This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust.
It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
Sounds like following people on a social media platform and only reading posts from in your network. Which is exactly how most people I know use Bluesky.
It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
A plug-in. Trusted users thumbs up/down sites and ratings are recorded in a database. The plug-in visually differentiates shite links (according to database) so others can avoid clicking on them (or they can hide them altogether).
Why that line in particular? It seems not to be about the quality of the content. Part of the issue is that businesses were advised to produce useful content, but the motivation for doing so is disappearing. A net negative, surely?
Even if you could do it perfectly (distinguish "authentic people" from slop merchants) the same old actors will do the same old things as long as the incentives are there. They will just wear "real people" like skin suits. Almost worse :/
Anyone else starting to see this as an unconscious but inevitable outcome of the world’s tail-end stage of becoming developed?
Moore’s law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.
We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.
Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential growth. We’ve hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number of resources.
Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.
Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services. The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.
Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know what a logistic curve is?
I don’t know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm and the products and services I interact with everyday are very optimised. But not optimised for me. They’re optimised for businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left offering anything.
Moore's law might have ended but Wright's law didn't, and even if it did, it would still be progress, we don't have exponential development in everything. Continues improvement is still continuous.
> The LHC found nothing of note.
That's just wrong.
> Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated.
Childhood mortality has not been defeated. And while Polio has been, many other things haven't.
> The periodic table is effectively complete.
People in the next 100 years will add more. And even so, there is so much about materials we don't understand its actually insane. There are many things we learn about materials that is just as or more relevant then discovering a new element.
> R&D is having limited returns.
It has always had limited returns. And in some ways it has huge returns. Making an airlplane 1% more efficient today has a much larger overall impact then making a plane 10% more efficient 50 years ago.
> This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.
That's just dismissive of 30+ years of research and work. You might as well argue that its just 200 years of catching up to the vision of Ada.
> But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.
From a global perspective there is no slowdown, its only relative to US experience.
> Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.
This has literally been every business for 5000 years.
> Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services.
And they still do.
> The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.
That's just not accurate. Go look up how much investment in next generation notes cost TSMC and then tell me all they do is extract money from consumers. Tell me that the restaurant down the street who works hard creating incredibly food is just extracting money from consumers in some kind of aggressive way.
When SpaceX deployed a whole new infrastructure around the globe, was that just extracting money because innovation is impossible, or was it massive innovation and massive infrastructure spending?
This is just a cynical world-view glorifying the past. When in effect, innovation wasn't easy. Go look up how many people died in air accidents, or car accidents. Go look up how many mainframe and minicomputer companies came and went, trying to invent the future. If anything the length companies now-days go to, to prevent a single death is actually kind of crazy.
> Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed.
There are tons of business that don't expect exponential growth. There are even many that expect to shrink. And tons of business who do expect it don't get it. And yet the world keeps turning for those business too.
Capitalism can work perfectly fine in situation of now growth, plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades. And yet food still gets delivered to stores. Trains and cars keep going around. And so on and so on. But even in those places, companies don't stop trying to grow.
Maybe we will live in a world where no company will ever grow and wont for decades, even in that world, MBA and everybody else will still try to grow companies. Even if the world experienced a 50 year decline, that wouldn't change anything. Teach them about logistic curves all you like.
> But not optimised for me.
The world doesn't evolve around you. Shocking that you had to realize that like this.
Your response leans on pedantic literalism and techno-optimism.
Yes, continuous improvement is still happening – but that's exactly the point. We're now largely in the slow, incremental phase of a logistic curve, not the wild exponential boom of mid-century.
Declaring "Wright's law didn't end" doesn't magically revive Moore's Law or deliver another physics revolution. It just means costs fall gradually – a far cry from the paradigm-shifting breakthroughs we once took for granted. Take your example of airplane efficiency: you argue that a 1% improvement today has more total impact than a 10% improvement 50 years ago. Precisely – because we've already squeezed out the big gains. We're fighting over the last few percent now. That's diminishing returns in a nutshell.
Claiming "the LHC found nothing of note" is "just wrong" without elaboration is not a rebuttal – it's empty hand-waving. In truth, the LHC confirmed the Higgs (important, but expected) and thus far hasn't found new physics beyond the Standard Model. In other words, no earth-shaking discovery to mark on the timeline.
Similarly, quibbling that "the periodic table isn't complete because we might add element 119+" is technically true yet profoundly trivial. Synthesizing a superheavy element that decays in microseconds won't herald a new era of materials (you brought up material science, not me); it only underscores that we're tinkering at the margins of what we already know.
