Too Clever by Half
epsilontheory.com
epsilontheory.com
Summary
Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote.
Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared.
Personal Connection
This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/
But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
And yes, under the circumstances (assuming the goal is to avoid problems, instead of to aggravate the staff, perform ad-hoc psychology experiments, or the like), any high school student should avoid contradicting the staff in public, start by acquiescing to any request that doesn’t pose an immediate injury risk, disengage quickly and completely and then marshal their parents’ help if there has been any kind of mistake that will affect them academically.
Few teenagers have figured this out though. To any high school rule makers out there, please read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, https://amzn.com/1451663889/ and in general, please try to treat the students with basic respect.
The kid didn't show up for two days.
On the third day, my teacher went to the kid's house, and asked him to come back. The kid said he dropped out of school. He told my teacher it wasen't his fault, he was planning too.
Well, my teacher was never the same. He went from a enthusiast guy to someone who didn't say too much. He talked about the kid the entire semester. He claimed he went to the kids house, and begged him to give school another chance.
To this day, I think about how one, usually ego driven comment/directive, can affect a person's life. I'm talking about the teacher's life.
I don't know what happened to the student, but I think about the guilt of that teacher, and how he carried it around.
It's very much an art to do this effectively, without alienating your students. You have to be consistent, yet flexible. Thorough, yet empathetic. Fair, yet differentiated. It's a web of contradictions.
I can understand that dealing with scores of angsty teenagers every day, and especially getting stuck with resolving all of the most intractable disputes, can be trying for even the most patient person. But there are some administrators who escalate every situation brought their direction into an aggressive pissing match. As if the reason some of them stuck with the job is that exercising control over other humans (in however petty or counterproductive a manner) makes them feel powerful.
They aren't particularly hostile, they seem to just want to survive. There have been maybe a couple hundred reported coyote attacks in the past 50 years[0] compared to millions of dog-related attacks per year[1]. Of course, one would expect dog-related attacks to be more common because they interact with us more, so it's not quite a controlled comparison.
Why hate on coyotes? I guess it boils to how cute they are, unfortunately. I don't think we truly need them, and they aren't cute enough to keep around for most people. Perhaps if I raised a baby coyote, I would be very inclined to keep one as a pet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attacks_on_humans
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_Unite...
I think you can stop right there. The dog thing happened not because dog "wanted" to be with humans. Dogs were clueless about what happened, it just did. The explanation is on a higher level, not in their desires, not even in the desires of the humans who participated in most of the dog domestication (even if some of them may have thought about it, but by then it was already happening).
"are having a tough time in the wild and they are smart enough to see how we treat dogs".
Its a hypothesis and it doesn't seem unreasonable.
> Selective quoting,
Yes - because that statement does not make sense regardless of context, so I didn't quote the rest. It also saves space. I always only quote the part that I respond to, the rest of the context always still is right there in an Internet forum, unless OP deletes the post. If I quoted in a different place, for example I quote someone in my own blog post, copying from another website, then I would have to provide the context.
[citation needed]
The outrageous claim that needs citations is that the wolves had "hopes that they can integrate with us".
I've read different theories about dog domestication. All of them have some strong and some weak points. All of them don't have enough evidence to be taken as the only source of truth.
Because "in hopes that they can integrate with us" is just silly.
Of course, I admit that I take for granted that I don't have to justify a believe in evolution.
If you entertain the possibility it was a deliberate human act it would have required an effort like the Fox breeding experiment in Russia. They would have had to go out and catch wild wolves and breed them for generations - that seems extremely far-fetched. Much more likely that there already were wolves that had gotten used to humans, which means they had already changed. Which is what I said:
> even if some of them may have thought about it, but by then it was already happening
It sure is likely that humans at some point thought it useful, but the domestication started not because anybody in particular wanted it to happen.
