RamshackleJ

https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q23-Earnings-Press... IBM is getting killed in infrastructure, their margins look to be growing but losing ~15% of their revenue y/y. This seems like them just gouging the last of the customers who are either unwilling or unable to leave.

for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.

nope, transactions clear at a rate unrelated to mining(so long as at least 1 person is mining).

The only thing that impacts transaction costs is how many other people are trying to clear their own transactions and bidding up the sat/vbyte rate.

Inflation is easy to fix, default on your debt and stop printing to service that debt.

also the basket of goods is mostly impacted significantly by technology which causes deflation.

it doesn't include things that don't have acute tech-driven inflation (housing/education/healthcare) where tech can't drive prices to zero as easily.

most people globally do hold most of their savings in cash, many people are unbanked and physical currency is the only way they have to preserve wealth.

you never had to worry about ransomware back when we used clay tablets for accounting.

sure, if you think the US government is united against bitcoin and willing to step on the civil liberties afforded the ~30 million US citizens who own it.

but.... I really don't think either of those things is true. You should talk to people in the state dept or DoD and pay less attention to FED/Treasury. The current USD global reserve status quo isn't always great for the US gov.

so you're saying a black swan event might affect the price? gee well Im glad that doesn't currently happen with USD, CNY, JPY....

you can also use bitcoin like a physical bearer asset (gold bullion) by using things like https://opendime.com/ so even if the network was 100% down transactions could still happen IRL. You'd just be exchanging a hidden private key that can move UTXO's on the blockchain.

considering that I'd say bitcoin is much more anti-fragile than a bank statement, in most of the natural disasters you're talking about im not so sure banks will be letting you withdraw any significant amount of $

anyone throwing those critics at bitcoin needs to provide criteria for when their critic is no longer valid.

They need to provide: - vol metric thresholds - price targets - adoption % - etc...

We've had over 10 years of shifting the goalposts with bitcoin. At this point it's starting to sound like denial. Every meaningful metric has continued to improve in bitcoins favor yet we keep hearing the same critics.

Changing it from one invasive species dominated ecology to a different invasive species dominated ecology.

at least the new invasive ecology has clean water.

wrong. The great lakes has been an ecological experiment since the St. Lawrence seaway was opened and continued to be that when the Chicago river was reversed.

There are almost no "native" species left in any of the lakes (excluding superior).

If you want sustainable native great lakes ecology you need to cut them off from the oceans, re-reverse the flow of the Chicago and do a one-off massive trout and other native fish stocking. None of that is ever going to happen so until then we can keep experimenting with ecology and in that case Zebra muscles is much better than massive population booms and busts of alewives or other invasive fish species (Salmon were originally introduced to help keep the alewife population down)

2021, the year when shitcoins, scamcoins and ponzicoins have their comeuppance.

the SEC shutting down centralized exchanges would be a short term shock to the value of BTC but long-term would be a disaster for regulators.

Decentralized P2P exchanges exist(bisq/hodlhodl), and shutting down centralized exchanges would force people to use those as the on/off ramps.

The best way for regulators to fight bitcoin imo is to slowly assimilate it into the legacy finance infrastructure to the point that it becomes similar to gold reserves, something only central banks and large institutions hold, while the public might only hold IOUs. Similar to what paypal is already doing.

Commercial beef feedlots vs commercial dairy feedlots are a mile apart, but unfortunately most dairy cows end up at the former after they hit declining milk production.

I'd recommend checking if you can go tour a local dairy, I've found that any quality dairy will let you do that and you can judge for yourself about the welfare of the animals. You're gonna to pay more but the nutritional value of a gallon of milk at $8 vs $2 is still well worth it imo.

I'd also really recommend looking into the health impacts of vegetable oils. Most milk substitutes are, at their core, emulsified vegetable oils. I found that the trade-offs were higher glycemic load(oat/rice), increased vegetable oils(soy/almond) or something that tastes nothing like milk (unsweetened coconut milk).

Hey yeah Im no expert but happy to share some of the stuff that I've looked at.

Glycemic Index - not every gram of carbohydrate is made equal. You can have a drink with fewer grams of sugar but that still has a higher glycemic load. Lactose has a fairly low glycemic index which results in it often having a lower glycemic load of drinks sweetened with lower quantities of maltose/dextrose. In terms of scientific literature I think there are a bunch of well regarded studies on this topic (glycemic load and how it relates to health) since its a pretty key factor in diabetes.

Vegetable Oil - tbh I'm less sure of the science for this but reading https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/why-is-vegetable-oil-unhealt... gave me enough doubt to try to reduce my consumption.

I still occasionally use unsweetened coconut milk, since it has no added sugars and none of the more suspicious vegetable oils. But what I've found is that when you get rid of the sugar/vegetable oils none of the milk substitutes taste anything like milk.

haha yeah it does come off a bit harsh. I don't doubt their sincerity but am definitely curious about how many farms they've visited.

If anytime you think of meat/dairy you think of mcdonalds style feedlot hellscapes, you're out of touch. Your oat/soy milks are coming from giant monocrop fields, loaded up on pesticides, fertilized with the poo scraped off the feedlots you hate.

I think its much more likely that dairy production becomes more sustainable than it gets replaced by even more intensive monocropping.

