I think you mean to say, Yelp users are sharing information, and patrons are choosing to go to different establishments that cater better to their desires. That was the idea of Yelp, was it not? Not seeing the problem.
The article mentions the bad reviews come from people that aren't even from the city where the bar is located, a lot of them are even from Europe, so not even from the same country.
The idea of Yelp is that people who actually have actually been customers rate the business. Hopefully you can understand how this sort of thing is not in the spirit of sincere, useful and fair reviews.
Yeah, I too fail to see the problem. I'm fully vaxxed and am not at all opposed to vaccines. In fact, I believe in vaccines so much, I don't care if anyone else is vaxxed or not - because my vaccine works.
On the other hand, I am opposed to nosy ass businesses and would definitely appreciate knowing which establishments are gonna waste my time with that crap so I can avoid them.
Your vaccine works now. Why do you believe it will work for the rest of your life?
While it works against the main COVID-19 variants, it might not work against some evolutionary accessible variant.
New variants require a non-immune host population for natural evolution to occur.
The more people with COVID-19, the more likely there will be some mutation that affects vaccinated people.
This is why the flu shot doesn't carry life-time immunity against influenza.
Therefore, even if I'm only using egotistical reasoning, my understanding of how vaccines work make me care that others also get vaccinated - it reduces my future chance of health problems.
> If an equality program is so successful that it creates an equality imbalance in the other direction what do we do?
Equality of outcome is not possible or even desirable. That is the problem. The more people try to force some completely unnatural result, the more terrible things they'll have to do (e.g., discrimination on the basis of body attributes, as if there is some good way to do it) and the worse things will get.
The reason we have to go to the trouble of making cryptocurrencies is that busybodies like this guy are endlessly trying to reduce our freedom. They're not trying to look out for people; they're trying to protect their ability to print money and steal. In crypto parlance, they want to remain the VIPs that have centralized special privileged access to create tokens, and force usage thereof. But now we have the technology to enforce currency issuance by immutable programs. That's a better way, because programs are very strong exactly where humans are very weak.
People aren't happy about that because he told everyone he was doing it for free. That he wasn't making a profit on the deal. Also, he used inside info to sell his trash quality face masks.
Fuck Sywert van Lienden, disgusting crisis profiteer.
Just to be clear, by "ability to print money and steal" you mean having a central bank and levying taxes? You're making a moral argument against the idea of government controlled currency in general, yes?
Can you clarify why you think controlled currencies are morally bad and how cryptocurrencies are better? I'd love to hear a less abstract argument than "more freedom".
EDIT: I assume downvotes mean there are people who like cryptocurrencies and agree with the parent. Maybe some of those could answer my question? "Freedom" is a loaded term with conflicting definitions and ideas like "taxation is theft" don't stand in isolation because they imply logical conclusions that most people prefer not to make explicit.
Inflation/deflation is an effect of the amount of money (or in general: any kind of material compensation for trade, work and services) available and which potential customers are able to spend and the amount of goods (and the capabilities to produce them), which are actually available. Meaning, it's a function and not necessarily a conspiracy.
Edit: In other words, if you are working really hard and are making earnings which allow you to spend more on Teslas than Musk can produce, you are creating inflation. Money or other tokens.
money printing is done by handing it to banks at zero interest and flooded on the stock exchanges. The rich get richer and the poor can buy less with the same money since wages are the last thing to raise (while the rich buy up houses and commodities with their free money). Inflation is a tax on the poor and elderly. Literally since VAT is percentage-wise levied on relatively more expensive consumer goods and if wages rise they come in higher income pay scales for taxation. Crony capitalism at it's peak where the players get bail outs and handouts and the poor get poorer and the middle class disappears.
Mining is supposed to be increasingly cost prohibitive so in an ideal world it would eventually cease to have a meaningful impact on currency supply within practical timeframes. Assuming economic growth holds, this would mean constant deflation (i.e. value of the currency continually increases as its supply remains quasi constant while the overall economy increases).
Since transfer of cryptocurrencies incurs transaction fees and the value of those currencies only ever increases, transactions would eventually become cost prohibitive for smaller values. So realistically it would seem that we'd eventually have to transition to representative money instead (i.e. you don't transfer crypto between wallets, you shift numbers in a trusted third party's database which itself holds crypto for you). This would lose most of the benefit of the blockchain for these smaller transactions and effectively create banks because these third parties would have operating expenses they would have to charge you for (either directly or by using your crypto for investments).
