CryptoPunk

>Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.

Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.

Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.

Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.

SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

I see laws that prevent the emergence and flourishing of Tesla and SpaceX as far worse than current laws.

I think it stands to reason that nuclear power plant design and construction efficiency would have progressed far more quickly with continued construction of nuclear plants.

And the amount of fossil fuel usage that greater energy production from nuclear sources would have curbed would have saved thousands of lives via reduced air pollution, particularly from coal usage, without coming at the expense of high energy prices, that increase mortality among the poorest segments of the population, that simply capping energy usage would have brought about.

So I disagree the mainstream environmental movement, that opposed the nuclear industry, got it right. I think they got it totally wrong, as any populist movement, that is heavy on simple narratives and ideology, and light on science, is bound to be, when it weighs in on extremely complex large-scale issues.

>Which trend?

1. Uniswap now has deeper liquidity on several major trading pairs than the leading centralized crypto exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance:

https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance

2. The volume of stablecoins on the blockchain is growing rapidly, notwithstanding the recent collapse of LUNA/UST:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255835/stablecoin-marke...

Do they consider putting someone in prison, for their refusal to surrender their privacy and private property in complying with the Income Tax Act, a violation of Human Rights?

How about confiscating someone's fruit cart because they do not possess a licence for it? This led to Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself, which triggered the Arab Spring.

How about fining someone for refusing to use someone else's gender pronouns? Or for refusing to perform a Brazilian wax on the male genitalia of a male who asserts they are a woman?

If not, then I question the existence of any underlying principle, beyond ideology, guiding their assessments.

>There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.

The UDHR, as interpreted by the UNHR High Commission, explicitly defines "collective bargaining rights" as a human right:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

Laws that grant collective bargaining rights mandate an employer to engage in collective bargaining with any set of his workers that form a union and demand collective bargaining, to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker or job applicant. Such a government mandate is a blatant violation of the right to free association, and thus property understood as a violation of human rights. In fact, it violates article 20 of the UDHR, which states:

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

>Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

>but still ran on a platform of "taxes are evil".

One can have a morally consistent world view that holds that voluntarily submitting oneself to the state's tax obligations to be a moral good, comparable to donating to the state, while relying on the state's apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons which compel compliance with state edicts) to tax the private income of people at large is an evil.

>The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising.

I'm a consumer of tether. I know the risks, and I take a calculated risk in using it for some applications. I perceive almost everything in the space as an experiment, and I'm willing to run that experiment. I personally believe that my sentiment is common among those who use and hold crypto assets. Cryptocurrencies are widely perceived as experimental and subject to large unexpected rice declines, hacks and other risks. That goes for stablecoins too.

I don't want you to forcibly prevent people from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child.

Maybe we can give people an option to suspend their rights as free citizens, and subject themselves to your political camp's centralized control, and leave every one else alone to decide for themselves, in accordance with the basic principles of liberal democracy. Is that a fair compromise, or are you going to presume large sections of your fellow citizens are not only financially illiterate, but also are too poor in judgment to realize they are better off under the control of people like you?

I was not referring to this particular project. You implied all crypto projects are scammy. I was taking issue with the over-generalization.

And as an aside, not being in compliance with SEC regulation does not in any way make a project scammy. Being non-compliant with SEC regulations could be the case with LUNA, and still be entirely incidental to it being scammy, as it is possible to operate with no deception and without exploiting any one - which is an essential component of any scam - and still run afoul many SEC regulations.

There is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of crypto tokens being, as a rule, scams.

The vast majority of crypto projects in top 100 by market cap are not like UST/LUNA. The demand for them comes from speculation about future utility, but there is no unsustainable market-beating yield to entice people to deposit new money.

I entirely agree with you on the damage done by lockdown-imposed remote learning for kids. I don't believe we're at a place technologically where telecommunication can fully substitute for in-person learning. If left to our own devices, people would not have chosen to switch their children, en masse, from in-person learning to remote learning, for precisely this reason.

But as technology advances, I believe more activity will voluntarily migrate to electronically mediated, as this mode of interaction becomes more effective. This is especially the case if the law and institutions are adapted to make this mode of living more possible. People should have a choice to switch to this mode of living if they perceive it as advantageous. That is all I'm arguing for.

If my predictions of a mass-transition to an 'always traveling' mode of life don't pan out, then that means the technological evolution I predicted didn't emerge, and no one was harmed because they were able to discern that this mode of life was not advantageous, and avoid switching to it. So I don't see the harm in providing that option, just in case my predictions do pan out, and being able to switch to having a dynamic physical address turns out to be better for most people.

