QAPereo

Yes we see this comment rehashed on every crypto thread on HN, why?

Because it still bears saying, especially given how many people are just looking for greater fools to hold their bag. Inevitably the replies include a barrage of whataboutism centered on “fiat currency” in an attempt to normalize or justify the cryptocurrency shitshow.

why would I need evidence? Dang isn’t contesting the point, just the terminology.

dang 1 hour ago [-]

Apart from the cloak-and-dagger tone, this either says something obvious—that HN is moderated—or says nothing.

You turned off flags, but now you’re doing something else yourself. You’re being honest, but not really telling the whole story.

Your thumb is very much on the scale however, where existing community sentiment doesn’t do the job.

Edit: I didn’t intend to be cryptic or confuse you. I mean just that proclaiming you’ve put one of many tools on the shelf for this thread in no way implies what you tried to imply.

From what I’ve observed, the idea is to work in hell (edit: obviously hyperbole) until enough money is made to work on your own. Needless to say that doesn’t seem to be the majority experience. The carrot is money and security and the dream of fuck you money. The stick is being a code monkey who is still treated like shit, but who can’t even dream of early retirement and personal projects. It’s a shallow philosophy, but there it is.

The willingness to take tons of shit from above, and the ability to rationalize the waste of talent seems to be what you’d expect from a glorified casino for billionaires. Variable-Ratio reward training will fuck you up.

Edit: I would guess that fear plays a role too. I recall a poster here saying they wished they could change their circumstances, but they look at the guy delivering their pizza and feel terrified that could be them.

Edit: Or a mod can just minimize this, but sadly it changes nothing, least of the the reality of your situation.

I wonder if he had some kind of political connections that could have helped?

Some people probably can, but then in addition to being intelligent he’d have to be an incredibly talented and disciplined actor.

Unlikely.

I had the same issue, and essentially developed a lingo to speak to those kinds of people. More contractions, dropped g’s, “fucking” used as an adjective. It’s been a couple of decades, and every time I switch to that, I feel like an utter fraud, but sadly it works. I can’t imagine what I’d do if that hadn’t been an option though.

Edit: Support group at my place everyone, coffee and donuts will be provided. ;)

Squandered talent, exceptional investment, buzzword, buzzword, partial-buzzword, connections.

It’s a great place to be young and wealthy, with minimal affect and empathy.

Fair point, I took your “one man alone” comment to mean something it didn’t necessarily imply. I’m sorry for any offense I’ve caused with that unwarranted assumption.

It takes far more energy to make new glass than to clean and reuse old glass. Even melting existing glass is valuable, as it lowers the melting point of the raw materials and therefore energy expenditure. Until glass manufacture uses solar or wind or something similar, it’s an issue.

The problem isn’t a lack of silica, it’s yet more waste of energy and pollution purely screwing is over.

Glass can only be recycled so many times and then it is worthless as you say. Value depends on the quality, color, and clarity of the glass. Given that cullet is necessary to make new glass, there is always a market for it. Best of all though, bottles can be cleaned and reused many times for a fraction of the energy cost of making new ones.

There are a lot of subtleties to recycling, some in favor generally, environmentally, and economically... some not.

Individuals don’t really matter in the calculus of billions of people. The dominant trends are frankly old, and persistent.

And glass. And steel. And precious metals.

As for an honest society, do you have some historical reference point, or are you just aiming for utopia?

It’s a feature, in the same way that the decentralized nature of white collar crime is a feature. The bug is in the people who naively believe that technology changes human nature, rather than empowering it.

Those people need to be locked in a small room with an excellent library to study history for at least a year.

This was recently on the front page, can’t find the link sorry.

I wouldn’t sell NBC weapons short... at least not the B and N parts. Nukes are dangerous in the hands of nations, but my god you just wait until every asshole with a laptop and $10,000 worth of equipment can customize their own plague. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re close, and regulating that is going to be utterly impossible.

