Plastic packaging makes hygienic food more accessible as an effective and cheap barrier to pathogens, incoming and outgoing. Such public health interests should be balanced against their toxicity. It's easier for wealthier people to substitute with restaurants, servants and higher quality materials. So a general plastic ban would amount to a regressive tax on sanitary food.
Agree that a case by case analysis is appropriate, but I don’t really see any world where the cost/benefit analysis of plastic and water would be anywhere near the same ballpark
It tells us that people are willing to sign a petition to ban a thing while clearly not having done their research on the thing, just because an authoritative-seeming stranger told them something plausible. It means that such petitions shouldn't be taken seriously; and, to the extent that they are serious, it implies something about people's recklessness with regard to policymaking.
(I wonder how such a survey would fare today, when most people have smartphones with browsers and an internet connection.)
As Upton Sinclair once said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something if the value of his crypto stash depends upon him not understanding it.
It's difficult to get a man to understand something if the value of his crypto stash depends on OTHER PEOPLE not understanding it.
This is what bitcoin is. It's not a mass delusion: it's a will TO delude masses. I suppose some manage to fool themselves but I consider it a lot more likely that the majority are fully aware of what they're doing.
But it depends on deluding another level of the pyramid, and there's no real way to tell how high it goes before it collapses, so people are all-in, to the point where even Warren Buffett is talking in code and messaging 'I'm not going to say what I think about this, but I am going to say outright that I'm not saying what I think'. Not terribly hard to work out the message there.
In Switzerland it used to be quite easy as the money belongs to you and you can do with it what you want. The only issue should be depositing large sums.
If the banks make it harder and harder to get your money out then of course things like bitcoin are getting more popular.
I can't actually speak for Switzerland, it does have a reputation for "no questions asked" banking.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, "Know Your Customer", "Due Diligence" and other Anti-Money-Laundering measure are important. (1)
I think your last point is better phrased as "If the banks make it harder and harder to get your money out in bulk, without proof that your transaction is legal; then of course things like bitcoin will be used for the illegal transactions. And as a result the regulators will sooner or later regulate those too".
Buffett and Berkshire in fact have a long history of intentionally not always seeking the maximization of profit. Read Lowenstein's Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist for several examples.
Berkshire is not an "investment firm" (although that may have been an accurate description 40 or 50 years ago). And they operate almost solely by the dictate of Buffett, not by theroetical shareholder demand for optimizing for max profit. That means they operate by parameters that Buffett deems prudent. Berkshire for example could have been deep into the supposed sure thing of the real-estate bubble circa 2005, instead they were one of the few mega corporations on the planet almost entirely insulated from it (so much so they were the ones doing the bailing out of other large corporations). That philosophy is the same reason why Berkshire might choose to pass on a supposed sure thing in crypto today: they don't like the risk; others may see a sure thing, they're skeptical (for better or worse).
Buffett isn't entirely adverse to metals such as gold, the reason he doesn't buy gold is he doesn't think it's often undervalued.
His history with silver for example:
"Warren Buffett made an unusual move in 1997 when he bought 111 million ounces, or nearly 3,500 tons, of silver. The famed investor's purchase helped make Thomas Kaplan a billionaire."
Berkshire Hathaway's market capitalization is more than $600B, so actually they could corner the market on it if they really wanted to (though it would probably become obvious that they were trying that long before it happened). They have no interest in Bitcoin because, from their previous comments on it, it produces nothing and they only invest in productive assets.
I think what the parent comment suggests is "Seal of approval" situation, similar thing that happened with Tesla buying bitcoin caused price surge. When a well known entity invests in crypto, trust in crypto goes up.
Berkshire buying bitcoin would definitely make me buy more bitcoin.
Exactly. But these guys are too old for the short game at this point. They are about legacy. And that should make these statements hit that much harder.
I feel the same argument can be make about Tor. While it primary uses are probably illegal (doesn't necessary mean immoral) activity, it helps a lot free press in oppressed regimes (also illegal, but by western standards moral).
I very much disagree. How many people with 401ks and/or other retirement vehicles actually know what companies they "own"? How many of them vote? How many of them actually have enough of the right kinds of shares to vote?
