering how many people are working to extract money from equities it's most likely luck.

Insane returns is one way to get to financial independence, because even if the edge exists, it's going to eventually disappear. You can boast about financial independence once you make enough to live the rest of your life from safe passive yield, after inflation, which in the current very low real rates environment requires a lot - maybe $3M as the bare minimum.

The obsession with plastic recycling is due to human irrationality. We are driven to conserve material resources over hard to imagine energy because matter is tangible. This is a fallacy. Plastic is made from oil, and recycling plastic requires more energy than making new one, therefore recycling plastic is the wasteful route. Just burn it all, problem solved.

Recycling not being economical betrays this reality. It's simply insanity to recycle, unfortunately in most places it's legally forced.

That's because the actual point of progressive taxation is to prevent class mobility.

Does this guy not realize how much he fucked up his Mars idea? You would have to be insane to live in a place controlled by him.

You're thinking of the upper 0.01%. Global upper 1% starts at about $1M nw. Private jets are only really affordable at 9 figures.

Online reality is as much real as the physical one, and as technology for io to the human body advances it's going to increasingly dominate.

She feels noticeably superior to people that prefer the online reality for unclear reasons.

>Western culture already has driven fertility rates well below replacement.

Yes but it's clear it's not 'western culture' but 'industrial economy'. It's happening everywhere. Eg. Iranian TFR dropped off a cliff since the 80s.

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/466445/Fertility-at-below-r...

Kids used to be income generators, now they're a luxury.

Because they would be. Cultures aren't equal. If you disagree, then how do you feel about death penalty for homosexuality in countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran? It's their culture after all and should be respected?

Same for the Bacha-bazi custom in Afghanistan ("a custom in Afghanistan involving child sexual abuse by older men of young adolescent males or boys, called dancing boys, often involving sexual slavery and child prostitution").

The proper way to evaluate cultural practices is by looking at what society they create. Western culture is by no means perfect, but as a whole package - it's the best there is. So yes, they would be better.

The problem with doing this in an adversarial online setting is that it's often used as a trick to make someone admit to some position that's 'close' to the original, and then spin that as agreeing to the original position.

Especially on twitter where post length forces shortcuts which are very easy to maliciously leverage.

In some cases if the assumption is what's being argued itself doing this is an attempt at manipulation, not genuine discussion.

>And at the bottom of it all, one of the first dominos to tumble, was a company called 3 Arrows Capital, which promised to generate revenue by buying crypto-dickbutt NFTS... and then went on the run. I'm not even kidding.

They lost borrowed funds in a ponzi scheme called Luna. I get that you wanted to poke at nfts, but the last remark may make someone think this is how it actually went down.

>1. Incorruptible supply

Not inherent value.

>energy must be expanded. There's no way to fake it.

That's a negative, not a positive. It means bitcoin actively destroy wealth while giving nothing in return.

>3. Self-custody that's difficult (near impossible if done properly) to confiscate by force. If you control your keys, you control your money.

It's not money, so properly described: a ponzi scheme that's harder to shutdown than more traditional attempts.

>Neither of those are impervious to failure

How fragile or not the backing mechanism is a completely separate issue.

>This is why, ironically, fiat is the ponzi scheme

It isn't. Investors (???) into us dollars don't cash out on future investors that were mostly lied to about what the dollar is. It's a tax token and people are forced to buy it.

>It requires everyone involved to believe the lie

No, it doesn't. It requires the ability to physically enforce the law. Whether people like the dollar or not, is, in itself, of zero consequence as long as the enforcement mechanism works.

>If they can't pay the military

Yes, an incompetent government can kill the economy to the point that no amount of force will work, whether due to violent opposition or lack of any remaining wealth. What actually happens is that people switch to using other stuff for transactions. It can be fiat money that's enforced by another country, or something of inherent value, like coffee beans (happened in Venezuela), salt.

>When in reality, it's just one giant cult

It's not a cult, money is always and everywhere a tax extraction technology. It's going to exist in some form as long as it's possible to tax people under a credible threat of violence. One day in history some human ancestor figured out that collecting rare thing (like seashells) and then forcing people to buy them (with actual wealth) is a good way of living and that's how it goes.

>It will inevitably blow up and when it does

...it won't be replaced by bitcoin, but by some other form of fiat money. Below all the false marketing lies a simple truth: buying bitcoin is a one sided wealth transfer, giving away real wealth in exchange for a printed from thin air token. Some people will as long as they think they will be able to sell to a greater fool in the future.

The problem is that eventually the scheme gets old and it's becoming hard to see where they could come from. People that like ponzi schemes realize that it's better to start new ones and be early. Which is exactly what happened. Btc's returns in the last cycle were pitiful. Now it's bear market and it's extremely weak - both absolutely and relatively. It's an old 13 year old thing that failed in all its stated goals. On top of that it's getting hammered by massive inflation.

Next bull cycle it's going to under-perform even worse and that will be the last time general public will think about it.

Gold isn't money. It was when the US government (and other before) forced people to sell other wealth for it to pay taxes. It was an early implementation of money.

Gold has very weak utility today.

>I don't think money needs to be backed by anything.

Which was empirically tested for the last 13 years. What happens is that people get bored of old ponzi schemes and stop buying them, instead preferring to be early in new ones. Which is why inflation-adjusted btc is at the very early Dec 2017 price. Nobody borrows in bitcoin (denominated in it - borrow x btc, pay back x+y btc) for unrelated investments which is one of the main use cases for money.

>It just needs to be limited in its quantity

Artificial scarcity is infinite. Claiming first artificial scarcity is token is somehow special is just a marketing spiel - one that's visibly losing its effectiveness. Which is why bitcoin dominance is dropping so fast.

Money must be backed by something. Bitcoin is backed by nothing. This makes it a ponzi, not money. It's very simple.

It can be used as a means of exchange, but due to being unbacked isn't and can't ever become a store of value, which in turns means it's completely useless as a unit of account due to eternal volatility.

The only way to get real wealth in exchange for bitcoin is to hope someone later decides to buy it. That's again a characteristic of something that isn't money. Americans are forced to sell wealth for us dollars, and without that force it would die. That's actual backing enforced by governmental force.

From all anecdotal reports of 'not working' I noticed all think of outsourcing as something they contract a middleman foreign company for, rather than hire individual remote developers. That company then hires locally. Then they wonder why it doesn't work. That's because no good local dev wants to work for an outsourcing company like that.

Hating Elon is in vogue now, anything else is irrelevant.