Just a side thought, but how do the collective bargaining protections work in the age of automation? Basically like robots as scabs or permanent replacements?
> If your work could be fully automated - you wouldn’t have a job right now
To nitpick this - there's a non trivial up-front cost associated with automation. As such using (well, abusing) people is sometimes just plain cheaper than the amortized costs of automating.
It may have already been noted elsewhere but it seems important to note that the author was (is?) the CTO of private blockchain start up and choosing to not disclose this in any of his crypto criticism seems very dishonest
I guess it would be embarrassing for him to admit that he tried to compete against Ethereum after Cardano destroyed his private blockchain startup.
Stephen Diehl is also no better than the crypto maximalists with his extreme absolutism. You won't see him debate and test his arguments with a balanced panel discussion so that you can easily see how extreme his arguments are. He has a book to sell and is full time, 24/7 tweeting the 'all of crypto is scam' chorus.
Not all cryptocurrencies, tokens will survive, but only a select few of them and their technologies will still be around to be used under regulations.
He makes some good arguments and is certainly better read in economics than the youtube conspiracy theory video level/back cover summary of the Creature from Jekyll Island economics most crypto enthusiast stochastic parrot back as truth.
The 24/7 crypto is a scam community is extremely odd though. I can't stand the sport of NASCAR but I can't imagine enveloping my entire thought and identity around how much I think NASCAR is a bullshit sport and trying to convince people to stop watching NASCAR.
Finding an anti-passion to that degree seems extraordinarily unhealthy mentally.
Crypto might well be the biggest vehicle for financial fraud the world has ever seen.
Whatever you think of Crypto more broadly, millions of innocent people are being prayed on, who have lost collectively, literally billions of dollars, some more vulnerable to the impact of that than others.
To a lot of (good) people, it’s unacceptable to allow that to go unchallenged.
So yeah I think I can see how it’s a bit different.
It’s an extension of the culture war. Tons of right wing culture warriors got really rich off crypto without doing anything to deserve that wealth, so left wing culture warriors are naturally opposed to it. You check out /r/Buttcoin, they also hate GameStop (valid) and Elon Musk (much less so, he’s doing great work outside of Twitter despite his immaturity) for those same fundamental reasons. It’s more of the same social media derangement cycle that sucks in so many people on both sides, even if they fundamentally have a point about a lot of crypto being based on nothing
I think it would be more accurate to say his companies are doing great work.
He's an idea guy, but mostly he's just an investor. A toxic, thin-skinned, sometimes fraudulent investor, but it's hard to argue with the work being done by companies like SpaceX and Tesla (not just what's being promised, but what has actually been done). IMO it's important to understand both sides of that coin.
Nah. Tesla is doing good work. They're far from perfect, but it's an interesting product, and they were first to market in many ways. I can't see it lasting that much longer in it's current form, but that doesn't undermine the work they've already done.
It's also important to note that Musk isn't the founder of that one. He just has a contract that gives him the title "founder".
And there's definitely a trend where his earlier companies were less likely to be scams. Zip2 and Paypal were both successful AFAIK. Boring Company is a bust unless it's radically reorganized (without underground vacuum tunnels), OpenAI is probably BS too. It's a little hard to say right now.
Elon Musk, personally, is an asshole. He is also majorly addicted to Twitter, which toxifies him, and his acquisition of Twitter is the equivalent of a severe alcoholic buying Anheuser-Busch.
Nevertheless, Teslas are great cars and SpaceX is doing phenomenal work in space travel. Hating Musk with a passion is extremely weird, and tons of online people really do
> Not all cryptocurrencies, tokens will survive, but only a select few of them and their technologies will still be around to be used under regulations.
No chance in hell.
The only sustained market this technology has are illegal transactions/black market.
To begin with: a regulated Blockchain is an oxymoron. The technology ceases to have any meaning if the government has the ability to regulate the chain. They'd be able be more effective with regular acid databases and certificates for the web of trust, like they've been doing for a very long time now. You be combining the downsides of Blockchain with the downsides of traditional banking, gaining only the weaknesses of both.
It happens, but generally only if the marketing of the weaker technology won out while both technologies were still growing.
This is not that kind of situation, the crypto hype train derailed ages ago and only one country attempted to switch to a crypto currency, which predictably ended in a disaster and turned out to be a money laundering scheme of the person that was driving the initiative.
Except he compares Bitcoin's irreversable final settlement transactions per seconds metric to Visa's tps which is more akin to the lightning network. Apples to Oranges.
It’s been a over a decade since I read any Marx but I thought alienation of labor was about the worker being alienated from the value of their labor (e.g. I get paid $10/hr to produce widgets that the employers sells for 10x the input costs and I receive none of that value) - I don’t think it was about the emotional connection the laborer had to the (non-economic) value of what was produced.
The greater point is alienation from other people - i.e. that such production destroys communal life, seperating us and preventing previously normal social relations (harking back to nomad days.) Now, this interpretation presumes no massive distinction between "early Marx" and "late Marx," but academics now reject a brief French-birthed academic fad decades ago that imagined two Marx's, early and late, with different views.
Whether it's easy to get back to that communal (community/communist) life of the very old days "after the revolution" is a whole 'nother question, of course. The history of self-identified communist societies suggests that it's no cakewalk.
So yes, exploitation is a huge part of the problem, but ending that is a means to an end, to community and a more human life. Marx seemed to want to restrict production (to prevent "overproduction" (recessions) not to keep going towards more and more material wealth.
My understanding is that (amongst other things) Marxist alienation meant that the fruits of your labour are used against you / your interest / your class (as appropriate.) So the company you work for having a mission you oppose is exactly that.
A capitalist who greatly marks up your product to resell would obliquely perhaps also meet that description, because paying you little keeps you dependent and stuck on a low wage (and class), while the capitalist maintains themselves in their class advantage. And with the profit from your labour can pay the gendarmes to beat you if you object in a not-well-organised way to that working relationship.
For example, nightly family prayer where everyone is given the opportunity to contemplate/share what they are grateful for that day. Also a time set aside to practice saying sorry/reconciliation. Contemplating the beatitudes, etc.
Amazingly fruitful practice that only takes 15 min or so. By the time the kids graduate from the home, they are quite mentally/emotionally prepared for the world from the practice :)
I’ve been a bike commuter in Minneapolis for almost two decades at this point. It’s much better than it was. In the early 2000s I’d say most cars were not used to or expecting to share the streets with other forms of transportation. Back then it was not uncommon to have motorists hurl insults or trash at you from their window. Today it’s not that difficult to route your commute to most places entirely on bike specific infrastructure. On the other hand, over the last five years and especially since the pandemic I’ve noticed a huge increase in distracted drivers who are driving dangerously and unpredictably. All this is to say, a lot of people have done a lot of hard work which has made this a better place to live and bike in, but there is still a long way to go.
My almamater, Grinnell College, has a still active social network Grinnell Plans, which extended from .plan usage for social networking on the college's Vax computer system.
Nice to see a another Grinnell alum in the wild! I want to try plans, but lost access to my @grinnell.edu email after I graduated. What do you think about it? Should I check it out?
