hans1729

Anyone that advocates for increasing democracy generally

I find this take fascinating. In my model, increasing democracy correlates negatively with increasing long term planning, which only then wouldn’t be the case if our species was acting as a collective. Aggregating individual interests doesn’t magically lead to collective interests, just to the set of actions that map on individual demand. There are no real majorities in favor of the rather radical changes required to deal with the major problems of our time, the opposite is the case. People are willing to sacrifice the stability of the future in favor of their well being in the current legislative period, especially in countries with demographics skewed towards the elderly.

Democracy is not the solution unless a culture of sanity becomes prevalent, and that’s not on the horizon afaik.

Borrowing from a german idiom, the current model is “Eltern haften für ihre Kinder”, parents are liable for their children. What we need is the cultural change in the opposite direction, that being a heavy awareness of the fact that children are de facto liable for the actions of their parents.

This just holds when you are b2b. If you’re serving end users, they don’t care about the contract, they care about their UX.

Not just FAANG! Smaller vendors are a very significant threat vector, too, precisely because they are smaller. More owners with smaller margins, looking to squeeze the last bit of profit from the available data, thus entering grey areas almost by definition. Entire markets emerged just from this - afaik data brokers dont get access to, say, Apples Databases. At least FAANG has no real business incentive to sell the data directly.

[citation needed]

Why isn’t there more central EU coordination in case there actually will be a gas shortage, and we need to divide the gas?

Look no further than back to early Covid again, remember the disparities and chaos wrt borders? When people finally realized the potential gravity of the situation, politicians went full "each man to himself". Saying "we distribute gas elsewhere while you are freezing" isn't part of any regular elected politicians playbook, don't you think?

To your first question, I haven't met anyone who openly doubts he'll be fine personally. The situation is tense, but not meteor heading towards dortmund tense.

When covid hit, governments across Germany realized wait, we need videoconferencing for students!. For the prime ministers and their ministers of education, this meant they could either shine in comparison to the others, or the opposition would rip them apart in the next election.

Suddenly: money everywhere, zero red tape, worry about compliance later, get it done now.

So, if the political will is there, things are possible, and I can easily imagine our country going a lot harder than that if the danger was imminent enough.

This asserts that Russian aggression would transcend across NATO-borders. Is that a given?

1. Party Z invades Country U. 2. Continent C denounces the invasion of U and sanctions Z. 3. Z retaliates against C.

Does an act of retaliation (weaponizing Gas) from Z towards C count a declaration of war? Because if not, who exactly did Russia declare war on? Europe is many things, most prominently a continent and an idea. Was Germany declared war on? If not, is it reasonable to assume that Germany will be declared war on, and if so, which escalations from which involved party would lead to that?

(As always, I don't have strong opinions, just trying to make up my mind on what to expect/how to read the situation)

I smugly commented "Dang" on one of the status updates on twitter and spent time with my girlfriend. Now HN is up again and I spend time consuming meta-content regarding the outage (such as this thread).

Have a great weekend everyone!

The US manages to be the reigning empire and a failed state at the same time. Internationally, it's the empire, internally, it's failed beyond repair.

fyi, I get a `page not found` for [3].

can't speak for op because I don't know what layout his country has. For Germany, vim is not usable beyond basic movements, because for example [ and ] have no dedicated keys. Typing { } on the default german layout is an insult to the typer. I remember a vim-shortcut that would have required to press five keys at the same time.

My m1 air with us layout was shipped to Germany from Poland within one month, right after M1s were released. The US-layout is faily common in the EU among programmers etc.

"Charitable reading" is something I should definitely lean more towards. Out of habit I usually assume the worst, maybe I should reflect on that.

I simply wasn't sure what to make of your comment. I probably shouldn't have assumed the worst in the face of ambiguity. The sentiment that science needs to be newsworthy wrt actual beliefs is omnipresent online, indicating (to me) a wrong canvas for your post.

The "news" are the findings of the paper. Not sure why beliefs should matter for the value of scientific work

Roadworthiness or streetworthiness is a property or ability of a car, bus, truck or any kind of automobile to be in a suitable operating condition or meeting acceptable standards for safe driving and transport of people, baggage or cargo in roads or streets, being therefore street-legal.

TIL ;)

I am. Berlin and Germany are in a special relationship, I'll leave colorful elaborations to others :-)

I was told so from a credible source a couple years ago. What I can recall: legalisation would entail complex legal work, to a degree where that option is essentially not on the table. This is supported by the fact that "Legalisierung" is not part of the political language wrt topic, instead they refer to "Kontrollierte Abgabe" (~'controlled distribution').