So in other words, this sounds a lot like returning to the gold standard with extra steps.
that "would" in your shift argument is already reality, that's the lightning network, which transmits bitcoin off-chain for pennies, but in a decentralized way, because it utilizes existing bitcoin balances on lightning nodes for it. There is still no bank, BUT there is a more centralized "arbiter", yes. So your argument does hold about the trustlessness, though not entirely the centralization.
The one thing that's central in this debate is to understand that current currencies are built to be inflationary, which causes the need for constant economic growth. Bitcoin is not. The "bitcoin fixes it" meme is hopeful utopianism, I grant you that, but bitcoin would not carry this growth mandate in its bowels that state currencies do.
not OP. But the less-buzzwordy argument is this:
the existence of money itself isn't the problem. The problem is that the modern monetary system is built on inflation and supermassive debt, and this combination has a bunch of highly negative outcomes:
-it systematically expropriates poor people. Inflation will make sure your money is worth gradually less, so the only option to save it is though real estate and stocks, which poor people have little access to.
-this goes along with the need for companies, and the economy at large, to keep growing year over year. Our modern infinite-growth mandate, the thing that is actually destroying the planet, is based on the system of money we now have, as saving loses you money: you have to make more, consume more, make more, consume more, or everyone loses the money they have. That is to stay, money is no longer a store of value, which is one of its major functions.
- speaking of destroying the planet, after the end of the gold standard, the current dollar/euro system is backed, in complictaed ways, by their uses in international trade, especially oil. After the fall of their productive capacites (all outsourced), the US now basically exports dollars to finance their internal consumption and worldwide hegemony. Because all nations need USD to trade, esp oil, the US can print and print and sink that into other countries that buy it while keeping inflation mus lower (still there) than it otherwise would be. This is a circle, as it both finances global hegemony, but also needs it: it is that hegemony that enforces the use of USD as a world transactional currency, and US "regime change" operations generally hit countries that try to escape this system.
-a house of cards: central banks don't print most of the money; private banks do. "fractional reserve banking" means that banks only need a fraction of the money that they lend out on reserve, which means that when it has a million, it can make many millions in loans to customers, effectively creating the rest of the money every time it makes the loan. This is margin/leveraged trading on a global and massive scale, and it is what makes banks crash every time a hiccup occurs in that system. It's a time bomb.
These are all massive systemic problems, and the -way- central banking is now organized is the problem. Could states organize this without these problems? sure; "gah states are unfreedom" is not the problem here, the capture of states by global corporate capitalism is. Will states change? no, of course not, not without a massive systemic crash or revolution. Do we need bitcoin to save this? strictly no, but bitcoiners see bitcoin as a sneaky trojan horse to destabilize this system, and -one- hope to overcome this massively cancerous state of affairs, for a host of reasons beyond mere dreaming that would double this already long comment in size. All I'm saying s: like everything, this is much, much more complicated than "bitcoin volatile" or "bitcoin energy bad".
Oh, I'm fully aware of the problems with our current economic system. I just don't see how toppling fiat currencies and returning to representative (or even commodity) currencies solves any of the problems. Especially if the process involves the full destruction of the state while maintaining our current notion of property.
Property only exists insofar as people are able to enforce their claims of it. Under the dominant economic system property rights are enforced by the state via the police and prison system. Without the state, you need to rely on the community to assist you in enforcing your claims. If you want to maintain an imbalance that they might not be willing to tolerate, you'll need a private army (i.e. share some of your property with people willing to protect you in return).
If you hold little to no property, you fully depend on others' willingness to share their property with you or you'll literally die (because even foraging would require accessing someone else's property if they have claims on the territory).
So unless those holding the most property (i.e. the extremely rich) either fail to secure their continued property claims (e.g. by having their army turn against them) or feel extremely charitable for no practical benefit to themselves, you still end up with extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
And honestly, once you have people like Jeff Bezos raising armies to assert their claims on a significant fraction of global wealth directly, you might as well call their claims states because this just feudalism without the mythology of the divine right of kings (yet).
