@crushedoranges's banner p

crushedoranges


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:35:13 UTC

				

User ID: 111

crushedoranges


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:35:13 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 111

I know this is a tangent to what you're really talking about, but I have to say something about crypto. In short, there is a very short list of people less trustworthy than the Argentine government: the people who advocate for cryptocurrency are amongst them. The sort of people who hold a morbid fascination with the misery and suffering of others to further the adoption of their internet funcoins in the off chance they can offload their bags onto desperate people is profoundly evil.

Crypto is not a good store of value, or a currency. And anyone who says that it is you should be very wary of.

I disagree: and I think it's a fundamental difference in values that can't be overcome by argument. I think that the world would be a better place if people thought through the consequences of their actions. If you pour chemical waste into the water table, you recruit people into a cult, or you don't push a shopping cart back to the corral, it's not guiltlessness - it's malicious indifference. There's no legal liability, but morally it is abhorrent all the same.

I disagree!

Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.

I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?

This is, bluntly, underpants gnomes logic.

I know you're an enthusiast, but liking (and seeing) those things as worthy of pursuit in of themselves does not make it true. There are a lot of X and Y things we can introduce into systems that exist, but would we want to? Is there a tangible, economic benefit? Is it cheaper? Is it better? Or, lacking in those two essential traits: is it the right thing to do regardless?

Forgoing the efficiencies and economies of scale of the current system is a cost. Trusting centralized institutions is extraordinarily cheap on scale. And sure, there may be a market of legitimate use - buying grey-market goods, sending funds to dissidents, etc. But that economic activity is a sliver of a sliver. That's not what advocates are pumping. They're envisioning a mass adoption across the whole economy - of which crypto's limitations and decentralization's costs would become rapidly apparent.

Crypto without exchanges is a currency without liquidity, a nightmare of passphrases and uncertainty of payment. If everyone self-custodies and that is the result, what value is the technology? How are you going to buy a pizza with your cold storage wallet?

At least underpants physically exist as a tangible good.

But my viewpoint is that cryptocurrency is a first order terrible thing, it is a banal evil like slash and burn agriculture, payday loans, etc. All the good it could possible do is corrupted by its incredible inefficiency and callous indifference to its own toxicity.

It is technology that is completely worthless, obsolete as it was theorized and definitely as it was implemented. Its only use I see is to extort the tears and sweat of the gullible and enrich the intelligent and evil. That some South Americans occasionally use it to buy USD is, in my mind, completely inconsequential.

Technology is not agnostic. It can be built to be vile. No amount of clever evasions and definitional wordplay can hide smug, self-satisfied, all-consuming avarice behind it all.

But that's not true, not in the least. If you are scammed in real life, you have several avenues of recourse, through the financial and legal systems. The very virtues crypto advocates praise (untrackability, anonymity, trustless systems) are exactly the qualities that make it possible for scams to be pulled off with incredible ease.

There are certainly those Don Quixotes who tilt at the windmill of the USD being a hegemonic currency, but that doesn't make alternatives to it better. If you create abusable tools, advocate for them, and don't tell naive newcomers of the dangers and only the benefits - you're more awful than you think. You don't get to walk away from the moral implications of your actions. You can't hide in the theoretical wonderlands and ignore how the implications of the technology come about in real life.

The devil isn't the inchoate maw that devours sinners at the bottom: he's the man who pushes a wavering soul at the edge.

It's a slightly gamified version of D&D 5e. An accurate representation of the roleplaying game, but it diminishes how fun it is. (The lack of simulataneous turns is the real killer.)

I can only comment on its aesthetic qualities but it very much feels like a raising, a visual bump in the text that is not as grating as italics or bold but still noticable. Kind of like braille.

If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.

Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.

Well, of course. It is implicit.

But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.

Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.

Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.

I would argue that it would be nice if we could live in walkable cities: but I'd rather be in the multi-ton steel behemoth than not, if the world is dangerous as you say.

I've noticed that terminally online (and dishonest) leftists can jump into the bailey of 'your valid and rigorous critique of x does not apply to y' because Marxism describes socialism as a stage of communism, or socialism is the end state of communism, or to be left is to be socialist, or the only true leftists are communist...