I went through a phase of drinking milk substitutes but I'm back to milk.

The glycemic index of most milk substitutes (oat,soy,almond) are equivalent or greater than a can of coke. Milk substitutes also tend to be really really high in vegetable oils that seem to at least have a troubling correlation with chronic disease.

The metrics used for the environmental impact of intensive animal husbandry tend too skew towards the worst case (obese cows on a grain fed diet in a feedlot). There are plenty of dairy farms raising cows with a more sustainable grass-based diet that doesn't release nearly as much methane (Think how gassey you'd be if the only thing you ate was ice-cream?)

I like supporting my local dairy farmers, more than I enjoy supporting some multi-national milk-substitute beverage company with a supply chain spanning the globe.

Iran is using btc to settle international trade transactions[1]. Using a gold backed coupon for settling trade has been talked about for a really long time by a bunch of people. If you're confused why people are speculating about crypto they might know something you don't. The rewiring of the global economy off of the USD _is_ coming, the USD introduces counter-party risk (albiet small for most people) and if btc can avoid that its an improvement.

1 https://news.bitcoin.com/iran-bitcoin-sanctions-inflation/#:....

It seems like you're operating with a different value system to most of the west and at the same time want approval from what is a mostly western message board. This is super apparent in "ends justifying the means" comments on XJ. You're also recycling a bunch of Chinese state media rhetoric on these topics.

The theme of the CCP being flawed but the best the Chinese people can expect b/c insert some state rhetoric here and that without them they'd be at the mercy of the western powers is propaganda. Economic tides have lifted almost every country over the past 50 years because of policies and values put forth by western institutions and worked DESPITE bad governance in some of the world.

Having maintained control of china even after some of the worst public policies of all history (cultural revolution, one-child...) is precisely the reason some are not comfortable with the ccp becoming influential outside chinas boarders.

Only randos on HN think that businesses don't have a fiduciary responsibility to share holders.

Search quality and profit are not always correlated.

Such a fun idea!

Just to add to the lore, we can already detect galaxies without dark-matter. Which would be galaxies already scrubbed of intelligent life by the EAILD

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/03/ghostly-galaxy-without...

Yep claiming to be a force for good when behaving like an amoral organization only concerned with profit optimization is what irks people.

pretending to be something you aren't is whats frustrating

Illegal, unethical and immoral are all separate things. Its possible to be doing something legal and still be unethical or even immoral.

Idk whats more disheartening, the censorship apologists in the comments or google shareholder/leadership willingness to be immoral in the pursuit of profit.

They are catching up, which is a net good for humanity. The highbred command/market economy and the focused bureaucracy of the Party have has been amazingly effective at industrializing and modernizing China. They have lifted many people out of poverty in a very short time.

Catching up and innovating are different though. There is so much structure and even culture in China that will make getting ahead in tech and science very difficult.

The protected industries and closed internet incentivizes making copy cat businesses. The lack of established academic institutions hurts research. Innovation depends on individuals, and the lack of individual freedoms does make staying in china less appealing to talented individuals.

I really, really hope china can become more open and democratic. That would be an amazing win for humanity. More opportunity and freedom for more people! For a while they seemed to be on the path to doing that but with Xi staying in power indefinitely I worry that what the powerful and rich want is at odds with what would be best for the population.

I disagree with your opinions and your characterization of my argument. I didn't say people will not think about technological problems.

Despite the incredible amount of good the party has done for the people of china they are still an authoritarian regime. I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.

TLDR; But the soviets lost.

I'm not an expert in soviet history but I feel like their efforts around science and technology were economically unsustainable and almost all of them were directly or tangentially related to the military. I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west.

Academic freedom isn't the only freedom that scientists and engineers care about.

I don't doubt that china can spend a ton of money, trap its engineers/scientists and use its media machine to try to keep its population focused on nationalism. I just think that if that didn't work for the Soviets it wont work for China. That said china's current system will probably work great right until it doesn't. Idk I'm just some person on a computer though....

Stealing IP mostly helps manufacturing, It doesn't really help innovation. If they want to build up their semiconductor industry they need to steal the people who are creating IP, which is kinda the opposite of what is happening.

the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.

Unlimited Vacation is the same as saying Unlimited Salary, its total BS. Without set guidelines in your employment contract of what PTO you get in exchange for working there it creates a drawn out negotiation between you, your manager and your team of how much vacation you actually get.

Its just better to know for sure what PTO you are entitled to in your employment contract. Would you accept a job without knowing what the salary was? Keep in mind that vacation days are something that you are EARNING in exchange for your work.

Yep, being anti-h1b !== being anti-immigrant. Immigrants who are free to hop jobs are a key component of a vibrant, entrepreneurial, worker-friendly economy. Immigrants who are disposable, bonded labor undermine the freedoms everyone else has while also promoting inefficient labor allocation.

not sure if this organization actual feels that way though...

I know its tempting to chest-beat for the EPA as the protector of citizens but they have a track record of staying silent or even covering up. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/01/12/e...

And most of the money for cleanup comes from taxes. Its a nice roundabout/inefficient way to make citizens pay for the pollution of large interests.

In my opinion its more plausible that pollution has decreased due to citizen awareness and organization rather than the EPA.