The plane itself isn’t the only cost of shipping. Even sending a letter is more expensive, and there’s no plane involved. You have to pick it up, bring it to the airport, and deliver it to the door from the destination airport.
What would happen if everyone lived like the Amish though? I’m assuming they are still profiting from modern science they wouldn’t be able to come up with, right? Or are they refusing MRI scans and Chemotherapy too?
I think the point wasn't that that specific example scales to the whole nation but more that if that specific example works as well as it does at the scale that it does than surely some middle ground between "import basically every consumer good" and "the amish" would scale to the entire nation with acceptable tradeoffs.
AliExpress is great for electronics. Not the „I need a phone“ stuff (although for that it’s fine too, I think), but more the „I need an ESP-32 module“.
This. People buying a laptop there for ten bucks then receiving the photo of one have indeed all the rights to complain, but common sense should suggest them before the purchase the old saying that if something looks too good to be true... And this can happen everywhere there's no strict quality control or accountability. Aliexpress is great for small modules, SBCs, diy electronics in general, however I wouldn't ever buy semiconductors, batteries or memory modules there, as the risk of fakes or low quality clones is close to 100%.
Yeah especially as in places like London there have been many explosions and house fires originaying from cheap foreign e-bike batteries.
Some Chinese companies care about a long-term brand and place high standards on themselves but it's not true that anything online has passed safety standards. It's hard to differentiate the two due to the amount of fake reviews also.
Yes,also beware of power strips and electrical wires in general: those coming from there are increasingly made of coated iron instead of copper or brass in contacts. The side effect is a much higher resistance that makes the wire dissipate a lot more power than it should, even to the point it can overheat and catch fire if under serious load (heaters, ovens etc.). Their exceptionally bad insulation and usually smaller size than advertised make the problem even worse. Such bad cables can be used for breadboarding where small lengths and low currents mitigate the effects, but they shouldn't be considered for anything serious. I've learned to ditch almost every bundled cable coming from there after multiple bad experiences. Surplus is a good source of top notch cables that can last decades.
Crappy cables can be checked using a magnet: pure copper ones won't stick. There are also reports of junk coated aluminium cables that wouldn't stick as well to a magnet, but they're rare as aluminium, at least good quality one, is not cheap.
It's basically McMaster with slow shipping for my hobby projects. I don't need the $1000 quality and warranty of a McMaster ball screw and linear guideways, the $80 BSTMOTION brand(?) stuff has been working for me for years and is plenty accurate.
You can get the base ESP-32 modules for example, but not most of the Dev Boards. They have some, but much more expensive than AliExpress. And then you also have to pay shipping.
Is that how it works legally? If you hack into computers using a zero day, did you also just access the computer according to the way it was programmed? Just because you can do it technically doesn’t mean it’s not fraud/something else.
If that's not how it works, where's the line for what is fraud and what is not? Once you move away from the "code is law" principle, companies have the perverse incentive to define fraud as "any transaction that results in negative PnL for me", which is exactly what happened here.
I am well aware that "code is law" has no weight in actual law. The point I tried to raise was, given the following sequence of events:
1. You deploy a smart contract to the ethereum blockchain
2. I interact with your smart contract in some manner
how do we define whether the manner of interaction in step 2 is fradulent or not?
"Code is law" is one interpretation by crypto enthusiasts to define under what conditions interacting with the blockchain is fraud; in their definition, it's never fradulent.
Let's assume "code is law" is nonsense, as many comments here say. Then, under what conditions do we define interacting with the blockchain as fradulent? What is fraud and what is not fraud?
Edit: In the blockchain we can even formalize this. The ethereum blockchain at block K has a certain state S_K. I submit a certain transaction/set of instructions T to the blockchain which is mined as block K+1. How do we define a function isIllegal(S_K, T)? (Assuming block K+1 contains EVM instructions from my transaction T only)
> Let's assume "code is law" is nonsense, as many comments here say. Then, under what conditions do we define interacting with the blockchain as fradulent? What is fraud and what is not fraud?
The thing is, laws can have issues and bugs as well, just like code! And we have courts to judge not just when someone outright breaks a law but also when someone is skirting on the edges of the law.
Take Germany's "cum ex" scandal for example. Billions of euros were effectively defrauded from the state and on paper the scheme appeared legally sound, but in the end it was all shot down many years later because the actions of the "cum ex" thieves obviously violated the spirit of the law.
The only difference is that blockchains are distributed worldwide and there is no single entity that can be held accountable and forced to execute or reverse any given transaction.
You’re never going to find a binary function that tells you if something is legal or not, in the end it’s up to a human judge to decide. But imagine setting up a search engine and I enter “ Robert'); DROP TABLE INDEX; --” as a search term. Would you say that’s a crime? That’s a perfectly fine thing to search for, right?