To say that stocks are about owning a company in practice is the same as saying bitcoin is just money like the dollar. It's true in theory, but it's not the practical reality of this moment in history.
If they bought the stock they are helping fund the business. The shareholders are keeping the stock because it represents their stake but the actual money paid can be used by the company selling its stock and that’s the primary purpose. Whether the buyer/investor votes, or knows what they bought, doesn’t change anything in that respect.
Well, of course there are other subtleties involved, but even the money that I pay for a given stock doesn't just go to the company unless it's an IPO. It might indirectly benefit the company because I'm adding to the demand and driving the stock price up, which helps all holders of the stock, including the company that issued the stock originally.
However, my point is that people are not buying stocks to own OR to benefit the company. They're buying stock so that a "bigger sucker" will come around later and buy it from them and they can make a profit.
So I guess it depends on who we're talking about when we say "primary purpose", but for anyone who is purchasing stocks, the primary purpose is NOT to be an owner of a company. The primary purpose is to speculate.
A trillion dollars a year are disbursed by the companies of the S&P 500 to their shareholders, in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. Berkshire Hathaway itself bought back $25B of its stock in 2020.
The difference between a stock buyback and iterative speculation is that the "bigger sucker" in a stock buyback is the customer interested in the actual product being sold by the company.
The existence of a secondary market helps the business to sell their IPO in the first place. Additionally they can raise more funds by selling additional shares.
Additionally the people who own shares own the company so what benefits the shareholders benefits the company and vice versa as their interests are the same.
> If you buy stock from other stock owners it doesn't help the business
Incorrect. That's what keeps the market for the stock liquid, and that contributes to value which the company can exploit through future stock issuing. Not to mention the indirect benefits to stakeholders within the company in terms of price and liquidity.
No, because your holding increases the price until someone else decides it's time to tell. In other words, the lack of liquidity increases price. Regarding your original question, that increase is GOOD for the company because it can raise more money for selling the same amount of stock.
Gold has a practical application creating demand, in addition to it being a speculative product. I guess you could argue the same for BTC in that you can put short messages in it, but I don't think that's a very valuable thing to have.
Even the most Pollyanna reports from firms that exist to ‘fight’ crime say it 2% criminal. I don’t know how much of that is illegal source versus regulatory evasion. World black market GDP is estimated somewhere around 25%.
And it make sense that it would be so low. Let’s say you just got $1M in Bitcoin and you have to pay your suppliers $500k in cold cash. Not going to happen. Only from other criminals that take profits in cash. But there is obviously a limit to that. I think the point is that those 2% can help a lot in fighting the 25%.
The fear is that illegal commerce could be conducted without fiat conversion. That would require that regular commerce would also be done in the same currency that the criminals use. This is fiat’s game to lose.
And by the way, this is why I love crypto. It has promise as an amazing technology for choosing financial participation according to personal and private community values. Although I’ll admit we’re not there yet, and a lot of the stuff might now be owned by people we wouldn’t want to have power over us. We’re still in the phase of speculation and fear and power struggles. I just hope that fear of the old power structures doesn’t bring good people to ally with values that we would not want in a new system.
> I just hope that fear of the old power structures doesn’t bring good people to ally with values that we would not want in a new system.
That's why people need to call BS on the current hype train. Otherwise, when a sufficient solution surfaces, people are going to distrust it just as much as the old power structures. And I'd say we're already getting close to that point.
The problem is, with equal distrust, people will tend to choose the option that doesn't require change.
It is getting pretty ridiculous out there. The gas price today was higher than recent memory with about half of it spent on dog coins. Also, Vitalik is now far wealthier in dog coins than Ethereum. If he was a US citizen he would owe billions on that, and last I checked, the treasury doesn’t accept dog coins.
I’m kind of neutral on which financial system prevails so long as it’s the best for society. I stand to gain a lot more if it’s the cypherpunk version, but, I’m not sure that the conditions that would bring that on would be good. The rule of all aspects of society by a maniacal banking elite is pretty dystopic too though.
Ultimately I think the best monetary system will emerge through competition among societies. Obsolescence more than decision. That might take a long time, and perhaps it’s too hopeful. What evidence do I have for that?