Wealth inequality may be in part driven by fiat currency. But wealth inequality is an inevitable consequence of our understanding of property rights (i.e. enclosure and the commodification of essential life necessities up to and including access to drinkable water).
Abolishing fiat currencies and existing states may create a free market, but it will not abolish or even improve poverty. You can argue that a freer market is better (but again, this needs a better explanation than "more freedom better") but it does not logically follow that a freer market reduces poverty and wealth inequality (ironically most statistics claiming global poverty is massively decreasing do not account for inflation and thus do not demonstrate an actual increase in relative purchasing power).
you're mistaking me for a libertarian. Which is understandable, because you run into so many of those in the bitcoin space, so no hard feeling! :D They irritate me as well.
The problem with the current system is obviously not that it's not "free market" enough. I fully agree with you on property. And fiat currencies are fine with me in principle, the structural underpinnings of our current ones are the horrid part, and the power structures this underpins.
What I try to communicate is that bitcoin can also be a tech for leftist hope, because it uses the greed of the free market people to strengthen something that actually undermines the current corporatist capture of the state, and does so massively. It's decentralized and a real threat to the banking system and its wealth extortion. It's inclusive, as its permissionless nature will bank anyone with a phone. It also undermines US hegemony, as the US control over the banking system through SWIFT allows it to engage in economic warfare against everyone it doesn't like. The fact that bitcoin is an option for sanctioned countries is a medal for it in my book. And I know that's utopian and the US will try to find a way to kill it before it can actually do any f these things, but that's exactly the reason why people with critical attitudes to corporatism and US hegemony should help it along, not participate in the moral panics against it.
Okay, but at that point from a leftist perspective it's just accelerationism and hoping that the revolution comes down in our favor without laying any of the ground work to prevent a rise of fascism (to "heal" the state) or a decline into feudalism (via stateless capitalism).
There's also no reason to believe that the existing hegemons won't be the ones ultimately controlling crypto if doing so becomes necessary to their survival. Crypto may be digital and out of reach for states, but the humans owning it are physical and very susceptible to physical injury. Capitalism has recuperated anti-capitalism, it will recuperate crypto if necessary (and some may argue it's already happening).
well, I hadn't thought about it as accelerationism, and I'll have to think about it more. It's a good point.
My first reaction would be that it actually does help in steps beyond just strengthening existing structures, like I said, by banking the unbanked and freeing them from banking systems, by giving states ways out from under US sanctions, by whittling away at the hold corporatism has. Empirically, it's not the case that this is only adopted by the rich. Bitcoin use is massive in Africa, especially Nigeria and Ethiopia, among not so well-to-do people, in Central and South America, mostly for remittances and for peer to peer economies among people who have no bank accounts. And those are the first to really jump onto it, the corporate leeches are following, not leading. It's not just a toy for rich people. I'm far from rich by any metric.
But you're correct, the powers that be will absolutely try to capture it. Holders are not out of reach, though holding it can be dome quite clandestinely (as can supporting the network; you can run a bitcoin node, and nobody will know; and if you raid houses to take them, new ones will spring up.) The power of decentralization is rather persistent, as we have learned with filesharing over decades.
Bottom line, I wouldn't reject the idea that bitcoin can be reformist outright, but of course nobody can guarantee that.
Fun fact: most of the money is issued by ordinary banks, not by the bodies presumably in control of the token/currency. (Any such control is rather remote and indirect.)
Well, I don't think "more powerful" is a good way to think about it. A spreadsheet is essentially a functional programming paradigm. One programming thingie is not going to be "more powerful" than another. That said, one could be cooler or more interesting than another one, at least to you.
My feeling is that it doesn't have to make sense, and you don't really need to have any justification. If you want to make a spreadsheet system with Lisp, I'd definitely do it. You learn the most when you do your own projects, and interest is the fuel.
Also, we're bad at determining beforehand what actually is important, so maybe you work on something as a toy, but later it (or some piece of knowledge developed while working on it) is crucial for something else later.
When people speak of "power" in a programming language, they generally mean expressive power. It's true that all (Turing-complete) programming languages can theoretically encode the same programs - but they do not all take the same time to implement. Lisp is more powerful than C; C is more powerful than x86 assembly; x86 assembly is more powerful than Brainfuck.
