d10r

Can't confirm, have been running stuff on Hetzner for almost 10 years. They will indeed auto-block you if any application is spamming the private subnet - happens e.g. with IPFS running in its default config. But this always comes after warnings and with an exact explanation of what happened (log of IPs the server attempted to connect to, timestamps etc). I always found support responsive, even in the middle of the night. It may be that I was lucky all the time, despite interacting with various support staff in various of their data centers. Or it may be that your issues had other reasons...

Bitcoin would have remained the obscure crypto-economic experiment it was 10 years ago if it weren't for the rotten monetary system we have creating strong incentives to look for alternatives. I'm holding some Bitcoin for quite a while now - in terms of value it has overtaken all my Fiat holdings - yet I would actually welcome if it became worthless. That's because I believe that it can become worthless only if we get back to a sound monetary system, something I'd value more than individually "winning" in an alternative scenario.

which may even be technically true - if measured in quantitative terms :-)

As long as we stick to the concept of nation, we likely have to live with such issues. This is how group identity works, sometimes to your advantage, sometimes to your disadvantage.

Here in Europe it's often the opposite. E.g. in Austrian cities you have decent bicycle infrastructure and everything in reach in the cities while in rural areas that's often not the case.

I've been in the US once, 13 years ago, and it was pretty shocking for me to experience the concept of "car centric" in its full glory for the first time. I was at CES in Las Vegas and went to some club one evening with a friend. At some point I left and wanted to walk to the Hotel alone in order to calm down and enjoy the nice climate. Turned out, there was simply no walkable connection between the 2 locations. I couldn't believe it, but - being stubborn - walked anyway, in the dirt along some highway, a bit scared of being picked up by the police, not even sure if walking there was even legal.

Later that week I moved to LA and first saw the endless suburbs of an American city, from the air.

I don't know how representative those 2 places are for the US, but having seen that, I can totally understand why many Americans have a very hard time imagining life without a car.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as that when large scale network effects are involved.

You should probably not listen to random YouTubers, but to people having something to say. I suggest starting from aantonop.com

That's indeed true for many DAO designs. I often wonder if those proposing such designs don't understand that or if they just don't care. It is however not inherent to DAOs. If you add identity, a lot of alternatives open up. Check out e.g. quadratic voting or daostack.io.

Could there be a class action lawsuit against the various companies whose recommendation engines hijacked people's attention to recommend and reinforce this garbage?

I think this thought is spot on. The usual defense is "but free speech!". Which would boil down to: "such is human nature". But I don't believe that's the problem. The problem may indeed be selection and amplification mechanisms like recommendation engines tuned to divert max. attention to the medium, masterfully exploiting the vulnerabilities of the human psyche as evolution formed it. The rest is collateral damage which nobody seems to feel responsible for. Not a sustainable situation.

you're omitting something very important in your list of related aspects: health

Are they though? I'm 38 and can't remember a situation in my life where a gun would have been useful. Not saying that I can't imagine such situations, I just find it a slightly weird example to make this point.

Lets assume the inflation remains contained in the financial sector. What does this mean e.g. for a young family with no inherited wealth, with average income and savings rate? How should they invest their savings? Isn't it more difficult for them to "break even" (in the sense that their capital income offsets their share of contributing to others capital incomes) than before the asset price inflation?

Beautiful comment! This being HN, I hope you are aware of the evolving space of cryptoeconomics, projects like https://commonsstack.org/ and https://daostack.io/ It's important that emerging protocol based institutions do not just replicate old patterns with modern technology. The innovation should be both technological and social.

Disabling automatic updates is always one of the first things I do on a new Android phone. I would happily enable it selectively for a few Apps of my choice (e.g. the browser), but unfortunately the Play store doesn't allow that - unlike F-Droid. So I occasionally do update Apps I want to be up to date manually instead. Also reduces unpleasant surprises like randomly being logged out or randomly becoming incompatible with backend servers (seen e.g. with Mattermost).

What I observe among today's people of these regions ..., regardless of their age, is defeatism and lack of confidence.

My personal experience (mainly from visits to Bosnia) confirms that. In my opinion, the ongoing brain drain is a main reason behind it. It's a rational choice for talented and motivated young people to move to a Western European country, thus many do so. Unfortunately, the result is that those not leaving have a very hard time forming a critical mass which could break through the various deadlocks left behind by the war years.

"Carbon taxes unquestionably fall hardest on the poor, as do consumption taxes generally."

I would question that very much and guess that overall the opposite is true. I don't however have any data, except national aggregates showing that there's a correlation between GDP and carbon emissions (even before accounting for the fact that arguably quite a lot of the emissions of less wealthy nations come from production of stuff for more wealthy nations). Do you have data?

omg, somebody built it! Will immediately try that.

thx for sharing this!