I'm not even pro-crypto really, but you keep making this wild claim without substantiating it. You're speculating anecdotally on the majority usage pattern of Bitcoin.
The primary use case of Bitcoin is to evade governments control over capital. Sometimes that’s good (governments disgorging kidnappers of their ransom). Sometimes that’s bad (Nazis seizing wealth of targeted groups). Sometimes it depends on your perspective (governments preventing the trade in illicit drugs).
Overall how you feel about this in aggregate will depend on how comfortable you are with government power. Let’s even ignore the fact that Bitcoin today is being used to circumvent unquestionably oppressive governments (Venezuela, China, Iran). Even as a hardened libertarian, I’ll freely admit that Americans and Europeans live under a generally fair and just government. Bitcoin is still worth it as a fail safe against future totalitarianism.
It’s the same reason I support the Second Amendment. Having a bunch of people run around with guns probably doesn’t help much today, and may even have ongoing social costs. But it would make things a hell of a lot harder for any would be tyrants. Not that it’d be impossible, but small frictions can have big impacts on the course of history. That’s a civilizational insurance policy worth paying.
> Most of the democratic world fell under fascist and/or Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regimes within living memory.
Are you suggesting that a few extra light weapons floating around in the 1930s would have stopped the Nazis and Soviets steam rolling across the Europe?
Are you suggesting civilian firearm ownership somehow prevented the Nazis from skipping over the Atlantic and taking over America? Why did America waste all that money on submarines and aircraft carriers, when they had such deep reserves of plucky gun enthusiasts at the ready?
100% of democracies with widespread civilian firearm ownership remained democracies during the entirety of the past century. Less than one in ten democracies without widespread firearm ownership did. How is that a negative effect?
You… really think a tyrant would fail because of a bunch of armed general population? The make or break is having public support, a bunch of people armed with guns don’t make a difference - maybe they would when the amendment was written, but the efficiency gap between a person with a gun vs US military has increased 1000x.
This logic only holds if you assume that the US military are merciless killing machines that unquestioningly follow orders. There are plenty of examples of much weaker revolutionary forces prevailing over modern well-funded militaries.[1] Heck, there are many examples of civilian areas that are so persistently violent that the state simply refuses to enforce laws there.[2]
No leader has unilateral control to unleash the full force of the military on their own citizenry. Imagine what would happen if POTUS tried to order a nuclear strike, or even aerial bombing, on an American city? The Joint Chiefs would almost certainly arrest him immediately. Ordering soldiers to fire on their fellow citizens drastically raises the probability of outright mutiny. This is true even in the most oppressive regimes. Even the Nazis were genuinely scared of average German citizens turning on them for perceived abuses.[3]
You provided more evidence for my case - you don’t need an armed population, just enough public support that can overwhelm armed forces and would cause a bloodbath/loss of military and police loyalty. You linked Egyptian revolution which was literally triggered by civil disobedience. Same for Nazis afraid of average German citizens.
None of the no-go areas sound like historical examples you would want to follow unless you like anarchy. They are messy pro-longed conflicts unlike eg Euromaidan.
It worked out horribly. They were shot, prosecuted, embarrassed, fired from their jobs, and forever surveilled and hunted by the entire domestic apparatus.
Your othering use of ‘you guys’ suggests a derogatory view of this event, but your suggestion of its applicability to the text implies that it was a failed protest against ‘would be tyrants’. So it’s a little confusing ideologically, but your rational point is spot on. The notion of any kind of physical power held by citizens over the government was overwhelmingly refuted. Any weakness shown by lack of enforcement against the prior summer of violence, was shown to be fully at their discretion. Absolute physical power. No more delusions.
But we’re talking about crypto here, and the international response to this has apparently been an unprecedented wave of panic crypto buying, or equivalently, state fiat selling. Imagine what they must think. I believe the markets; not the ‘official’ sources, not the press, and definitely not social media.
I'm confused by this statement. The primary use of the dollar is as a currency. The primary use of Bitcoin is as a currency. The fact that so much of Bitcoin's traded volume is used for speculation is actually an issue with excess dollar liquidity available for speculation, not because of some problem inherent to Bitcoin. That liquidity would just move to some other financial product that probably wouldn't make the news because the concept is too complicated to grok, unlike "BITCOIN BAD AND NOT REAL MONEY".