You very much are a Communist, your denials notwithstanding. Communism is a theoretical stateless anarchy, which means it is, in theory, libertarian socialism.

It is also the most destructive ideology in history, that has created the most totalitarian states that man has been subjected to.

Those who believe in your ideology will always side with anti-libertarians, and advocate centralization of power to stifle the individual, because Communism deems man, in his natural state, as evil, and glorifies efforts to stifle him as good.

>I do believe that voluntary contracts can be exploitative (because they can by definition),

By definition, they cannot. If both parties choose to engage in the trade, no one was exploited. Marxism claims otherwise, in order to villify a free society and those who champion it, and legitimize anti-libertarian ideologies like Communism.

>I was thinking more unionisation, social-democratic movements

You framed it as death camp supporting fascists versus your political camp, implying libertarians are in the former, and now you take issue with me calling your camp Communists.

Utterly disingenuous characterization of the impact of Musk in his capacity as Tesla's first major investor, first chairman and 14 year long CEO, and of SpaceX on commercial space flight:

But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust).

I sometimes wonder what kind of psychopathology motivates this kind of mindset and ideology, that prioritizes the demonization of the most financially successful over even basic integrity and truth.

The maths is basically "I'd rather help build death camps than (tolerate minorities/reduce worker exploitation)

Ironically, with your claim that voluntarily agreed to employment contracts are "exploitation", you turned out to support Communism, which is the ideology used by privileged unions to legitimize their privilege, and which has led to the creation of the most totalitarian states in history, while you falsely accuse any one who opposes Communism of being a genocidal fascist.

The property of being preserveable affects more than just the appropriability of resources. Cereals being preserveable also would have made them more tradeable, and trade increases productivity.

Taxation is a concept related to trade, in that it enables resources to be transferred to facilitate larger-scale coordination, and with it, greater division of labor. But it is this ability to transfer resources, to facilitate larger scale coordination and division of labor that I believe would be the underlying economic advantage provided by cereal crops, with taxation just being a subset of this class of interaction.

It stands to reason that the ability to store cereal surpluses more easily also increased cereal crops' utility as a food source by leading to less waste through spoilage.

Intelligence is a higher order trait so harder to describe, but it is still a discernible trait. Roughly speaking, intelligence is the ability to achieve an objective through modeling scenarios in order to determine more optimal behavior.

Intelligence across species shares common characteristics even between dolphins, apes and birds which all evolved it independently.

Any source for Thiel being a fascist?

Every one has challenges. Claiming certain groups have more challenges implies being able to measure the difficulty of challenges, in order to be able to ascertain the challenges of one group are greater than the norm.

But why does one's address have to be fixed to provide these services / establish these qualities?

Society adapted to advance the listed social causes in the historical context where having multiple or frequently changing residences was far too costly for the average person to consider. But what if modern civilization makes this mode of living attainable for the masses?

* Information technology enables efficient markets for renting out housing for short durations.

* Modern financial technology enables these markets to become globally accessible with minimal processing fees and delays.

* Modern transportation technology enables people to travel globally very quickly and affordably.

* Modern construction technology enables people to build much more housing units per capita than in the past, which makes second homes, vacation homes etc more viable.

* Modern telecommunication enables people to work remotely, which makes a work life that is combined with travelling much more viable.

We could very conceivably see a significant fraction and even a majority of people consider themselves world citizens, and prefer to travel non-stop, with the change brought about by the aforementioned technologies. In such a setting, society could very possibly manage physical neighborhoods differently, without tying people to a district in order to procure the necessary resources to maintain said neighborhoods.

In terms of the social aspect, people may adapt by linking themselves moreso to virtual communities, in order to enable connectivity amidst physical travel and migration.

Society not currently being set up to work without residents who are tied to physical neighborhoods is more likely due to the majority of people historically not being able travel non-stop than functional societies not being possible without static addresses.

No fixed address, but:

>To access the No Fixed Address programme, you must be experiencing housing or homelessness difficulties and receiving support from one of our partner charities.

>If you aren’t receiving support from Shelter or one of our other partners, you won’t be able to access the No Fixed Address programme.

If they're anything like the charities in North America, they work closely with the state, and receive most of their funding from it. So you have to become dependent on the state - effectively a ward - to qualify.

The true "no fixed addressed bank account" is a MetaMask wallet.

And the Democratic Party claims voters should not be required to show photo ID to vote.

