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Crypto and its problems

"Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" - Folding Ideas

and

[M]arkets are distributed systems.

Even though there are, in fact, very strict regulators and regulations, I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. (Tax authorities merely want to know, and anyway, notifying them is asynchronous and lossy.) Prices are set through peer-to-peer negotiation and supply and demand, almost automatically, through what some call an "invisible hand." It's really neat.

As long as we're in the continuous control region.

As long as the regulators are doing their job.

Here's what everyone peddling the new trendy systems is so desperately trying to forget, that makes all of them absurdly expensive and destined to fail, even if the things we want from them are beautiful and desirable and well worth working on. Here is the very bad news:

Regulation is a centralized function.

The job of regulation is to stop distributed systems from going awry.

Because distributed systems always go awry

...

I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.

Despite my ongoing best efforts, I have never seen any exception to this rule.

Even the fanciest pantsed distributed databases, with all the Rafts and Paxoses and red/greens and active/passives and Byzantine generals and dining philosophers and CAP theorems, are subject to this. You can do a bunch of math to absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your database is completely distributed and has no single points of failure. There are papers that do this. You can do it too. Go ahead. I'll wait.

\

Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.

Whoops, there's a hierarchy after all!

Tô Minh Sơn's comment on apenwarr:

"Men prefer to will nothingness than to not will"

and also pointed me to chainalysis's ranking of crypto adoption with Vietnam being on top

conflict theorists

People who vie for power are locked in the most obvious zero sum game in existence, and so they're necessarily conflict theorists. People who have no lust for power themselves and try to explain the world in terms of mistake theory are basically forced to speculate that Power does not exist at all except as epiphenomenon of some poor coordination or whatever, or does not matter. It exists and matters a great deal, however, and shapes the way they live and think, and seeks to triumph over them ever harder. They just don't know yet.

/u/Ilforte

the shopping cart

The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.

No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.

A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.

The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.

As To Minh Son says: "4chan shit"

  • in society
  • 1 min read

democracy as a terminal value

telling people that they only get to win elections if they vote for things they don't actually want is isomorphic to telling them they don't get to vote. The point of voting is securing one's preferences. If voting can't do that, voting is pointless.

I do not believe anyone involved in this discussion at any level considers democracy itself as a terminal value. If a durable 75% majority of Americans supported reinstating slavery of a specific ethnic/racial group, it would be madness to expect the other 25% to simply accept this outcome because them's the rules, so whaddya gonna do? If you convince people that they do not have a reasonable hope of achieving their preferences through the political system, they will work to achieve those preferences through other systems. - /u/FCfromSSC

society is not ready 2

I had a thought the other day, that if there really is a Superman. he would have used his superhearing and hear the cries and whispers of people locked in cellars/basement all over the world.

I dare WarnerBrothers to make a movie about that.

  • in society
  • 1 min read

society is not ready

The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study - HN thread

I was once in a law lecture on medical ethics. We were discussing genetic testing of newborns and how this could detect incest/abuse. A medical doctor in the class was dead against such testing. In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers/brothers. His opinion was that our society is not ready to deal with this, that such abuse is far more common than anyone is willing to admit. He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this. - sandworm101

they are talking about that big cat

A couple years back, one of the big cats at the local zoo escaped his enclosure. High on freedom, he roamed the other habitats and killed eight other animals, none of which he even partially consumed. Wildlife experts were interviewed to explain that this "surplus killing" was the result of his instincts interacting with the unnatural, constructed environment. He was overstimulated, he saw movement, he attacked. "It was completely natural behavior that is in no way reflective of a bad cat."

Not long after, my dad and I happened to be watching the local news together. The anchor reported yet another murder in a high-crime neighborhood. Disgusted, Dad changed the channel. "The way they talk about these people. It's like they're talking about that big cat loose in the zoo."

It stuck with me. I'm sympathetic to the life circumstances that make poverty or crime all but inevitable for people less fortunate than me. I want to understand these dynamics so we can fix them.

But yeah, sometimes when I'm talking to progressive friends, they use almost the exact same language about people from unfortunate backgrounds who do horrible things as the wildlife experts used about the wild animal loose in the zoo. - /u/raggedy_anthem

bullshit jobs

If a man calls a girl 3-5 times who doesn’t want to hear from him an tells him to fuck off everytime, its harassment and he can be charged... if a man calls 100 people a day who all tell him to fuck off and continues that everyday for 20 years... we call that a [sales] career.

...

the fact that expertise in a particular field of compliance and expertise in the government bureaucracy mandating the compliance is the exact same skillset and a common career path is jumping back and forth between the two “Sure i can help you comply with these rules! I was the one enforcing them!” “Sure i can help you write and enforce the rules! I’ve spent the past 4 years complying with them!” Does very little in my confidence for this field. - /u/KulakRevolt

a reply:

I proposed once on this forum that some value is "derivative" of other value, so that none of the people doing sales at an oil company could exist without someone manning the well. I remember being mostly told that economics isn't measured that way. (I consider that economics' problem.)

teenagers lost rights

I think it’s important to recognize that, whether his argument is sound or not, teenagers do occupy a rather historically unique position in the present. People between the ages of 12 and 18, or even 12 and 21, are probably the only group who have steadily lost rights over the last century and a half (maybe dating from 1880 in the US?) as a result of their membership in an immutable group, rather than gaining equal rights with others, as has been the trend for other such groups. Obviously age is more mutable than e.g. race in the absolute sense, but certainly it’s immutable in the sense that it’s not alterable by any human power, only by time itself.

This does seem a bit strange, considered from the perspective of an alien observer: 250 years ago, Alexander Hamilton was selling cargo at 15, publishing influential political writings while attending Columbia University in New York City at the age of 17 and serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp at 19. Now, at those ages respectively, he couldn’t work, instead being forced to be in school, he wouldn’t even be able to drive in NYC, and he couldn’t knock back eggnog with old Georgey either. And why is this? I don’t really know. - some user on /r/TheMotte