cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
9d ago
I can't even tell what the dude is saying. He is stuttering and mumbling and talking in circles.
"I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say: Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?"
The way she phrased it made me think she was saying it is ridiculous that we borrow our own currency. But yeah maybe I am just totally misinterpreting her tone.
cjet79
24d ago
This is the kind of problem that crypto currencies were meant to solve.
To elaborate:
- Cryptocurrencies are a bit like cash in that transactions are never reversed (I know it can be done, but its mostly not done). This is important when the products might be embarrassing and for digital goods which can't be fully "returned" once you have access.
- Cryptocurrencies do not have to actively endorse all the transactions that go through them. If a government doesn't like a transaction going through a traditional payment processor, they can lean on and pressure the people running that payment processor.
- Cryptocurrencies can have a degree of anonymity. Bitcoin doesn't have great anonymity, large-scale actors like government can figure out who owns specific wallet addresses. But personal anonymity is pretty easy compared to credit cards. Its not a payment to pornhub on your financial statement, its a payment to wallet [string of characters]. Which is often enough to hide from girlfriends/wives.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to have sympathy for these websites/users, because the failure of traditional payment processors to handle this sort of thing was recognized and predicted before cryptocurrencies existed. When bitcoin/cryptocurrency was first released/invented it wasn't a bunch of people saying "oh look at this cool toy, we have no idea what its for, but it seems neat!" No, they were specifically saying "yay! we have solved this hard problem of digital payments that has been plaguing us for the last decade on the internet! These are the cool things we will now be able to do: [same list as above plus other things]."
For any kind of business that once needed cash to function: switch to crypto or die a slow death as payment processors leave you.
cjet79
4d ago
Game looks good, I'm surprised that I haven't heard of it until now. I wonder if I have it ignored on steam for some reason.
cjet79
13d ago
It's an engineering problem, but the precision control needed is pretty high. I don't think it's impossible, just difficult and thus likely to remain expensive.
Human tongues are pretty sensitive, they can pick up very tiny differences in texture and taste. Consider diet sodas. If you've ever had a regular soda and a diet soda you can usually notice a slight difference between the two. They try to make the two sodas taste the same and fail, even though it's a much easier problem than textured meat.
cjet79
7d ago
I'm looking for a strategy game that is BIG. Stellaris kinda scratches the itch, but I've played the hell out of it too many times. I want the sense of massive armies movies, and not just fighting battles, but fighting wars.
There seems to be a glut of strategy games lately that are on a small scale with a few dozen people or a hundred or so people fighting. I'm not entirely opposed to a game like this, but they often just feel so tiny. I don't like having to care about individual units, but so many games seem to make that a selling point. They Are Billions is a "smaller" scale game that I still find enjoyable, because at least the scale of your enemies feels massive. I'd be happy playing that game again if there were maps that were five to ten times larger, as it currently is you are failing on the harder maps if you don't cover the entire thing with defenses by the end.
cjet79
1mo ago
I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:
To connect our divided country, the American Exchange Project sends high school seniors on a free, week-long trip to a hometown very different from their own.
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Staring at the sun today. Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.
cjet79
9d ago
Much of these are solved through private arbitration, with courts as a resolver of last resort. The reason they are a last resort is that lawyers will eat up most of the money in the case. Which kind of defeats the purpose of a dispute over money. Courts are mainly avenues of Justice. As in you want the person who screwed you over monetarily not just to pay you back but to suffer.
cjet79
9d ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
I'm gonna stick by my statement. I don't think the example you give really contradicts it. The actual world we live in has a mix of both systems where the American government gets to flip a coin "heads I win, tails you lose". They regulate the industries, and allow those industries to be sued by individuals. From what I understand this is actually a little strange by international standards. Russia (for traffic stuff) goes more down the route of sue anyone but very loose regulations. And most of Europe goes down the route of strict regulations, but you can't sue (for a bunch of business regulations).
In general, I think in cases of death or serious bodily injury it makes sense to have a court involved. In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved. I'm not suggesting entirely doing away with courts. But courts are a terrible place for solving economic distribution questions. They are simply far too expensive (judges and lawyers are generally smart and capable people).