What you see that is an error of impreciseness is more of an general fly-swatter to those arguments. You don't have to be an orthodox Marxist-Leninist to know what exactly we're talking about here.

But it is hypocrisy. What Marxists call attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and what fascists of every stripe call parasitism. And they are correct in their critique that it solves nothing: there is still inequality and no amount of welfarism will remove it.

Now, you can see this as necessary process of the churn of liberal democracy. That's a kind way to look at it. But, and correct me if I misrepresent you, the essence of your response (and what many liberals would also say) is that "I am okay with a permanently unequal society, so as long as it makes token efforts to make me more comfortable living in it."

Which is a... worldview.

I honestly don't know. I admit that although I am anti-liberal, I am aware that being able to critique a system by no means gives you the expertise or authority to suggest a replacement. It may be indeed that liberalism is the best performant system human beings have come up so far while simultaneously incubating authoritarianism within its ideological framework because of its contradictions. If there's a formulation of liberalism that can square the circle, I would like to learn of it, because I like having liberal rights in general.

If there is anyone in the world that has the right to complain about Jewish women, it is Jewish men. For most of the world's masculines they are a folk tale told to scare impressionable youths but they (the Jews) have to live with and marry them. The closest thing in our reality to an actual monstergirl.

Not that I have any true objection to what you just said, but the USD-market has its share of bad actors, then crypto is crawling with them. It would be charitable to say that most of the space is full of scams preying on dumb money.

Just because a system is bad doesn't make its alternative automatically better! Crypto enthusiasts are baffled at the lack of uptake of their ecosystem - it is because for the vast majority of users, they lose their entire investment or come away losing money. An unregulated, legally opaque market is the perfect environment for naive investors to lose their shirt.

(And being a 'grudger', in the defect/cooperative axis, is a suboptimal strategy.)

Censorship is bad, I think everyone understands that. What's not so clear is if it is a problem that bitcoin can solve. It doesn't matter if you accept payment in BTC if your hosting service doesn't, if your payment processor doesn't, if any of the points of failure on the modern web refuse to take your payments. Could Bitcoin have saved Kiwi Farms?

At some point crypto has to onramp onto the fiat economy, and whatever benefits its proponents says it has collapses.

But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.

If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.

'legitimate victimhood?'

Are you like, the edgy version of the Republican boomer that says 'Democrats are the real racists?' 'Wokes are the real oppressors?'

If you define wokeness by that parameter it means on some level you've functionally accepted the priors of critical theory and therefore are not particularly based in any aspect. Cringe indeed.

I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.

But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.

Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.

I actually do make things: I'm a writer, but the content I make is perhaps too spicy for here, being 4chan-adjacent. :P

Union leadership has been captured by socialist activists and politicians as to be completely alienated from their working-class roots. There's a reason why unions are marginal parts of the leftist coalitions now - outside of regime-adjacent bodies like teachers and civil servants, blue color labor has little real power. If they did, you think that NAFTA would have ever flown?

History belongs to those that show up. In other words, when your population will be half seniors by 2080, you're not a competitive Great Power, no matter how much automation you have.

To put a blunt point on it: no matter how many Chinese boomers have a boner for aggressive foreign policy, they can write checks that their youth can't cash.

At the simplest level of understanding, inflation is the consequence of too much money chasing too few goods.

Since none of us are Scrooge McDuck, we don't have a need for money: we want the goods that money represents.

An NrX solution would be to appoint Jeff Bezos as a Czar of logistics with the intent of increasing supply. I would nationalize all food banks and related charities, and import German managers from Aldi to coordinate them. I would create biblical-scale, Josephian government granaries that are needlessly large - seven years worth? - enough to convince even the most ardent hoarder that there is a lot of goods to be had.

I would also enlarge the strategic fossil fuel reserve and convince oil companies to invest in extraction with a fixed, contracted price. Housing is more difficult, but the creation of a state-based stockpile of common building materials - ensuring a stable price for construction - would also work, too.

The best thing about all of these agencies is that their mission is very defined: and can be phased out when the need passes.