The SPD brands itself as social, pro worker, peaceful, pragmatic and economically-focused all at the same time. They woo young voters, while their core clientel is >65. They actively make policy that works against the youth (serving their main voters, which are old), while presenting themselves as the good guys to the youth.

From my point of view, this makes them pure evil, much more so than the other parties. Yes, all the parties play the power game, but not all of them have the insane level of audacity that the SPD demonstrates again and again, in every election since I'm old enough to pay attention.

advocatus diaboli: the FDP has a long track record of advocating for legalisation and then voting against it or abstain in parliamentary elections. Their core clientel are small business owners and (other) anti-regulation folk, I strongly doubt that they lose big margins of voters due to their covid policy, maybe even the opposite is the case.

Point being: if the FDP is the reason to have faith in this, I'm not feeling much more confident than before.

Not with respect to the country as a whole. 'broad' is the key term in the sentence you quoted.

Wording: Germany will not legalise Cannabis. Maybe it will be decriminalized, but there is basically no chance of legalisation (too complex/expensive of a process).

I have no reason to trust the SPD that they will deliver on this, they are the infamous poster child for betrayal. They are the kind of party that would sell their entire voting base if it served the acting politicians individual careers.

If they will do it, then it will be leveraged to the max, right before the next critical election.

people want to buy it, and people also want to sell it. That means there's a market and therefore a value to it for those people.

People don't want to sell it, they have to, in order to pay the electricity bills for the mining (in their countries normal currency, for that matter).

There is no inherent value - you can only sell if the exchanges find someone who is willing to buy.

The value to the seller is the Dollar/Euro they get at the exchange. The value for the buyer is speculation on the price, which someone else then has to pay at the exchange in normal currency. There is exactly zero value in crypto itself.

Scarcity isn't 100% important for value - leverage is. Leverage can be tied to scarcity, but doesn't have to, it all depends on the goods which are being exchanged. Artworks exist just once, coupled with the attributed prestige the value increases. Guns exist a bunch, their price doesn't scale relative to their scarcity. Food is not priced relative to the amount on the market, but to the demand of the consumer. If the demand is high and so is scarcity, the price rises, but if demand is low but scarcity is high, the price stays low. [...]

Gold is like an old god: its faith has a lot of coinage. However, its rule is not necessarily omnipresent.

Very nice point, you're not wrong. That being said:

we are in a post-nuclear apocalypse. I have a small trading post and a can of beans; you have a solid gold coin. Challenge: convince me why I should take the coin.

Because it has properties that qualify it as a method of exchange (portability, provable chemical composition [...]) -- the same reasons it worked the first time. Mr Bean-Haggler, what else do you suggest we use for exchange? Mud? :-)

The exchange rate for gold (i.e. the interface of an economy with the material) can crash, not gold itself, thus the inherent value. That was my point, sorry if that wasn't coming across.

If the world crashes so far that gold is a meaningful proportion, will there be much to transact at all?

This is where I start speculating, but couldn't we just create an arbitrary new currency and tie it to gold?

Ha, nice. Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins. (Unless the cultural prestige lies in the underlaying technology itself, in which case the piece of art is the blockchain-implementation, not embedded content)

Very few economic transactions are denominated in gold, either as a medium of exchange or a unit of account.

That doesn't mean that gold isn't a viable medium of exchange - it obviously is, just go to a market of your choice and trade it for goods. In fact, it's the single most viable medium of exchange, globally, since currencies are tied to economies, and economies can crash. Gold can not, thus is it valuable.

Scenario: a country-wide blackout occurs. You're haggling with local farmers for food. Which has value to them, bits on a hard drive or solid gold?

So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable?

You're mixing up things. I can draw a one-off picture, that doesn't make the drawing valuable (sadly. If you want to buy my paintings, hmu). The value needs to be attributed by a shared denominator, which for the example of Mona Lisa is cultural prestige. Crypto has zero inherent cultural prestige, it's only value lies in social attribution. Wallets on hard drives are meaningless unless we decide that they aren't. The mona lisa isn't worth what it is if we decide otherwise, but it does have inherent value. Crypto does not. For crypto to have value, someone else needs to pay Dollar/Euro/whatever at an exchange. That's the value of crypto - the exchange rate.