But people can already sue for bodily injury or death, so when I say an expansion of what you can sue for is laundering costs, I mean that generally any new thing that you can sue for. (and there are some old things you can sue for that I also think are bullshit, but I specifically listed those things.)
cjet79
14d ago
Taste does seem very difficult, but cheapness seems inevitable.
Just from physics/energy perspective lab grown or vat grown meat is more straightforward. Animals are not 100% edible and some of the energy they consume goes to their non edible parts and to activities that provide no benefit to edibility.
I think it's comparable to the difference between cars and horses. Cars have more uniform energy requirements, and far less wasted energy. But horses have numerous aesthetic benefits that are hard to imitate (like auto navigation).
cjet79
4d ago
Great game, I'm hoping the second one that they have announced is as good as the first.
cjet79
6d ago
I've played most of the total war games. The later entries in the series I've enjoyed less. Maybe I should spin up one of the old ones.
cjet79
22d ago
That rule is insane, because it basically mandates a massive ongoing expenditure for all municipalities.
It also opens up a bunch of other potentially insane rules that the justices pointed out.
Can you only ban public defecation if there are publicly available toilets?
Can you only ban public cooking fires if there is cooked food available?
Can you only ban theft if welfare money is available?
Can you only ban murder if sufficient mental health care is available?
This feels like Copenhagen Ethics written into law. You can't try to partially fix a problem, you can only fully fix it.
cjet79
7d ago
I remember reading steel world a few years ago. It was a fun book. I ended up not reading any more of the series, can't remember why.
cjet79
7d ago
Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power sounds like my cup of tea.
Calamitous Bob has been sitting in my follow list for a while. I read it a long time ago up to about chapter 100. It has an amazing army fight scene.
cjet79
1mo ago
Agree that more Americans should see more of America. Pretty cool place. I feel like I've done most of my traveling in the last decade just attending weddings. My wife and I both have a lot of cousins. I did more travelling in college and just after college as part of an obscure rec-level sport club (underwater hockey, check it out and play it, my endorsement is worth op security concerns)
I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.
I am not feeling that this needs a political dimension. I think in general there are two axis of negotiation on any topic. One is the object level disagreement. And the other is a more nebulous social standing / social cohesion.
Take a simple example of where you want to go eat for dinner with a group of people. The object level concern is "what do I want to eat". If you are with people you care about and interact with regularly like your family, then you are definitely willing to go eat somewhere you don't like just to keep another person in that group happy, or make it clear that you might get later leverage on other things. Or you just love them and you want to make sure that they are happy.
Imagine you are instead going out with random strangers. They will eat at different tables, and you won't even know who they are. The nebulous social standing dimension / social cohesion negotiation space gets entirely erased. You have no reason except to advocate where you want to eat. And any compromise is a pure loss.
I think the bifurcation of America into rural vs urban has really destroyed the nebulous social dimension negotiating space. No one on either side is willing to compromise because its a pure loss for them and everyone they know. But if you stick them face to face with each other and get them to talk about politics you kind of reintroduce that nebulous social dimension.
Politics needs some grease to work. That grease is often the nebulous social dimension. Congress itself seems to partly work on these informal social dimensions. Politicians that only went after the objective political issues like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were semi-pariahs within congress. They often weren't useful in making deals, because they may as well have been robots.
What this exchange program does, what all exchange programs do is add some negotiating space.
When I went to India, I ended up liking my Indian coworkers better. It meant when it came time to schedule meetings that meant me waking up an hour earlier, I wasn't as annoyed with them. Because I knew it often meant staying an extra two hours for them. There were a bunch of minor effects like that. It added up to me being happier / better at interacting with India team members.
The student exchange program I went on middle school is now dead. Its an objectively bad way to spend money. Its basically subsidizing vacations for less well off PMC children that can figure out the hoops that need to be jumped through to participate. I think this American Exchange program might end up going the same way.
Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.
cjet79
7d ago
Game looks kinda interesting, but I doubt I'll make it over the steep learning curve.
cjet79
2mo ago
As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
- No one on this forum is infinitely excused of bad behavior. Having quality contributions and providing a unique viewpoint might get you some additional leeway, but our patience isn't unlimited.