Working together is in the best interest of humans. Humans require trust to operate. A system designed around mistrust is inherently against our nature.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Do you consider the middleman banking system a sign of trust? How about the invasion of privacy required by the state in order to collect taxes?
It used to be that humans could exchange value without third parties. The third party was introduced exactly because of mistrust, and eventually this practice grew so widespread and big that it became a new industry all on its own. Cryptocurrency cuts out that third party, and makes business a one-to-one interaction again, where contracts can even be fully automated.
Of course all third parties out there dislike this, but there might still be a silver lining for them. For the state, all Bitcoin transactions are visible on the blockchain, for instance. This makes Bitcoin inherently less useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth... And for the banks it makes the transfer of big amounts of value extremely safe (contrast this to what's going on in South Africa at the moment, where value transports are being violently targeted by cutthroat bandits). It also opens up a wholly new business opportunity for them if they start exchanges and on- and offramps for crypto. Already new organizations are being made that grant interest on loaning out or staking crypto, for instance.
Trustless systems expand who you can cooperate with. Systems which require trust limit you to cooperating with those you trust.
Furthermore, systems which are manipulable by a central group that you are supposed to trust are often used not because they are trusted, but because there are not good alternatives. The trust element is only a factor if there are options. Decentralized systems are about moving control to a protocol all participants agree to rather than a small group of people.
Modern civilization is designed around mistrust. It's the reason we have police, contracts, lawyers, double-entry accounting, the SEC, and all sorts of other things. Blockchains are just a logical progression now that we have internet.
Designed around mistrust? Surely you mean motivated by distrust in the financial system? You know, the same financial system that launders cartel money, rigs interest markets against the poor, and crashes housing markets to make pensioners go broke?
That's why there are control systems in place. Institutions. Their effectiveness may be debatable, but by embracing Bitcoin (imho) we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater for not a good enough reason.
But what do I know. For me this whole Coin-Thing looks like Online Poker did 20 years ago. People like to gamble and they like Robin Hood type of stories..
Very true. But GDPR is pure annoyance. I wish they would 100X consequences of offenders and quit wasting development time on the worthless permission prompts.
Is it? I'm the marketing manager of a European app publishers with around 5 millions active monthly users (and many times more if we account for the SDK that we license to other developers). We operates cloud services as part of our offering too. We find it very easy to comply with GDPR.
As for me, I'm very glad as the end users to be protected by GDPR. I've had my data deleted or unpublished about a dozen times since the law has been enacted. And all the people around me are far more careful with how they share their data (and mine! e.g switching to Signal vs Facebook Messenger, or ProtonMail vs Gmail...).
Permission prompts are the wrong way to approach a generally good feature. It would be much more useful if you could configure the permissions you want to give once and for all in your client (browser), and there would be a standard to communicate that transparently to the server.
I keep making the same settings over and over again with different websites. That should not be necessary.
Having browser-wide permissions is actually allowed for if the constent string is stored in the consensu.org cookie. But website owners choose to use their own cookies.
Meh, I want notifications on for whatsapp but I definitely don't want them on news sites. This is the wrong way to go about this IMO. Just a default, should definitely be overridable.
It's also sad that humans act so immorally that laws forbidding rape and murder must exist. Or maybe it's good that we can come together as a society and agree that these things are bad? Who knows
Well the big difference is that even without laws against rape and murder it is generally still a big exception. On the other hand tracking, carelessness with personal data, privacy violations etc. have been very much the norm with all companies (and arguably still are) even before the GDPR.
I am not the author, but it could be important (all your past TODO) even if is not life threatening.
Also the service provided the active tasks as an export so same workflow could be copy-pasted and you update the SQL to include completed tasks too. The issue probably is that the priorities are different and implementing this would mean managers, designers and other "experts" would need to agree first.
> A nation state is a state in which a great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. It has been described as a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. [1]
This makes a lot of sense and I wish it were easier to do elsewhere. Probably wouldn't leave the vs code ecosystem for this alone, though.