nnfy

I understand that there are legitimate reasons that someone may need assistance.

My problem is with this nonsensical mentality that, without any actual statistics, people automatically assume that anyone struggling is a victim of circumstance. Or worse, that they have somehow been abused or stolen from by those with money. Which, by the way, I believe I'd a relatively new outlook in the history of the U.S.

The danger is that it encourages people to live haphazardly and in the long run is not sustainable. And, quite frankly, I have no desire to pay for people who lived selfishly in their own time.

but when you're in a situation with no support things feel a lot different.

The fact that things feel different in hard times does not change whether objectively they are right or wrong.

Are you sure that the problem doesn't actually exist in Europe and Canada? Are you sure it isn't offset by a culture where the young are expected to care more for their elders?

Her savings long gone, and having never done much long-term financial planning

And so again we are expected to pay for the mistakes of others. What incentive is there to save if you know you have a social net to save you anyway?

Yes, I understand, it is a terrifying way to live, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but if we deincentivize personal responsibility, what stops this from becoming a larger problem? How can this be sustainable?

Edit: please do not mistake my attempt at objectivity for callousness. One must divorce personal feelings of pity and empathy for individuals when discussing matters which affect hundreds of millions of people. There comes a point where there are more people requiring assistance than we are capable of supporting, and part of the solution is to discourage recklessness.

How long until Facebook literally asks for my soul?

Awesome, but to me this stuff is also terrifying, and I can't quite place why.

Something about dissecting intelligence, and the potential that our own minds process things similarly. Creepy how our reality is distilled into these uncanny valley type matrices.

Also, I suspect it says something that these images look like what people report seeing on psychedelic trips...

So leave Cali.

What is with this entitlement to live anywhere we want for any price we want?

Weird how you haven't considered population density, or housing safety regulations, or the state of the economy, or the average productivity of immigrants looking for a better life at the turn of the century compared to the homeless in modern cities...

Almost as if comparing NYC 100 years ago to modern Seattle is total nonsense.

Right, the solution is to give addicts more money to buy drugs. I suppose that'll solve the problem when they inevitably OD and we can stop wasting our money on them.

I'm not speaking from an ivory tower either, like many UBI supporters seem to do. I grew up with friends who were addicts. Ive known people who died of overdose. Plenty of kids are more than happy to throw away their lives smoking weed and shooting up, especially if they're getting their shit for free.

For the record, I support responsible drug use. But UBI is not the answer for the problems in our society, because it will hurt many if not most of the people it should protect.

Maybe some of us prefer not deincentivizing work and creating an even larger subpopulation which is entirely dependent on government and won't be employable for generations?

We live in a reality where resources still require effort and capital to extract from the environment. A society can only support so many through welfare before it collapses.

The subject is a little more nuanced than watching people die out of some kind of jealousy.

But you're ignoring the fact that bitcoin is about more than simply moving money. There is value in security and decentralization.

Further, GDP ignores consumption, it is gross product, not net product. Further indication to me that comparing bitcoin to power consumption of a small country is inappropriate. Apples to oranges.

Edit: after reading a couple articles on wikipedia, I'm confused. Gross implies product before subtraction of consumption (I.E. revenue), while wikipedia claims that GDP factors in so called intermediate consumption, which would make it more like a net value (I.e. profit). Do we have any economists browsing? Genuinely curious.

Everyone is happy to sentationalize the amount of energy that the bitcoin network uses, but no one ever mentions how much energy use is acceptable.

Nor does anyone seem to attempt a thorough cost/benefit analysis. How much energy from financial infrastructure could bitcoin free up?

Edit: vague comparisons like these really bug me, because while they make problems seem large by comparing them to A WHOLE COUNTRY, they actually offer little in the way of information. Most of us know nothing about Ecuador's energy use in comparison to any other country or industry, except perhaps that it is relatively small. But I guess it gets you the clicks...

Of course. This kind of power is so easy to abuse.

Unfortunately, google and amazon are a little harder to abandon than fb because of their utility...

That was one of the final straws for me. I don't think anyone should trust Facebook with enough information to completely take over someone's real life identity.

FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.

You're right, I misspoke. My point I think still stands - there are something like 1-2 thousand different Cryptos, many without ICOs, but there is little value in purchasing them, be it via ICO or an ordinary exchange.

While I suspected the same, after reading the article, the author does not conflate the bursting of the crypto bubble with the price of BTC.

