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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32141 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Nate Silver wants to share what he wrote in his journal with you - LINK -

He's couching it as a "Reader Q&A" but it's a self-reflective series on him, his substack, the election, polls, and politics in general. If you're already fed up with Mr. Silver, it could be an exasperating read. I am not, however, and do find Nate's straight political takes (without any of the bulllshit "data journalism" or woo-woo risk and gambling stuff) to be better than the average pundit.

Just before the paywall, Silver concludes with a paragraph that reveals the rot at the core of the PMC-liberal elite;

For me, “Trump’s even worse!” worked one last time and I voted for Harris — largely because of January 6 and because Trump, like Biden, is too old. But maybe some of my gut feeling that Trump would win was because I sympathized with voters’ instincts to punish the Democratic Party more than I did in 2016 and 2020. Being willing to take a short-term hit to discourage coercion or punish broken promises is probably a pretty good default, an attitude that’s close enough to rational more often than not.

Dishonesty has a price. The Liberal/Left coalition has been held together by ducktape, glue, and the continued adherence to the idea of a "better tomorrow" as guided by the experts. But they're all inveterate liars and the American people finally called them out on it. Is it a full moon, Nate's turning into a self-awarewolf.

"Did prediction markets and other indicators that called the race correctly just get lucky?"

Is beyond the paywall, if anyone happens to have access beyond the paywall and is willing to C+P ....

(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack. I would absolutely sign up for something like that. Signing up for 10 different substacks for the sake of reading the 1 or 2 articles a month that interest me .... not so much).

(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack.

This is the use case that I'm annoyed Crypto hasn't managed to fill.

Same with newpaper articles. I'm not going to create an account and subscribe to read the couple articles per month I find interesting with every news outlet.

But if I could pay like 15-150 cents to read a particular article on the spot, with just a couple of clicks, I'd be pretty happy to do so.

Why on earth would you need crypto to solve this rather than just a credit card?

Credit-card processors impose fees that can be major impediments to small transactions. One page describes a fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. In that environment, making a 15-cent purchase is not feasible, because the fee would be literally twice that much. (See also all the small businesses that refuse to accept credit cards for any purchase smaller than 15 or 20 dollars.)

Thanks. I thought that the length of the blockchain was making transfer costs go up... has this issue been solved?

I don't know that much about cryptocurrency, but it's important to note that different cryptocurrencies have vastly different transaction fees. According to this graph:

  • Bitcoin itself (BTC) is quite bad for small transactions, because its transaction fees are enormous—at present, 3 to 6 dollars.

  • Monero (XMR) has fees of 0.05 to 0.07 dollar, in addition to offering anonymity.

  • Litecoin (LTC) has fees of 0.007 to 0.008 dollar.

It wouldn't work like that. The aggregator would only bill the card monthly, or when it reaches a certain amount.

Then they're extending credit. Which they certainly do not want to do.

Nah, the dollar amounts are low enough that one month of access wouldn't be a problem. That's the way a lot of court vendors that provide online access work. When the product only costs 50 cents a page or whatever they aren't going to bill each transaction, especially since most of their customers are professionals making a lot of transactions. Instead they just bill monthly, and PACER only charges if you spend more than $30 in a billing period. If this is too risky, then they can always set up a draw-down account where you pay, say, $30 up front and it bills your account until it reaches zero before automatically replenishing.

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