tCfD

And then another time my statistical mechanics prof informed me that "physics is just drawing cartoons of reality with math." That came as a huge existential relief by the way.

One of the most formative and sublimely influential 'aha' remarks I've ever encountered was a line in a Willam Goldman book about screenwriting which simply read, in the manner of a final summation to a chapter: "POETRY IS COMPRESSION." Caps in the original. I had the same sense of instant resolution, like wearing glasses for the first time, that you seem to have had with your prof's insight.

This could also be phrased '[...] are increasingly reduced to numbers', in order to be rationalized by algorithms. How much wealth is counted multiple times by multiple models all recognizing the same qualities under different enumeration schemes?

I expect to see more and more references to Goodhart's Law as this increasing bias in favor of numerically digestible value amplifies the (often unacknowledged) premise that 'that which cannot be counted, doesn't count'

"a boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into"

Good luck to this guy, but it seems every solution to a blockchain scaling problem is ultimately the creation of a blockchain decentralization problem, and vice versa.

Unfortunately it's a misunderstanding of alchemy and it's role in the development of modern science that causes these knee-jerk negative responses to what is in fact a useful and non-pejorative comparison. I suppose next time I'll make my case in more detail.

Alchemy gave birth to science, this is not trolling.

Cryptocurrency is just alchemy for the internet age. Same failures, same etiology, same promise of unexpected insights in another, future form

In most if not all cases the answer is: they can't. The price of crypto, especially that of the ICO era, is propped up by the same individuals that would most want to sell it. It's their HODLing of the coin that keeps it illiquid enough to allow them to drive the price up to the ico target and beyond. By casing out they'd be selling largely to themselves + the thin wisp of actual rubes they've duped into believing there's any substantial buy support under the listed market price.

A centralized cryptocurrency is just digital currency. It may be cryptographically secured against unauthorized transfers/access, but if it doesn't employ some sort of game-theory based custodial sharing scheme which is intended to incentivize decentralization of control (successfully our not), it's not using the 'crypto' protection in the special sense that cryptocurrency implies.

tl;dr anger is a great tl;dr compression algo

The misguided belief that "if it can't be counted, it doesn't count" lies at the heart of all structural social conflicts. When complex reality is overcompressed into digestible, uniform units of account, whatever values fall outside the perception model is discounted to zero and lost.

Expect to see this, and/or its close cousin the McNamara Fallacy, among the top blogpunditry memes of the next few years. If only it were possible to buy stock in these phrases...

Don't forget the moose! cm.org

Op may be thinking of the 'flipper' type of home buyer, where these would be investment only transactions, kept marginally in the black between sales by prior profits Airbnb etc.

Kuro5hin was built by Rusty on slashdot's codebase so I don't think it could have been prior

Sign all content and post pubkey in as many public records as possible - Would that help?

Slashdot, including the first time 'karma' was associated with digital influence afaik. Meta moderation and a cap on influence ranking was and still is the Right Way to constrain sunset score-whoring feedback loops.

Just a minor clarification - the Video Toaster was a switcher, a broadcast quality paint box, and could facilitate regular linear editing but did not have non-linear capabilities. It wasn't until much later, nearly at the point at which the Amiga had ceased to exist and become at best a peripheral of the video toaster rather than the other way around, did the video toaster gain NLE capabilities in the form of another product the Video Toaster Flyer. Source: video toaster serial number 000009 lived in my personal A2000.

This is a valid point were it not for the fact that being structurally designed to thwart regulation (by obscuring the link between account and account holder) is the main difference between cryptocurrency and ordinary digital cash, and is a major - if not the principal value proposition of the technology.

Ritual Reality

You'll still want them to be able to stack at least two units high or they will not be eligible for 90% of rail transit. Also having more than one container standard will create a different set of logistics problems for storage, repositioning, and allocation / return of empties.

That is a very good idea, though the development and standardization of the current series of intermodal containers was about a 20-year process, and that's with _enormous_ assistance from Vietnam War military logistics planners, who desperately needed a non breakbulk solution to supply line issues that were not solvable with the tiny conex boxes they had on hand.

Tires blowing out are a much bigger (in terms of simple cost and the thornier problem of schedule optimization and ability to guarantee precise delivery times) and much more common of a problem than mechanical breakdowns. They're also a problem that does not go away with autonomous trucks or electric motors or anything conceivably around the corner, outside of some miraculous development in materials science.

As such, a (somewhat) well-organized industry has developed around getting replacement supplies like tires and other accessories to the site of a breakdown as quickly as possible, and this would simply need to be extended to include whatever it is autonomous trucks would require that doesn't touch the road.

Although the paperwork problem will definitely be an under-appreciated obstacle to making these systems work, autonomous trucks will eliminate a significant portion of it because there will no longer be any such thing as hours of service, or mileage logging for drivers.

Ditto for licenses, drug tests, background checks, and most of the common kinds of moving violations. and scheduling has its own set of paperwork which is a colossal nightmare because you are dealing with the always conflicting priorities of drivers on one side and customers on the other.

The major logistical obstacle outside of paperwork will remain to be resolving last-mile issues, but that has already been resolved long ago for containerized railroad freight: a.k.a. autonomous trucking technology from the 1800s. There's been a century's worth of time to solve this, manifested in the form of short-haul service providers known as intermodal draymen who pick up the container from a designated landing area (a rail yard) and haul it the last mile. This can easily be adapted to autonomous trucking logistics.

Of course this was bound to happen, the entire point of a blockchain is supposed to be that joining it is voluntary based on a set of shared values that you wish to support by contributing resources to sustain the blockchain. Forcing someone to join the blockchain is nothing less than forcing them into a commercial racket, and completely renders irrelevant the fundamental value proposition of decentralization.

It worked for the alchemists!

Sadly, the history of people faced with difficult, complex problems turning to opportunistc 'one weird trick' quacks out of desperation is long and depressing.

How about EcMH - the "Eventually-consistent" Market Hypothesis

/s-orry Bogleheads, couldn't resist :D

Given that one of the fundamental objectives of the cryptocurrency movement is to devolve the power of monetary policy, issuance and supply leverage from the state to various 'decentralized' (weasel word of this century) groups, and thereby deprive the state of its power of taxation, I would think it in the interest of these regulators to pass the word along to those who do control monetary policy.

If this is Samson Mow, a well-known so called 'bitcoin maximalist', he most likely means most cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin have been overvalued. These guys always make a special exception for bitcoin when talking about the many downsides and over hyped value of cryptocurrencies.