- The mods do read and participate here. We know when someone is starting to abuse that leeway. We know when there is frustration about it.
- We do try to be deliberate and slow about things. It can feel real shitty when a cabal of people meet in secret to discuss your punishment and they decide permanent banishment is the solution. For longtime users that have put in the time and effort to be a part of the community here we don't lightly jump to permanent bans as a solution.
Please keep any discussion civil.
cjet79
12d ago
It does seem like individual taste buds are bad, but society wide taste buds are pretty accurate and good.
cjet79
10d ago
Anyone playing manor lords and having any thoughts yay or nay? Or even just "wait a few months"?
cjet79
22d ago
Which is potentially the rule no longer, because if the homeless don't want the shelter for some reason you are screwed.
cjet79
6d ago
I've played total war 3k a few times, pretty early on. Meant to come back around to it after it got more fleshed out, and then ya CA abandoned it.
cjet79
1mo ago
From the impression I've gotten from surgeons and doctors who know many surgeons, this doesn't surprise me. Surgeons have a bit of a reputation for being high class technically skilled butchers. They operate on flesh, but their treatment of it is closer to that of a car mechanic than most other doctors. I think they perhaps see it as a very easy case of tumor removal. @self_made_human may have more insight.
cjet79
9d ago
As I mentioned, not too attached to the particular solution I had. Just that this is a problem. So I don't think we disagree too much.
cjet79
24d ago
I mostly agree that crypto is not very useable. I personally don't use it.
My post was originally just that first sentence, and as I tried to write anything after it I just kept expressing frustration at these companies and users of crypto that have wasted it.
Going through the problems:
- Not easy to use.
- Value is not stable.
- Funds are not secure.
- Risk of government crackdown on use.
I think the first problem is something that porn websites could solve. They are web companies, they know how to build useable things on the web. They have more resources than paypal and venmo had in their early days.
The second problem of stable value is solved (as you point out with stablecoins), but people just choose not to use it. Because speculation and gambling is more fun than a boring currency that just does its job of facilitating transactions. This could be better solved by the porn websites and other places that need crypto uniting behind a stable online currency.
I think the funds don't need to be quite so secure if you aren't using crypto as an investment vehicle or speculation device. Store your money in traditional banks / stocks / etc. And then just transact into crypto when it is specifically needed. And yet again porn websites are some of the places that are better suited for dealing with security issues. They still live in a wild west style internet, because they don't enjoy as many protections as traditional businesses. If some hacker messes with a bank website they could have the feds come after them. If that same hacker does the same thing to a porn website, they won't get in trouble at all.
Some governments, like China, have cracked down on crypto. I did have more worries about government crackdowns on crypto back in the early days. The US and western crackdowns on crypto have mostly been because of the problems of crypto. People getting their money stolen, or using it as speculation / asset bubbles. I don't think the Western government crackdowns would necessarily stop if those problems went away, but I think it would blunt a lot of the political momentum.
Most people beyond the small niche of ideological libertarians only use crypto when they're doing something sketchy or illegal, otherwise conventional banking is the easier option with far more guarantees for standard transactions.
The sum of my frustration is that if you are one of those businesses selling "sketchy" things this whole crackdown by payment processors has been predictable and visible for at least a decade. And the solution and their salvation has also been available and sitting there for a decade. Its like they've just been sitting on a railroad track waiting around. Now that the crossing bars are down and the warning lights are flashing they start screaming "no please! don't run me over!" Get off the tracks you idiots!
Maybe its just the nature of people to not treat upcoming disasters as real until those disasters are already upon them. If so, then I'll also say that its in my nature to have no sympathy for them when their lack of preparation bites them in the ass.
Their funding is very confusing.
They get very little direct money from the government. But they license out their content to a bunch of small and tiny radio stations that wouldn't exist at all without government money and grants.
So whenever the topic of funding comes up they get sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth . They'll say "we are mostly supported by donations", but then also say that if you cut government funding they'd have to drastically reduce their programming.
I suppose they could both be true if the donations are mostly for a few very popular radio programs.
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