notch656a

"Better" is not a universal truth. It is dependent on the context of the individual transaction.

If you simply refuse to acknowledge that crypto might be cheaper and/or faster than available traditional finance options for some particular transactions, not in the theoretical but in the real-word options present, then I simply yield that you must live in an alternate reality than many people. One thing I really hate is losing money and losing time, and the very narrow circumstances where I have used crypto to buy goods (legal goods) I sure as hell wasn't going through the pain in the ass of dealing with crypto for ideological reasons.

It's going to be hilarious, after all the time spent world-wide to snuff out self-custodial bearer bonds and shares, if governments actually explicitly legitimize self-custody decentralized stable coins.

That's an interesting take. The actual transfer is the one big upside I see of crypto over wire. And remember 'wire' is not a currency, we're comparing transfers here not the suitability of a currency ('wire' as an independent concept has none).

I've done many wire transfers and many crypto transfers and the one consistent thing I've found is the crypto transfers are both cheaper and faster. If I could do crypto transfers with old school stable currency (not some cheesy stablecoin hoodwinker in the Bahamas) it'd be the holy grail.

If you want paper gold instead of real gold you should probably be holding gold mining company ownership instead.

I've had domestic wires held up for days just to go through yet another KYC when wiring between two already KYC'd accounts. If the authorities decide to civil asset forfeiture it in the process, the recourse is to pour 10s of thousands in lawyers and just maybe get the money back after the legal process eats half of it and my life gets looked over by a fine tooth comb because some middle-aged fat belly government man who's entire self worth is how much he can seize without the decency of a criminal trial had his feelings hurt that the citizen had a minor win.

So I don't think wire is necessarily a perfect substitute. There are different ways to get fucked and you have to decide which risk looks most palatable for each individual transaction. It's sort of a pick between a traditional finance system set up to fuck the little guy or the crypto landscape which is a fraud fest wild-west of living at your own peril.

Sorry if I did a poor job of conveying, but my comment was never intended to rationalize committing suicide or not committing suicide. It was to illustrate society generally doesn't respect these wishes, that these wishes often fail, and that ending up in an institution staffed by our juniors may be less of our own choice than we may think.

Buying and selling horseshit, generally, is not a crime. Taking a deposit for the purchase of overpriced horse-shit, and then instead betting on the value of another pile of horse shit, while telling depositors you won't do that is the most immediate crime I foresee SBF having to answer to.

How on earth is this comment grey. Basic biology is women, with a higher reproductive burden, to be more selective.

Something like 95% of suicides fail and then they'll toss you into a home or someplace terrible to keep you from doing it again.

What you're describing is tragedy of the commons. No negative consequences to not having children, but big negative disproportional cost to the parents raising them. With disproportionately privatized losses and socialized gains.

People often say you shouldn't have kids for your own retirement. In the ultimately hypocrisy, they often mean kids will be for everybody's retirement (when they're forced to pay social security taxes as adults).

The economic incentive is to let others have kids and shoulder disproportionately the costs, while you can free ride and "not have negative consequences." Immigration doesn't solve this problem at the system level as removing children from foreign tax pool into our domestic pool shifts benefits from one elderly person to another.

I wonder if he started taking emsam after he knew his goose was cooked several months ago. Might be the only way to keep going with a straight face while you bet the farm on red hoping to get the deposits back.

MIT grad, ex Jane Street trader, comes from lawyer-professor family, garnered VC capital from big names like Kevin O'Leary and lead the pitches.

Dude knew what he was doing and if he didn't it was done out of such criminal negligence that he's still to blame.

I thought starve the beast was where non-wartime federal spending as a percent of GDP increased multiple times over the past 100 year period. The beast to be starved being the individual citizen and businesses.

Yes you can see, the beast has been horribly starved.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

I think you would be hard pressed to find someone currently living with a license that got it at a time where it was OK to will-nilly hit pedestrians.

Where I live private businesses can act as agents of BMV. IT creates an economic incentive for productivity and pleasantness because the customers are not captive to this business and since they are in competition and profit from each license, they try to make the process as efficient as possible. Meanwhile go to an actual BMV and no fucks are given because there is literally no economic incentive to move along nor be nice to you.

Arizona driver license don't expire until you are 65. The linked website is innaccurate.

I think New York State should also require the consent of children before institutionalizing them for non-criminal matters. The history of New York state suggests they are child abusers and mentally unfit to make decisions to forcibly institutionalize the non-criminal mentally ill.

If I were a child of sufficient age to express desires I would rather beg in the streets in a state of psychosis than be in the institutions such as New York's Willowbrook State School.

I think the gulf between opinions here is I see adulthood (and fundamentals like ability to do as you please to your own body) as irrevocable until at least a crime against a (not yourself) victim has been performed. Ideally I would live in a society where people have agreed to such, in practice I've just tried to move to places where the least number of people such as my counterparty above exist so as to reduce my exposure to such impositions of violence. In practice I've ended up in fairly rural western states where individualism is highly preserved, you can do things like buy weed without a card or carry a gun without a license and hell even be senile/demented/schizophrenic at the same time as both and as long as you don't fuck with anyone else people tend to not impose anything on you -- notwithstanding no such place perfectly does this and you'll no doubt find horrible counterexamples where this didn't play out.

I do not think the alternative society that say maximizes certain utilities at the cost of consent is wrong per se as long as it's possible to freely enter/exit such a society, I just find it incompatible with my values. While I disagree with the notion of stopping someone who has asked his/her respects to be honored in regard to suicide, I don't think it's some moral failing if a private individual makes an in-the-moment reaction to stop them. It's pretty much human instinct to try to preserve innocent life of those around us, so hopefully it hasn't been read that I think you're a bad person or something if you see someone cutting themselves and you stop them.