Maybe it would. Or maybe one of them would have blown up (lets say e.g. on 9.11.2001) and due to bad luck (winds not blowing onto the pacific, but towards densely populated areas during crucial hours) have rendered some major cities inhabitable for years or decades. We will never know.

That said: I agree that replacing nuclear power with coal power is insane. I am for continuing nuclear research and for using nuclear power with designs which are inherently safe if it's cheaper than renewable alternatives at a given location.

I too never got this. Have learned using bare metal before AWS was around. Took a look at AWS in 2008 and decided that it was interesting, but nothing I had use for at the time. Since then, I never felt any need for it, except for a few times when I wanted to emulate a distributed network for testing purposes.

If I look into the AWS dashboard today, I feel totally overwhelmed, while running my own servers with LXC containers on it feels effortless. I guess for many it's the other way round.

Don't really know what I'm missing, but I'm happy about the old school skillset I have, allows me to have a fraction of the infrastructure costs I would have otherwise for what I'm running.

Oh yes, lets get back to discussing eugenics instead of discussing our slow descent back into feudalism which creates such issues in the first place. This discussion has already made good progress 100 years ago. Then something happened and suddenly stopped it. Don't remember what it was...

There are zero consequences to anyone important when a data breach happens

probably not in the EU - at least not if some kind of negligence, as specified by the GDPR, took place.

The eternal problem is that exporting is giving away the output of your people in return for a shiny bauble

That's an important point!

In the case of China, I'd guess that it was a strategic decision to do so. Being in debt with others gives others political power over you - at least as long as you are not stronger (ultimately, in a physical sense) than them. I guess China wanted to avoid that as long as it wasn't strong enough. Now that China is getting stronger and stronger, they are starting to invest that accumulated capital in order to gain political power over other, weaker nations. That's btw. a hot topic even on Germany, if it's ok to let the Chinese buy local companies and other assets.

In the case of Germany, I don't really understand why it went that way. The surplus seems to have become some kind of fetish. During the Greek crisis, the risks of such imbalances became visible. The big risk for Germany is imo that a major country like France or Italy will tip over politically, leading to the destruction of the Euro. There's no playbook for how to handle that and I guess it would be a messy and ugly political process which may render quite some of those collected "shiny baubles" worthless. With European history in mind, I don't think taking that risk is worth it.

That's why I call those salaries "Schmerzensgeld" :-)

for me it did change. I stopped flying and I stopped visiting websites which won't accept my tracking blockers.

one addition to the story: Exit from nuclear power in germany was already decreed by law several years before, by the then government of social democrats and greens. This decision was reverted by the first (I believe) Merkel government, only to be reverted again few years later due to Fukushima.

Merkel is known for being quite pragmatic and following the path of least political resistance in most cases. While the exit of the exit was very popular at that moment, I do believe that in this case she was sincere when telling that seeing the Fukushima disaster changed her mind. I guess it was humbling even for world leaders to see how helpless everybody up to the PM were in Japan in the face of what was happening.

I followed the Fukushima disaster very closely when it was happening. And I remember that during the crucial hours, when emissions of radioactive material was highest, the wind was luckily going to the east, out onto the pacific ocean, with thousands of miles of buffer. Given that, it seems to me that Fukushima could have gone much, much worse.

I have a pragmatic proposal: lets use nuclear power if it's competitive including insurance and including the long term cost of handling its waste. If it's not or if nobody can insure it, we should probably not.

I also see this connection. On a game theoretical level, it doesn't pay off for the individual to make a personal effort, unless the right incentives are in place.

The status quo would be a great opportunity for a drastic policy switch: introduce correct pricing of resources (nomore externalizing) and "recycle" the generated income as an UBI.

If you do the pricing only (even if just small amounts), you get yellow vests. If you do the UBI only, you would likely just boost consumption and even aggravate the ecological problem.

But combined, it could be the solution the world is looking for.

... in other words: based on personal observation, I believe that the correlation of personal wealth and value contributed to society is not strong enough (which doesn't mean there's none) to justify making one's existence dependent on it - in a sophisticated society which could easily afford otherwise.

I think I understand what you mean with that and agree with it in principle. However you should keep in mind that you are a person with a "business mindset". There is plenty of people out there who may well have something valuable to contribute to this world, but have no chance of getting an economic return out of that. This can be due to a lack of economic mindset/understanding/education or also just due to the type of value one is able to provide not fitting any monetization model. I believe that a modern society can and should afford to relieve their members from existential fear related to biological needs. That is not about taking away aspiration and agency.