sergefaguet

I have HPPD and it is kind of fun and not at all distressing or problematic for my life. Cool part of how my brain works.

Doesn’t require it but it is ok if that happens.

Change by definition requires breaking established rules and is how societies grow. Normal part of the process.

Yep my thoughts too. He writes like a juvenile philosophy student who has attended one too many gender studies class. The insecurity and mediocrity seeps from every sentence.

she will, and she will be heavily funded. i'd love to invest in her next thing.

he is a genius and one of the most talented people in the world.

just watch this video and check out his charm, communication skills, ability to speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp-CM-gQik&feature=youtu.be

of course you want to bet on him, his talents are an unfair advantage in just about any business.

right, everyone can build one of the world's best-known brands and become a billionaire. super easy, no talent needed.

just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp-CM-gQik&feature=youtu.be

the guy is an absolute genius, master of charisma and communication, one of the best speakers i've ever seen. he calmly and easily responds to every difficult question ARS throws at him. i aspire to learn from him and would love to spend time with him.

of course people will give him much more capital.

Because he’s a very talented entrepreneur and that’s who investors want to bet on

Ahh, so nice that we developed cryptocurrencies with the explicit goal of making it impossible for UN trade bodies and other centralized actors to halt their rise :)

But good luck guys, you will need it!

well, the thing is existing institutions are completely fucked. governments simply do not represent us and there is no trust for them. we have not opted into these systems, they do not speak for us, and they are not legitimate.

we are indeed social creatures and we are developing new civic and social innovations. this mostly relates to actively opting into communities with people we like that share our values and that do not attempt to control us. and crypto/web3 enables us to exit the rotten institutions that try to coerce us into being part of them, and create new institutions that represent our values.

it is pretty obvious when you think about it. only institutions we actively and freely opt into can actually be legitimate.

and the idea that something that claims a monopoly on violence also claims to be legitimate is just completely, utterly laughable. and what is going on right now is that the clown car is finally flying off a cliff :)

I’m not ignoring this.

You are making the moral assumption that just because someone has a better negotiating position in a situation there is a moral obligation to intervene in some centralized way to “correct the imbalance.”

I am denying your assumption and presenting a different point of view which has no less of a claim to morality or truth than yours.

Interesting. I must have missed the point when unions became about voicing concerns. Last I recall, creating unions is an attempt at monopolizing labor to extort the employer. When this tactic is applied to any other factor of production it is called a “cartel” and engaged in “market manipulation.”

How surprising that employers who pay above-market wages do not wish to be extorted further. All the modern propaganda says they have to welcome this benevolent expression of democratic freedoms!

An extremely efficient and competent corporation doing everything it can to deliver goods cheaper and faster to hundreds of millions of people while creating value for tens of millions of shareholders? And now it has more and more impact running social services too?

How dare they do this travesty without democratic oversight. Clearly the best way forward is to regulate them so that they are on a level playing field with other democratically overseen government services.

Unfortunately what you refer to as a “problem of currency losing value” is a feature for a government, not a bug. They want this because it allows them an additional path to taxation by diluting all existing holders of fiat.

The only way to prevent being diluted is to not hold fiat and end up in a situation where it is held only by government beneficiaries, i.e. that the government is inflating to pay people affected by inflation. Then their ability to inflate is de facto obliterated.

He’s not saying society “should” be structured this way.

It is more about that it “already is” and “will be even more so.”

Glad that someone is talking about the reality of how things are. The death of the nation state and other hierarchical organizations and of broad-based democracy is written in the mathematical structures of networks.

It just makes no sense to treat all nodes in a complex network equally since they are unequal by virtue of network structure itself. And it certainly makes no sense to create large C&C hierarchies when well-positioned nodes and clusters carry far more value and information.

And reality does not tolerate inefficient structures in the name of ideology for long in the modern world especially since all ideology is variable and none fundamental.

It will of course be covered up by various PR for a long time. But the writing is on the wall.

A lot of people are excited about that. For good reason too. The very idea that two people exchanging private value should be subject to “democratic oversight” is a totalitarian nightmare.

very consistent with my sense. it has become much easier to raise money from US VC while being based internationally in the last 12 months

There’s something quite un-human about this idea of just being content and accepting and not standing out. Yes this is what a lot of meditators aim for and it likely means less emotional variability in life.

But it is not peaceful contentment that lifted us from the caves and will lift us to the stars. It is passion. Love. Hatred. Desire. Dreams. Despair. Individualism. That is a large part of what it means to be human.

Not the whole thing to be sure - the sense of unity with all that I get from DMT or similar things is sublime. But a large part of life is about intense striving for the dreams I have. As a self that is separate from the world.

Being happy through absolute contentment with one’s lot in society sounds like what being one of the social insects feels like.

Yep. The reason was that geography based communities were relevant. That reason is getting out of date. And it is important to remember that nation states are a step in an evolutionary process, not the end point.

The reason these things are happening is that the world needs different institutions going forward and the failure of the old is part of that evolutionary process. And the old naturally dislikes being replaced and invents myths that claim this replacement is a negative event. It is not.

A lot of what they are saying is that governments are losing legitimacy and ability to deliver what people want, and this will shift governance and power to other institutions that will take over much of how humanity interacts.

I guess that is bleak for the spy agencies but not for the world overall. People will be happier with a reversal of the tendency of governments to get larger and a return to more fragmented communities that humans have evolved to be happy in.

I’m surprised they have the balls to say this though

Legitimacy is generally not an objective thing. So there’s not much of a point in arguing here further.

i'm not in the US for that reason. and very many people are not following laws.

On academia, I work closely with a lot of professors at Oxford, MIT, Caltech and the like and they uniformly believe academia is in decline and with horrible institutional incentives accelerating that decay.

The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.

Unfortunately the majority of people who will read this thoughtful and inspiring letter will only see trivial stories about evil corporations. Stories they have been fed by the media and have accepted without thinking.

Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions that remain in America today. Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.

And amidst that sole set of institutions that inspire, thrive and lead us into the future, Amazon is one of the most inspiring.

Jeff, thank you for helping prove that humans can create great things.

Excellent comment

what is important to remember is that people who ignored the law made a huge return on holding their gold, and people who followed the law lost out

bans are a very strong advertisement for piling into the asset being banned. especially when holders of the asset in question are quite difficult to identify

another related point is that busting regulations is a great way to create great wealth. Dhirubhai Ambani created his first capital by smuggling. the Rothschilds did too – by busting Napoleon's sanctions

make your own conclusions about ways to behave in response to economic regulations ;)

This highlights why governments are impotent: - it has been 5 years since GDPR was implemented to great fanfare - by the time of implementation data mining has been going on for many years - 5 years after 90% of businesses use dark patterns that are non-compliant - actual fines and enforcement are negligible - maybe they will start enforcing more aggressively... after another 5 years

It is simply the case that large bureaucratic organizations are too slow and too incompetent to deal with rapidly changing technology. And the tech community sees this and has no respect for governments. How can you respect impotent Industrial Age structures today anyway?

My view is that by mid-century Western governments will be going bankrupt in droves since tech will optimize out their ability to collect taxes or inflate currency. Plus they will just be extremely behind the curve and become irrelevant to everyone’s tech-dominated lives.

It is tech companies that will lead the future. It doesn’t matter if this does not agree with pro-democratic sensibilities. Sensibilities will change and adapt to reality.

No, you are not. A substantial majority of people consider this foolish

Just think of it as a weird entertainment show that doesn’t have to be rational. There are crazies in all historical eras; the various social justice people are ours :)