It's reasonable to ask if a given approach to language design results in more "power". It's not just a question of taste.
One interesting thing with lisp and spreadsheets would be that a you can transform data in the sheet into a program with a macro, so rather than just values one cell could turn other parts of the workbook into a dsl. Could be some interesting shenanigans you can get up to.
If I can run any arbitrary lisp program in a cell (assuming the env is global), I was wondering if this was just a 2d text editor for a lisp. But that's awfully reductionist.
But you're right I'm assuming I'll discover interesting things if I keep tinkering with it!
If you think it might be a little inappropriate to care much about a programmer's endorsement of a vaccine, here's an actual famous doctor saying "for God's sake don't take this thing".
Ok, I'll bite.
I was willing to assume he might have some legitimate concern.
A quick Google hoever reveals he was a Covid denier from the start.
There is plenty of evidence that the pandemic is real. Why should the oppinion about the risk of the cure of someone who denied the risk of of the pandemic, be relevant?
How does a credentialed person go off the rails so badly??
Well, entire generations were brainwashed not to eat good foods, and to substitute more harmful foods in their place. Remember the food pyramid? Many of my schoolmates are obese and well on their way to an early death due to diabetes, from being told to avoid fat and to eat plenty of cereals and grains.
Yea the food pyramid is pretty bad, its basically a how to guide on getting diabetes. Cereals and grains have the word glycemic loads while fats and meats are the healthiest things to combat insulin resistance and diabetes but the pyramid tells you to never eat them. If the pyramid was inverted (except for sweets) it would be healthier.
As is often the case with the FBI, they were apparently facilitating the crimes. It's easy to argue that the crimes might not have taken place without the FBI's help. Somehow this is never entrapment when the FBI is doing it.
It's allowed, but I get the sense that many HN users don't want it to come up to be discussed in depth, because it's a huge can of worms, because if it's established that it works, intellectual honesty compels us to ask why it was suppressed, and a lot of people would have their fundamental assumptions challenged.
I think that's why the hivemind often finds it convenient to just squash the topic by flagging it. Nobody knows who did it, nobody has to provide any reason for doing it, etc. Flagging is very convenient for suppressing discussions where we might actually get something done.
I basically agree -- the woke interpret anything other than absolute unconditional support as opposition. But there may be something to this strategy of making the announcement so insipid that the woke don't have anything in particular to get upset about, or perhaps aren't even sure they're being opposed.
Sure, I don't think it's good tech, and I don't like it. But I don't like a million things people do, and I don't try to make some convoluted argument that their weird activity is a matter of public concern.
> And the world burns for it.
Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?
>Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?
Got a source for the "fires are down 90%" statistic?
I think it's pretty clear that GP was referring to climate change, which wastes of energy like NFTs and BTC exacerbate. A side note - climate change means that bushfires are more common and their severity is worse than in the past. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the world burns for it.
According to Cambridge University, Bitcoin alone consumes more electricity per year than the entire country of Argentina, for no actual tangible benefit to the world. It creates nothing but an imaginary store of imaginary wealth.
It obviously has value to the people who are involved with it. We don't decide if other people are allowed to do the things they're interested in by comparing their activity to something in Argentina. If you are able to say precisely how some particular person or organization is harming you, I encourage you to file a lawsuit against them. If not, I encourage you to take up some kind of spiritual cultivation practice to help you not be unduly concerned about the activities of others.
The presence of harm cannot be decided solely on a individual basis, to be solved by lawsuits.
Just as you cannot solve the problem of harmful emissions or pollution by measuring individual harm and somehow tracing that back to the source.
How would a person trace their illness caused by PFOA emitted by DuPont, if DuPont could simply counter with "prove that the specific PFOA molecules that made you sick came from our plant."?
It doesn't work that way, and for damn good reason. You don't have to prove specific individual harm, in order to condemn and regulate actions that do harm on societal, national or global scale.
Cryptocurrency demonstrably does harm by vastly increasing global power consumption, plus the cost and environmental damage from producing the increasing amounts of hardware needed to run crypto as a whole.
That is why regulation is needed, because we cannot let the misguided desires of a few crypto-obsessed tech heads contribute to climate change on such a scale.