The original point – that the big foundational discoveries (DNA, the atom, electromagnetism, etc.) have been made – still stands. And yes, childhood mortality isn't zero and new diseases appear – but pretending the original claim was that "everything is 100% solved" is a straw man. Polio has been virtually eradicated worldwide; childhood mortality is down to a fraction of historic levels. These are monumental victories. Dismissing them because "many other things haven't been defeated" is like shrugging off the moon landing because we haven't colonized Mars. It's disingenuous nitpicking that ignores the broader truth: the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. Progress now tends to be harder-fought and incremental, exactly as a logistic curve (or plain old reality) predicts.
You insist "business has always been this way" – growth-obsessed and optimizing numbers – as if 5,000 years of merchants hustling invalidates any concern about today. This is a false equivalence. For most of history, economic growth was glacial and businesses were limited by local markets and resources. The modern era's exponential growth expectations are a relatively recent phenomenon fueled by industrialisation and cheap energy. Now we're hitting planetary and societal limits, something those ancient businesses never had to grapple with on a global scale. Pointing out that reality has a carrying capacity isn't "denial" – it's maths. We live on a finite planet. Endless exponential GDP growth in a closed system is fantasy. By slyly conceding that some companies "even expect to shrink" or that "plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades", you're actually reinforcing the original argument: perpetual growth is not guaranteed. Yet in the same breath you acknowledge businesses will "still try to grow" even in a no-growth world – which is exactly the problem being highlighted!
An economic paradigm built on eternal growth starts to cannibalise itself when growth dries up. Debt-fueled bubbles, resource depletion, and exploitative practices aren't signs of a healthy status quo – they're symptoms of chasing an impossible target. Teaching MBAs about logistic curves and limits to growth isn't frivolous; it's an attempt to inject reality into boardroom delusions. Dismissing that as irrelevant is just embracing willful ignorance.
And no, global progress isn't all wine and roses just because some developing countries are catching up. Your "from a global perspective there is no slowdown" line ignores that much of global GDP growth in recent decades came from population increase and China/India's rapid development – one-time events that don't prove infinite growth is sustainable. Meanwhile, frontier innovation and productivity in mature economies have slowed, a fact noted by plenty of economists. Simply put, we're coasting on momentum. Pointing that out isn't "glorifying the past," it's cautioning that the frenetic growth phase is leveling off – and our economic mindset needs to catch up.
You object to the statement that the only model left is "aggressively extracting money from customers," by rattling off examples of ongoing innovation. Sure, TSMC pours billions into next-gen chip nodes – but that actually supports the point about diminishing returns (each shrink is exorbitantly expensive and yields smaller gains). Yes, SpaceX built a new rocket infrastructure – an impressive outlier that everyone admires precisely because true game-changing innovation is so rare these days. Citing a local restaurant making "incredible food" or a rocket company revolutionising launch doesn't magically erase the countless counter-examples of businesses optimizing for profit at the expense of customer benefit.
Look around: software shifting to subscription models for basic features, appliances designed to break faster or use proprietary consumables, games riddled with predatory microtransactions, tech ecosystems that lock you in and harvest your data, airlines nickel-and-diming passengers for things that used to be free. These are all optimizations for revenue extraction, not for making your life better. My frustration was about this very shift – that many products and services nowadays feel like they exist to trap users in a maze of monetisation, rather than to deliver clear value.
Your response that "businesses still make lives better" reads like a blanket corporate press release, not an engagement with reality. Nobody said innovation has literally ceased. My claim was that the "large pile of low-hanging fruit" is gone – and you haven't actually refuted that. Incremental improvements and isolated leaps forward (like reusable rockets) happen, but they're increasingly hard-won. Meanwhile, companies flush with MBAs and pressured by investors turn to easier plays: locking in customers, eliminating competition, and squeezing every penny. When you counter with "but look at this new chip/rocket/restaurant," you're cherry-picking exceptions to downplay a broad trend that every consumer can feel.
The weakest part of your rebuttal is how it mischaracterises my original arguments and occasionally even undermines your own. You spend a lot of energy torching straw men. Nowhere did I claim "the world should revolve around me" – that's your invented absurdity. Complaining that products are not optimized for users (but for profit metrics) is not the same as expecting a personal utopia tailored to each individual. It's pointing out a systemic misalignment between what customers want and what companies prioritise.
The irony is that in your rush to refute every point, you often validate them. You argue "R&D has always had limited returns", which doesn't rebut the idea that current R&D is yielding less bang for the buck – it reinforces it. You point out how much harder it is now to get small improvements (exactly the complaint!). You deride the notion of a logistic curve, yet your own examples (small incremental gains, global catch-up growth slowing as it matures, etc.) paint a textbook logistic scenario. Your unwavering faith that "everything's fine, progress is progress" blinds you to the qualitative difference between transformative growth and grinding optimization.