Do you have a source for the claim that Thiel supports a return to monarchy?

All of these are crude generalizations. If marginalization can be definitively stated to exist in someone, then it can be measured, and if it can be measured, then it can be directly compensated for without resorting to generalizations.

I would prefer that the state treats every one equally, instead of trying to equalize something as elusive, hard to measure and outside of any sensible government mandate, as good fortune (or lack of bad fortune) in one's life.

>Let's be honest, the reason so many people are opposed to this view is because it has been wrongfully used in the past to justify very real oppression and inequality of opportunity. At the very least, it is a very dangerous mindset historically, and even now it's not very well understood.

And the denial of that view has historically been used to impose the most tyrannical societies that have ever existed, in the form of totalitarian communist states.

This is sophistry for social justice ideology masquarading as science:

>Racial inequality costs the U.S. economy an estimated $16 trillion in lost gross domestic product (GDP) (4), failing to hire job seekers with a criminal history results in an annual loss of $78 billion in U.S. GDP (5), and the persistent gender pay gap restrains the global economy by about $160 trillion (6).

The idea that these inequalities can be addressed, in an economically net-gainful way, by government mandates or simple changes in hiring preferences, is based on the fanciful premise that such inequality is economically irrational and due to discrimination, as opposed to disparites in skills or work hours that justify pay and representation inequality. This premise - that inequality between various demographics in employment is significantly or largely due to discrimination and thus economically irrational - is not only not established, it is heavily counter-indicated against by the evidence.

Policies that reduce inequality in pay or representation, without addressing inequality in skills present or value contributed that are behind the pay or representation inequality, will harm the economy, by mismatching compensation/representation and value provided, and thus causing capital to be allocated in a suboptimal way for the purposes of maximizing total productivity.

>After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.

Making it less likely that companies become very large, profitable and valuable discourages investment in companies of all sizes, by reducing returns on small cap and venture capital investing.

As for direct effectd, "taxing the shit out of" the rich, as you suggest, would impact far more than large incumbents. It would reduce the incentive for the rich to invest in general, by reducing the size of the reward for becoming very wealthy, encourage capital flight and expatriation of the highly ambitious and capable, and reduce the after-tax income of the best investors, and with it, the volume of new investment.

Flight evolves all over the planet, across diverse environments.

But in any case, there will be some commonality in environments across many planets, owing to what environments are the most probable hosts of life, and to the fact that the laws of physics are universal.

You've hit the nail on the head with this. I often see "big idea" thinkers who I find to be brilliant, like Jordan Peterson, criticized, and I think a lot of that comes from literal thinkers who 1. apply a rigorous evidentiary standard when assessing their writings, when they should instead see them as well-articulated cases for a "hunch" and thus not expect them to contain proof for their theories, and/or 2. don't see the utility of expositions of hunches.

This context is quite biased by ideological preconceptions.

It's obviously true that convergent evolution, that produces similar traits across distantly related species, occurs. So your assertion makes no sense to me.

Crypto has unique qualities that enable new applications.

For example, you can issue loans to yourself using MakerDAO:

https://oasis.app/borrow

The process is permissionless, meaning, among other things, that it can be automated, and it carries almost zero fees (only the Ethereum gas fee for EVM instructions).

To take another example, the world's leading decentralized exchange, Uniswap, has now overtaken centralized exchanges in market depth for some major trading pairs:

https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance

This is a credibly neutral value exchange protocol that major centralized exchanges are coalescing around as a source of liquidity. The market depth is truly impressive. For example, you can sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ETH in one trade with almost zero slippage.

So crypto is not just another iteration of Wall Street.

And to the point of past iterations of Wall Street: the 19th century banking system was not rife with scams as the caricature suggests:

https://www.cato.org/blog/fable-cats

In case you forgot, numerous states forbid people from even going outside their home, and from perusing numerous services if they weren't vaccinated. This was restricting people's bodily autonomy under duress, to theoretically reduce the spread of a virus with a 99.5% infection survival rate. On the basis of prevailing legal norms, an entirely secular argument could absolutely be made for not allowing the eviction of a person from their mother's womb, to their death.

We put mothers and mostly fathers in prison for not providing child support. The latter never even had an option to abort their parental responsibilities the way mothers did during pregnancy. The idea that a non-religious argument against abortion can't exist in light of this is absurd.

>Like I said - there are no logically valid arguments for abortion ban, other than strictly religious.

Like I said, believing abortion should be prohibited can be an entirely secular belief, your dogmatic denial notwithstanding.