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byset

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The queen (or king) can abdicate but would not have the power to abolish the British monarchy. That's a constitutional change and would presumably take a Parliamentary act.

“Unless it impacts your performance during working hours” — Shouldn’t the employer just note the poor performance and tell you to improve, rather than police your personal life? Under your reasoning, an employer could require a certain number of hours of sleep per night.

Didn’t hurt his career much? He was barred from the securities industry forever. Sure he had a lot of money left, but how can you know where his career would go if he weren’t prosecuted? That’s like saying that if Bill Gates were forced to cash out of Microsoft in the 80s it wouldn’t have affected his career much because, after all, he would still be a billionaire

SEC pursued junk bond pioneer Michael Milken in the 1980s, Ivan Boesky before that… unsure of specifics of SEC personnel getting to “high office” because of that but seems obvious that high profile successful prosecutions would be career-making

(Granted those examples are from the 80s but i would think there are more recent examples…)

Milken was prosecuted by Rudy Giuliani which didn’t hurt Giuliani’s career, but Rudy was a US district attorney or something, not SEC

Agree with your sentiment generally though, seems like a boatload of people could have been put away after the financial crisis but they instead profited from bailouts

Ok thx for the reply

I was just dismayed to see the story sink so fast (but I get it now) — the article involves an interesting discussion of how scientific consensus is represented in the media and how it relates to social media, which seem like very HN-friendly topics… shame that so many are eager to flag something like this based on (as seems likely) some sort of forbidden-topic litmus test

"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN."

And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?

I do remember often being frustrated when mostly useless Yahoo Answers content would appear at the top of Google search results. I never understood why it was ranked so highly. YA seemed like what Quora would be like if you were required to flunk a literacy test in order to participate.

I would think that's more of a cognitive thing where if you don't normally spend time around people with Down's syndrome, the particular physical features that characterize Down's syndrome really stand out in a way that makes you perceive them as looking less distinctive as individuals. But once you get used to it, it becomes apparent that they look as different from one another as anyone else does.

I wonder how much DOGE Elon Musk holds, and how his, or anyones behavior towards these speculative coins is any different.

So you're speculating that the world's richest man (give or take) risked a felony conviction by running an illegal Dogecoin pump-and-dump scheme? Is that right?

I'd wager that Musk's Doge-pumping buffoonery is more of a hobby than a revenue-generating side gig. If he ends up in federal prison, It'll be for cooking Tesla's books.

No one fails to make this "hey, it's a private company" point in these discussions. It's always brought up when someone is criticizing a tech behemoth for censorship of some kind, and it's nearly always a non-sequitur.

Guess what? It's totally fine and valid to criticize private entities even when their conduct is perfectly lawful.

Thought experiment: imagine eBay and Amazon started to promote Neo-Nazi literature on their home pages in the same way that they now promote anti-racist books and such. What would be the appropriate response: outrage, or "bUt iTs a pRiVaTe cOmPaNy!!!"?

Bitcoin Is Time 5 years ago

I hear this idea a lot, that Bitcoin is obviously flawed design that would be done differently if we could do it over again, so either it's the myspace of crypto and something better will supersede it, or it's the QWERTY keyboard (or maybe MS Windows 3.0) of crypto — locked in as a standard due to network effect but it's a sad thing because it's basically a garbage design that we're all stuck with now.

But it's always kind of vague what is fundamentally different about this imaginary, perfected version of bitcoin. Is it the block size, i.e. Bitcoin Cash is really the ideal bitcoin? Seems highly debatable, but anyhow, the block size is a debate about tradeoffs between centralization and throughput rather than an obviously embarrassing decision. Or is it more about the issuance schedule and supply cap?

Generally, if the current bitcoin is an embarrassing beta version that we're stuck with due to network effect, what does the better bitcoin look like? Does it exist already? That seems like a more interesting conversation than a meta-discussion about why we're stuck with this "dumb beta version" or why bitcoin maximalists are so mean.

Bitcoin Is Time 5 years ago

given how much HN hates bitcoin, it's curious that anyone would assume anti-bitcoin boilerplate would get downvoted here

BTC Endgame 5 years ago

It's not an error, it's a different (yet common) usage of the word "inflation" to mean expansion of the money supply, rather than the more common usage meaning a decrease in the purchasing power of money.

It’s even worse than that, because LinkedIn actually pretended to be you —- its invitations to “connect” were crafted to look like they contained a personal note from you.

LinkedIn was much worse as they used dark UX patterns to trick you into letting them spam all your contacts with invitations to “connect”.