> You’re never going to find a binary function that tells you if something is legal or not, in the end it’s up to a human judge to decide.
... but the whole point of cryptocurrency, or at least of smart contracts and "DeFi", is to reject that and try to build a parallel system. That's presumably based on a belief that you can write code that behaves the way you intend, regardless of whether you really can do that or not.
So perhaps the judge should decide "Well, you signed up for that when you tried to opt out of having human judgement govern your deals. Have a nice day.".
And in fact perhaps there should be formal statutory law that makes it clear that's what the judge is supposed to decide in any case that isn't itself "borderline" somehow. Which the case at hand shouldn't be.
That's neat, but the bitcoin whitepaper opens with:
> Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
Why do you think you can dismiss the obvious claim that cryptocurrencies are a form of decentralized finance with a "no, it isn't"?
> Why do you think you can dismiss the obvious claim that cryptocurrencies are a form of decentralized finance with a "no, it isn't"?
They are or can be a form of decentralised finance. That doesn't mean a system that is totally parallel to the legal system. And, again, different people intend different things with it. It's definitely not all "code is law" people.
If I put up a sign „trespassers will be enslaved“ on my property and then force people who trespass to work for me, would that be fine because they knew what they were getting into? You can’t just create your own justice system which contradicts the real one by making contracts.
Alright, please go ahead and define under what legal pretext this guy's behavior might be illegal.
There are other cases where interacting the blockchain is illegal in a very clear manner. Example: if I know an Iranian or North Korean entity has the keys to an Ethereum wallet, and if I send USDT to that wallet as a Western citizen, that is very illegal due to sanctions.
The context is completely different though. Building a normal computer app is not an attempt to do anything without government or legal structures so it makes sense that normal computer apps would be protected by government or legal structures.
It doesn't really make sense for people to build smart contracts that are intended to be an extra-judical agreement where the code enforces the rules and then run to government whenever something they don't like happens. What is the purpose of smart contracts at all if you still need the entire legal apparatus around them?
What does agreeing to a contract that inherently implies trying to work around the need for government in contracts means? What does it say about intent?
If for example, the firm that lost money had been saying "Code is Law" in their previous pro-crypto statements and had explicitly talked about smart contracts being extra-judical it seeems there intent would be to avoid legal intervention entirely and it would require a fairly high bar to argue that any bug could result in a lawsuit.
It may not pass muster with a judge in some backwater, but with one in the Northern District of California or a jury of their HN peers, it might. Laws are what we make them.
Imagine I write a contract and empower an AI to execute it. I put $10,000 in a bank account and write, "I'd like a nice car."
I do this of my own free will, at my own hazard. I know I'm playing this game. I have intentionally elected to use a system that will execute without any further intervention or oversight on my part. Verbally, I state that I am confident enough in the writing of my instruction that I feel secure in whatever outcome it may bring.
The system automatically executes and someone has sold me a very nice remote control car.
Isn’t, in the US system, the definition of fraud built up through a combination of legislation and case law from previous ‘grey area’ cases? I think most laws tend to have some balance between what is easy to define/understand and what is desirable to allow/disallow.
What does one have to do with the other? Fraud is "intentional deception to gain an unfair or illegal advantage, often resulting in financial or legal harm" what does that have to do with code? What could code even do about fraud?
There are indeed pay machines, and removing them is only a profit-squeezing play by the operators.
You also never need the QR code. It's only provided as a "convenience". And in fact they usually also provide a way to pay by phone (see illustrative picture in article).
So these are all issues created by bad engineering and operators trying to squeeze as much as they can without consideration for the users.
> You don't need an app to accept online payments.
Right, but does it matter if it’s an app or a website?
> There are indeed pay machines, and removing them is only a profit-squeezing play by the operators.
Yes, and?
> You also never need the QR code. It's only provided as a "convenience". And in fact they usually also provide a way to pay by phone (see illustrative picture in article).
Of course you don’t need a QR code specifically, but you probably need some kind of URL (which can then be imitated by the scammer) so everyone can pay.
> So these are all issues created by bad engineering and operators trying to squeeze as much as they can without consideration for the users.
I wouldn’t call it bad engineering, it’s a tradeoff. Either expensive machines for every parking space or a simple sign with a QR code.
This is just plain wrong. With glider planes, you can fly around wherever you like (in the non-restricted airspace) and aren’t required to have ADS-B or FLARM in Europe. Most people don’t do it but you could entirely rely on visual detection to prevent collisions.
As someone who grew up with an Atari, the difficulty was coming from you having to rotate the turret for target priority. Turning it into a touch and shoot (I only tested it on my phone) removes that portion of the game.