After this realization I was able to set aside my indignation and observe that the author makes a good point in that most other Cryptos and "blockchainy" startups are doomed to fail, while BTC as he claims will likely recover (he makes some mention of a v-shaped price trend in BTC when the bubble bursts.

I think many crypto-currencies (with and without ICOs) are rather obvious cash grabs that provide no actual value beyond speculation (e.g. dogecoin); was something comparable going on during the .com bubble? Were there many companies offering no actual value and taking in cash?

Edit: I originally conflated cryptos with ICOs, and have since corrected the mistake.

Isn't it bad science to suppress findings? Where does one draw the line?

Suppression of results introduces subjectivity and allows for injection of agenda into what should be an objective practice. Not to mention, someone else will likely make the discovery eventually; would you rather suppress your findings and allow say, North Korea to be the first to develop a dangerous technology without any study into countermeasures?

Add this kind of bad practice to the other contemporary problems in research (replicability crisis, p value misuse, etc) and it feels like the modern scientific establishment is regressing.

I remember when CNET was trustworthy, and not a giant, malware ridden advertisement...

Serious suggestion: consider amphetamines. Dangerous in excess, but not unlike any other double edged tool, relatively safe when used responsibly.

Edit: faceless downvotes? How about some actual discussion?

I wonder how many of those with the qualifications to be selected for a trip to mars would make such a sacrifice.

If you knew you weren't coming back, would you still be willing to be the first person on mars?

No, the point is that in 1984 you had doublespeak, where people used words in ways that were contradictory to their meaning[0] - in the way that the GP claims that prohibiting filtering is somehow a form of censorship, when censorship is literally a form of filtering.

0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to see your thing in place of the thing they want.

This reads like a paragraph straight out of 1984. No one is forcing people to view anything by prohibiting filtering. It simply is making certain available on the platform.

Now I suppose one could argue that filtering is a form of speech, but thats still reaching I think.

Hold on, you dont think it absurd that, by the logic in your post, if I retweet something as newsworthy as the president tweeting "negroes are bad", that I will be banned as well?

This is exactly the kind of myopic mindset that makes me worry about twitter censoring speech. Not to mention how easy such censorship is to abuse in order to, say, craft a narrative...

Actively spreading the harassing or inciting material is an implicit endorsement - you could stop it if you wanted.

Hosting an open forum is not the same as endorsing ideas on said forum.

In fact, I would argue strongly to the contrary-twitter has an implicit social responsibility to allow all dialogue, as it is effectively in a position to limit speech, given the size of its audience and its position as a disseminator of information.

Do you really want faceless corporations like Facebook, google, and twitter deciding what is and is not appropriate material? Especially when they effectively have more immediate power in censoring or creating narratives than our own government?

Apparently this is the so called progrwssive prince behind the crackdown, the one who among other things allowed women to drive.

I wonder what this could mean for the middle east and the Saudi export of Wahhabism...

In theory it sounds like a good idea, but I just wonder, what stops people from gaming such a system if it becomes commonplace?

$500 for a couple hours of trouble, assuming I'm local, isn't a bad deal.

How does anyone expect high school graduates to make responsible decisions regarding loans and choice of major when the overwhelming majority of his grads exit highschool financially illiterate, with the nonsensical idea that any college degree is good enough?

How many times have you heard the expression "do what you love, and the money will come?"

The culture in the U.S. is in dire need of a return to merit, as well as drastic changes to our education system; and, no, the answer is not more funding.

Also I believe that government aid should be restricted to degrees with a minimum relative ROI. Education for the sake of culture is no longer useful when you have an increasingly incompetent workforce.

I'm not sure I follow; the authors claim that paying job applicants for applying attracts better talent? And they further claim that Ethiopians cannot afford the cost of generating an application?

Somehow I doubt that these results would translate to white collar jobs in the first world.

I can attest, I have a 9 card mining setup which pulls around 330w per card 24/7. In the summer when it was 70-80 degrees outside it was enough to keep a large basement in the 90s, plus the rest of the house uncomfortably warm. I had to purchase an AC to keep the place livable.

Now that winter is coming around I look forward to the extra heating.

There seems to be discussion in these comments about mining for the purpose of heating a home, but the heating is a bonus. You're making money AND saving on energy, that's the important part.

Plus, in my opinion, a constant heat source like a mining rig is preferable to an older cycling central system which can be slightly disturbing as it loudly cycles on and off throughout the day...