poetically

What exactly in human nature requires profit?

Are you doing heroin right now?

Same as Naval's definition.

People seem to like heroin as well. What is your point?

That you'd be an entirely different person in another time and place? That's pretty obvious to anyone that has traveled anywhere other than the place they were born.

That's a fact. If you were born somewhere else you would be an entirely different person. You'd be speaking a different language, you'd be involved in different social arrangements and institutions, and you'd think the axioms of your reality were entirely different.

Read what I said instead of projecting what you think I said. I did not say anything about changing human nature.

This is a common confusion. My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they can change their transportation habits, they can change institutional arrangements that favor profits over well-being, they can change the forms of market transactions they find valuable.

This isn't anything deep. These are just basic facts.

Recruiters have no way to affect any real change. Thank them for their time and then say you're not interested.

It's not a perfect analogy but yes, we are like bananas. We should expect all future viral outbreaks to have similar effects. The moment Omicron was detected in the UK I knew it had already reached the US. There is no way to contain outbreaks in a global technocracy. Detection will always be too late.

Trello is free (https://trello.com/). You can use a trello board to manage the process.

World is projected to have 10B people by 2050 (I think). There are plenty of people. He should be more worried about the famines in Afghanistan and Madagascar if he cares so much about people.

This can all be done with GitHub repositories and signed commits. The workflow would be every "transaction" becomes a pull request that requires approval from several owners of the repository and the CI pipeline only passes and merges the PR to the main branch if the commits are signed by some minimum number of approved contributors.

There are also things like joint bank accounts that require approving transactions so this is all already possible with existing technology, all without having to put up with gas fees or any other blockchain nonsense.

This isn't regular ignorance. At this point there is enough data on vaccines and death rates for any sane person to see that the vaccine is a net positive. What's going on with some people is more than just ignorance. They're killing themselves just to "own the libs". The virus doesn't care if you're republican or a democrat, it's just a biological replication machine, it has no political agenda or allegiance.

Innovation hasn't slowed down. Individuals are just having fewer effective ideas. This is expected. The contemporary world is a complicated place so any kind of real innovation requires coordination among large groups of specialists. The development of the vaccine is a very good example of real innovation because it demonstrates what specialists can accomplish when they effectively cooperate across commercial and governmental institutional boundaries.

So if something is slowing down innovation it is probably the incorrect emphasis on the lone genius focusing on hard problems. This is no longer a sensible model for innovation and it probably never was in the first place.

Follow the science means gather data and see what works, it's not about philosophical differences about whether lockdowns are good or not from a philosophical perspective but whether they actually have their intended outcomes, i.e. reduction of infections and deaths.

It would be idiotic to think lockdowns don't make a difference for a highly contagious airborne virus. The fewer people there are out and about the less chances the virus has of jumping from one host to the next. That's not even following science, that's just basic logic. But people don't have logical skills anymore because they keep consuming nonsense from their internet connected pocket supercomputers.

What exactly is the abstraction here? McLuhan is describing something very concrete that is not obvious to most people.

It's not going to end. It's going to evolve and it's going to continue killing people. We're stuck with it.

Ya, I'm willing to bet money this is going to happen. It's pretty much guaranteed at this point since there is evidence now that Omicron picked up DNA from the common cold. [1]

1: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/omicron-possibly-m...

It sounds like you want variations of a patch instead of what GANs do with the synthesizer and the discriminator. You might be better served with some kind of evolutionary algorithm instead since there is no discrimination involved in what you described.

So you don't think the medium has an effect on how people think about and perceive the world?

Omicron will not end the pandemic. All the previous variants are still in circulation and evolving. It's only going to get worse because the more variants are in circulation the more chances the virus has of evolving. Eventually there will be several overlapping waves of infections each with a different variant so that people might even get sick from a combination of different variants at once.

The only way out of this was all the way in the beginning when we had a chance of stopping it through lockdowns and vaccination but that's no longer an option. The virus is spreading faster than our vaccine manufacturing and uptake capabilities. This virus is here to stay, it has become endemic.

It's also not surprising. This is exactly what ecological theory would predict for a monoculture. See what's happening to bananas with tropical race 4 infections.

That's just bizarre.

Still don't see the point but to each their own I guess. Seems like a waste of money.

I think that's the ending of the story. Some drunkard buys it because he has decided to drink himself to death anyway.

I couldn't think of any so I asked why people use exercise trackers. If the goal is exercise then I've managed to do without them so if you know what their purpose is then you can just answer. But if you don't know then I don't get why you're even commenting.

This is the bottle imp paradox: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/07/the-paradox-of-the-bottle-.... The crash is far enough in the future that people don't worry about buying into USDT because they think they can sell it off before the inevitable crash.

I don't know. I'm not an expert but seems like there should be some institution that figures out whether financial games like stablecoins are actually economically beneficial and whether they should be regulated in some way or other.

No one has seen any of their collateral or knows how much of it they actually have. I believe the finance people call this being over-leveraged but I'm not an expert. Seems kinda weird that the SEC hasn't looked into it.

Great, glad we cleared that up.