It's like responding to someone worried about crop yields plateauing by saying "nonsense, we're still growing some corn every year." Totally misses the point. Finally, your tone doesn't do you any favors. Dismissing valid concerns as "cynical world-view" or implying anyone who disagrees just doesn't understand that "the world doesn't revolve around them" is more insulting than illuminating. It's possible to appreciate past innovation and be concerned about current trends – that doesn't make one a nostalgia-blinded cynic. Throwing out patronising asides might feel like scoring points, but it only highlights the emptiness of the rebuttal. When substance is lacking, sneering condescension fills the void.
Your response really tries to read like a thoughtful counter-argument and yet comes off as a knee-jerk denial of anything remotely critical of the status quo. Nobody is saying human progress stopped or that businesses overnight turned into pure evil. The argument is that we're entering a new phase: slower growth, harder innovation, and yes, a desperate push by many companies to maintain profits now that the easy growth is gone. You haven't disproven that; in fact, you've indirectly affirmed many aspects of it while arguing past the point.
To address this because it seems to be a repeated thought pattern underlying a lot of your responses lately: labeling every concern "wrong" or "cynical" doesn't make it go away. Sometimes metrics do plateau, sometimes the next big thing doesn't pan out (ask the LHC physicists hoping for new particles), and sometimes companies really do put profits over people in ways that hurt quality and trust. Acknowledging these realities isn't about glorifying the past – it's about not deluding ourselves regarding the present. No, the world doesn't revolve around any of us. But it's not supposed to revolve around corporate KPIs or your personal techno-optimism either. Progress isn't a given, and pretending otherwise is as misguided as assuming we were on an endless exponential.
A little less hubris and a little more humility about these limits would go a long way – especially before dismissing others as simply "wrong" without having the muscle to back it up.
The threat of being evicted every 12 months in Melbourne has reduced me to not being able to plan much at all. Rental market is cooked. It's exhausting.
What interests me is long-term, which nation/currency is optimal as reserve currency?(assuming no political/military factors)
Like theoretically, assume all countries can’t collapse. Should the reserve currency be primarily the countries with the most people? (think China/India/Indonesia/Nigeria) Most natural resources? (think Australia, China or Russia) Historical power? (UK) Linguistic network? (France)
Can we even derive a normative answer?
Do non-national currencies differ to national ones?
I’m not the biggest fan of economists, but I feel like research does need to be done here…
All the things you mention could be used to decide make no sense at all because you discounted "political and military factors", which are almost all that matters in choosing a reserve currency.
It's like asking which is the best CPU when you discount speed, price and energy consumption.
It is really even more than that because of the depth of the US bond market.
Nation states need to be able to make huge transactions without any one else holding the currency feeling it. That is what makes the reserve currency the reserve currency.
That can't be done without a massively liquid bond market and no one else is even close to the US.
Then the network of military bases and military power is just another layer on top of the US bond market.
Then on top of that the top competitor has capital controls.
There is signal under the noise of political and military factors
Political and military factors right now are the primary concerns
But in peace time, or with a long enough view (centuries and millennia) the question of what makes a good reserve currency is a question worth addressing
In peace time politics and military are exactly as important as during war, because the threat of war never goes away. This has been true as long as we've had currency, which is inextricably linked to military power. You need the power of the state behind the currency for it to have any value and for people to use it as currency, as well as to prevent forgery.
Personally I believe that the days of the reserve currencies are close to over, and that they will go away with the going away of the oil trade.
The present situation is one where if one wants oil, which everybody does and has nothing to trade directly with the oil countries, must export something to someone else who either exports or sells something to the oil countries, or who in turn exports or sells something to someone who exports or sells something to the oil countries. I believe that once this ends trade itself will become less important. Today it's mandatory to get oil, but once we don't need oil, the export of goods to acquire dollars to buy oil becomes optional.
Consequently I see the future as one in which people will manufacture what they themselves need or want, instead of what sells abroad.
Won’t the reserve currency simply switch to being “backed” by some other fundamental productive input? And by switch I mean the world’s most militarily powerful country will ensure that countries producing this fundamental input denominate their exports of it in their currency, if they don’t want to risk being “liberated”.
Personally, my money is on semi-conductors. It’s currently sitting at #4 in total international trade value, behind automobiles (which are increasingly reliant on semi-conductor inputs), refined oil, and crude oil.
Certainly casts a new light on contention over Taiwan.