It’s possible to exist in a relative detente between nations, but when the capacity to end human civilization is democratized we are dead. Many forms of incredible tech are really maturing, and frankly our laws are a century or more behind. We’re in real trouble if we have to wait to be burned to believe in the fire this time.

Unfortunately it seems that most of the smartest people are desperately trying to strike it rich, and that’s just about all. Even most of the people who want to make a difference only feel they can/should after making “fuck you money.”

I doubt that they still believe that, as much as they are highly incentivized to claim that. Bitcoin is a disasterous enterprise as it continues to scale poorly. But hey, some people get rich (for a while) and others get to have a waking ideological wet dream, so who cares if it’s a tragic exercise in “printing” entropy and calling it value.

Whataboutism isn’t going to change that.

Besides, hasn’t the world suffered enough for the sake of grasping ideologues? Does everything need to be seen through these same bland lenses? This is a truly maddening and mad use of a currently limited resource with globally damaging externalities, and it produces nothing except waste heat.

If the average Joe really understood this, and just how modest the real potential of blockchain tech probably is, there would be lynchings.

What you can do as one man is precisely nothing, except to make yourself feel a bit better. Caring in the absence of organizing and acting, is that really caring? At the very least our priorities are made clear by our actions and not our attitudes.

Care about budgets, and cut the waste such as losing wars and corrupt, broken nonsense like the F-35. Care about price controls in the health sector, and care about investing in infrastructure.

Frozen cubes? Never heard of them, but I can imagine how freshly frozen might be useful. Thanks for the good ideas! I’m going to make some myself and see how long they stay fresh... months I’d guess.

People do not commit crimes expecting to be caught. If the death penalty is not a deterrent, how could you expect anything less to be?

Yeah, but we’re not talking about total budget, not even the total military budget; that’s $7 trilllion just on two losing wars. You need to lose another decimal place, and remember that you also print your own money and can levy taxes.

I think you’re taking my acknowledgement of reality to be an endorsement of it. You can’t hope to change anything if you’re living in a fantasy. The reality is that the government of “this here nation” can roll over you like you never existed. Want that to change? I do.

Think of it this way... we’re going to end up spending about $7 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan having accomplished essentially nothing good.

$64billion is a rounding error for our government.

Do you at least acknowledge the reality of how laughable your “natural right” to resist would look against even a minute fraction of the state’s power?

That stuff in the jar is such crap... sliver some garlic, smash it with your knife, anything except the jar!

Not to mention that they just threw the door open wide for another company to, as many here love to put it, “disrupt” the online video hosting space.

Thank god for that.

Sounds like a stellar way to miss out on talent, alienate people thereby creating opportunities for foreign intelligence agencies, and create institutional and cultural blind spots. Much like the obsession with Islamic terrorism, it ignores the potential of betrayal from racially/culturally “safe” places.

Most of all though, if your security relies on racism to succeed, it’s already failing. You can’t psychically find traitors, and traitors don’t have a race. Traitors can be turned from any group and the only defense is to evaluate everyone impartially, relentlessly, and consistently. If you find those measures insufficient, don’t turn to profiling race, study behavior!

Profiling is like torture... it appeals to people who don’t understand a damned thing about how either fails in practice... or it appeals to people who already like such ideas regardless of merit.

That seems both cruel, and needlessly harsh. Surely you yourself have weaknesses which could be exploited, and I hope that you’re not prepared to kill yourself over it. By the same token, telling people that they are too stupid to live is pointlessly cruel, unhelpful, and frankly wrong.

You can be intelligent, but old and suffering from MCI, or a more advanced dementia. You could be mentally ill, or brilliant in one field, but utterly ignorant of finances, or human nature. You could be a genius with TBI, or you could b young and foolish.

I can’t see what you’re saying as anything other than venting of spleen. Maybe it makes you feel better as a mechanism to cope with frustration, but I’d encourage you to reconsider that attitude toward your fellow humans.

Is it really news to you that life, politics, and international relations have tribal and competitive aspects to them? You can be superrational, but that will cause you to lose horribly to the rest of the players. Unless you believe that China would be especially magnanimous in reversed circumstances, what is your point?