The dictator part in me, if given the ability, would wave a magic wand and make these individuals 100% neurotypical for 24 hours. At the end of the time, I would ask them if they want to (1) wave the wand again and stay this way as long as they like (2) Go back to their <diagnosed disease> self or (3) commit suicide. I don't know what the answer would be, but I imagine the vast majority would pick (1), a few would pick (2) and a few would pick (3). From that point on, I would defer their suicide decisions to themselves.

Sadly that is not the reality we live in. The dictator, in this case is New York and various government entities. A government notorious for putting mentally ill in wards where people are "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo." [0] Without magic wands, the doctors are not always returning them to neurotypical condition, but rather often some other, perhaps clinically more palatable often drug-induced different mental state. There is often no neurotypical state the wand can be waved to, and often the decision for suicide overlaps between "ill" ad not ill persons particularly when they're subjected to indefinite stays in facilities under conditions of sexual abuse such as historically found in New York mental wards. Hell I might argue it may be cruel to stop someone from committing suicide to avoid being "helped" by New York.

That is, we are dealing with gritty, dirty reality where the mentally ill entity that is the state of New York, itself unqualified in its mental facilities, has a history of sexually and physically abusing people [0, but that's not all] to "protect" them from their own mental illness/suicide etc. Even if the consent argument fails on merits (I disagree), I argue the decision cannot and should not rest on the state in non-criminal concerns of imposing force on the ill (and notwithstanding the dystopic notion of government entities choosing who meets often poorly defined mental diseases).

With the state totally unqualified, and the individual on his own on the street often with family far removed, I defer to his perhaps ill consent. Notwithstanding, of course all help that can be offered should be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

So this isn't meant at all to provide an analogy, as it's a different circumstance. But I'm curious about your personal opinion. Someone has curable cancer (but definitively imminently fatal), but they irrationally reject treatment saying "the stars aren't aligned properly for it" or some nonsense like that. OK to tie them down and cut out the cancer? I'm always curious where people draw the line for when force is ok to use to make someone do the 'better' or more life-giving thing.

It would be odd indeed if it was OK to stop the dying only if they intentionally performed the action that led to their (imminent) death, but not OK to stop the dying if it was caused by something like a disease.

I imagine that was a traumatic experience for you. Trauma has been known to make people make irrational and poor choices.

I can't honestly say I know that living in a psychosis (medicated or not) is always better than dying. I defer that judgement to the owner of the body contemplating suicide. Personally no I would not stop the bleeding if asked not to, whether their choice was rational or not. I believe consent and personal choices trump my feelings or trauma from past experiences, even if it turns out the choice of others may be misplaced.

It's not the offering of help I take issue with. It's the use of force/violence to impose it, most especially in cases where there is no criminal wrongdoing.

Personally I find your stance far more judgmental than mine; no one needs to 'justify' to someone else why they will or will not commit suicide. It's not even for me to justify or not when someone else does that and I reject your allegation I've done so.

Doesn't take a month to cancel his passport. Wouldn't his stay be illegal at that point and he could easily be deported?

The legal position of starting off as a free person and having that taken away is not at all analogous to one of someone who starts out as an unfree person (child) and has (or hasn't) reached self agency. Pretty disingenuous analogy, and even then we're ignoring the contextual differences typical present between mother/father/guardian and a government apparatus. This is seen time and time again, for example the burden for a parent to not have their kid removed is not at all the same as the burden to get your kid back from state custody. That is the decision making path (grant agency to non-free person vs don't remove agency to free person) is not symmetrical in either direction as you mistakenly suggest towards.

Also If we're going by someone with compromised mental faculties, I would say an organization (state of New York) who physically and/or sexually abuses the disabled* is not fit to make these decisions. The New York State government has proven themselves to have compromised mental faculties and thus unable to make these decisions to violently/forcibly institutionalize the portion of 'mentally ill' adults who don't aggress upon others. In part New York paired down their institutions because they were such terrible places for these people to be, often worse than in the gutter with teeth rotting.

IMO even the disabled, especially if they are not acting in a criminal capacity, should be asked for their consent before violently being forced into institutions of physical and sexual abuse for which New York is known.

*grep for my below comment about Willowbrook State School where we discover the (mentally disabled) children you worry so much about are actually abused by New York when institutionalized.

Enjoy the generous 'help' New York provides when they operate an expanded system of wards:

  Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo" and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions.

...

   Shortly thereafter, in early 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then an investigative reporter for WABC-TV in New York, conducted a series of investigations at Willowbrook uncovering a host of deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate sanitary facilities, and physical and sexual abuse of residents by members of the school's staff. 

It's a far off memory now, but it turns out these are the conditions New Yorkers choose when they create these kind of expanded wards, which ultimately resulted in them being shut down. It's no wonder so many might choose their teeth rotting out in a gutter over this help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

The moral of the story is people should be forced to do things without their consent if they'll be healthier/better for it?

I find myself utterly incompatible in living in such a society and I've spent much of my life seeking other people and locations that eschew such violence

I don't think their should be a court of rationality. You should have the right to be irrational, including the right to commit suicide because sad face or a lizard looked at you wrong, if you can do it without aggressing upon others. Your body, your choice.

If someone asks and you say no, what do you want them to do? IMO if someone would rather be in a gutter with their teeth rotting out than in an institution, that's their prerogative if they can do it without aggressing upon others.

AFAIK in new york the wards were closed largely in response to abhorrent conditions exposed in a documentary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School and other locations.

Bitcoin is entertaining to some people. It also allows you to lower transaction fees in certain situations, or make an electronic irreversible transaction relatively quickly compared to ACH/wire.

My point is that Buffet seems to understand non-tangible benefits are still valuable, and not only that he is hypocritical in his reasoning that he would have to sell it back to you.