I don't think that can be done. A whole lot of countries, even some quite small ones, so it won't be possible to directly bully them all.
Secondly, these technologies usually have stages developed by different people. Microchips are a chain: different components from Europe, Japan and the US are put together into actually usable factories in Taiwan, South Korea, the US etc. The whole chain is needed. Obviously the US recently succeded in some bullying against Taiwan, but I think it was mostly about demand, threats of tariffs, that kind of thing, and I think that kind of threat again matters only because exports are necessary because of the oil trade. It'll be harder to bully with tariffs when trade matters less.
I also think bullying countries capable of doing useful semiconductor work is less possible, and I also think countries like China will catch up, so that much will be commoditized.
I see thing as being like the end of the bronze age. With iron there's nothing to control, so there's no path to power, with decentralization and independence as the result.
And even when they can, comparative advantages are still a thing.
That being said, I do agree that with a reduction in the need for oil, the importance and use of a reserve currencies will reduce even if they don’t go away fully.
Yes, but if you're not manufacturing a bunch of stuff for export, then you can also dedicate the resources used for that to build what you actually want.
Exports are more "expensive" for countries with reserve currency status. This is a problem for countries that export many primary and "low-tech" secondary sector products. Countries that export many "high-tech" secondary sector products can usually still thrive.
This leaves us with the usual suspects: US, China, Germany (-> EU) and Japan.
Given that minting the reserve currency grants a nation economic privileges (in terms of being able to lend at a lower interest rate and having foreigners want to sell you things so as to get your currency), perhaps one could argue for a populous developing economy like India.
Foreigners sell you things in exchange for your currency, because they want to hold the currency. Once a currency is usable for payment in taxes, it can be analysed like any other commodity.
There are no 'reserve currencies'. Anybody holding a financial asset in a denomination outside its home physical zone area is a 'reserve'. They are operationally no different from hoarding diamonds or gold bars.
There’s one crucial difference - countries can’t print new diamonds or gold bars at will. Whenever the US prints more dollars, it transfers value from hoarders of US dollars to themselves - they’re levying a stealth tax via global oil price inflation. Other countries do not have this ability - if they print more of their own currency it just leads to domestic inflation.
The US can effectively tax the world as long as they use their military power to ensure oil producing countries denominate their oil exports in US dollars.
The reserve currency system is a stealth tribute system.
I’d argue the Catholic Jesuits probably had a more profound impact on science than any counter-catholic Christian denomination - purely from their intellectual output
They were formed around the same time as the reformation, but obviously had vastly more money and power (not that this should discount their contributions)
Examples:
- Christopher Clavius (created our modern Gregorian calendar)
- Anathasius Kircher (somewhat helped pull geology and medicine from vague Natural Philosophy into actual disciplines)
- Rodger Boscovich (atomic theory and a lot of basic everyday lab work was first used by him)
- A lot of contributions to astronomy and mathematics by many priests
- Probably their biggest contribution was the communication to the west and preservation of Chinese and Indian cultural artefacts/traditions. Without their work later anthropologists would have lost entire fields of study
Protestants had, what? Max Weber? That’s more cultural than intellectual or scientific
I agree with you though the later scientific revolution and age of enlightenment were in spite of the Catholic church, but I’d also probably broaden that as in spite of Christian belief altogether
Team Protestant had, well, lets see. Isaac Newton is a good place to start, who singularly contributed more to science than everyone on your list combined.
And how about Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Euler, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin. That's off the top of my head, and this isn't even a subject I've really thought about.
All of those are from the later scientific revolution (except Linneaus, Maxwell and Kelvin) and none of those are priests/leaders of a church. You’re correct in that they’re protestant and were surely religious but had little to no influence on protestant theology
Can you find any protestant priests with major scientific contributions during the reformation?
I only mentioned Weber as there are no other major contributions I can think of that actually influenced protestantism/wasn’t primarily from the scientific revolution
So, this works only for a subset of ads, specifically, ads that are CPC (cost-per-click) (sometimes called CPL -> cost-per-link), this wouldn't work for CPA campaigns (cost-per-action), which only pay out when a sign up or some other arbitrary action is performed by the user.
The larger adtech companies will have some form of bot-activity-detection, _but_ plenty will let it all just slip on by. (I've personally written a Babashka script at $job that checks performance of our publishers, and flags any fraudulent-seeming activity)
Watch Adam Curtis Century of the Self. I don't think he set out to explain ads in tech, but to my mind it answers a lot about how ads specifically came to power.
when there's a need to make money, but there's noone who wants to pay (but they want to use the service), then it naturally falls onto being ad-driven.
Where do you draw the line?
Who gets to draw the line?