By the way, I think horse domestication is (was) probably different. It's easy to see how wolves benefit from leftovers found near humans, but horses just need grass. Horses also still don't depend on humans nearly as much as dogs do.
Did you read the full text or just immediately jump to the snarky burn attempt?
Again: Can you support this claim with anything? I'm actually curious, and you seem evasive.
Again: Proof has to be provided by the one making the extraordinary claims.
The statement that requires proof is the one that dog evolution was caused by desires of any one in particular, especially "hopes to integrate with us" of wolves.
That statement was made by anonytrary, not by me.
I mean you don't actually think there's documentary evidence from the time dogs became domesticated of either what the people, or the dogs, were specifically thinking, do you? It was my hope that, perhaps, by reflecting on that I might draw attention to the obvious futility of the direction of questioning.
And yes, snark.
I know a few people that hunt them, but it's just because they want to keep the coyotes from preying on the deer herd. So that they can prey on the deer herd themselves.
I'm now trying to teach my son that just learning to do the work, even if it's boring, is the real skill you need. But he's too focused on winning every mini-game.
> A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.
but it sounds like the original experiment controlled for the trust factor so I don't really think it shows that the original results were invalid.
Having said that, I've not done a huge amount of research into this so maybe take my opinions with a grain of salt or two.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-...
I would have been burnt in college, except I got to homeschool the last few years of high school. During that time I took CLEP tests. They were pretty easy for the most part, but they required I actually do the reading and prepare for them. That helped, since in school I just had to pay attention in class, and I'd be good. Then I went to a community college for most of my core classes. That helped too, because there the homeworks either were optional or counted for very little, but I got to see how not doing them hurt my grade. By the time I went to the actual university I wanted to for my major specific stuff, I had developed better study habits, and knew what it took to actually do well. I was helped at that point that, since it was the courses relevant to my major, it was all stuff I was interested in, and actually wanted to attain mastery in.
I don't think this is the right approach, because you need the ability to focus on work even when it is not fun.
You do need something that makes the work rewarding in some way, but I wouldn't push to hard to try to make it fun.
> Or, try and instill a goal less of "getting the grade" and more "attain mastery of the subject"?
This was my approach in high school as well. It led to me being the one everyone wanted to study with because I picked up the material the best, but then I flunked classes because I never did the homework.
I would flunk classes that depended mostly on homework, and ace classes that depended mostly on tests. Since I had convinced myself that mastery was more important than grades, this reinforced my behavior.
Somehow, the acing the tests part allowed me to get into an Ivy League college. Which I then flunked out of because at that point, I couldn't get by without actually doing the homework and studying outside of class.
This pattern of behavior continues to be something I struggle with as an adult. I can be quite productive for short bursts of time, but have a hard time keeping on track with longer term projects that don't pay off immediately.
I think what you need is to learn the value of steady incremental work that only shows significant results after a long period of time. Basic reinforcement training techniques can be used for this; provide rewards for getting incremental work done, but better to provide them intermittently. Eventually work up from smaller rewards for smaller goals to larger rewards for larger goals.
I think that reinforcing consistency, habit, and small incremental progress rather than brilliance is a big part of what you need. The problem with brilliance is that you can easily get a lot of positive reinforcement for it; people are impressed at how well you understand something, at how much you know, at how quickly you pick it up. But even if you are better than average at picking things up and figuring things out, you will eventually hit the limits of what you can do through brilliance alone; there are some things that will just take long hard work no matter what, and then all of that reinforcement for brilliance comes back to bite you because you're not getting the same kind of reinforcement, and you can easily get stuck and lose faith in your self-image.
> I don't think this is the right approach, because you need the ability to focus on work even when it is not fun.
this is just coming from my personal experience, but i think it is very important for a kid to have a job sometime in the high school years. my parents are fairly well off and they "protected" me from this need by just giving me spending money (sometimes for a trivial amount of chores, but usually just free money), so that a menial job would not distract me from my studies. of course, i just spent that money on frivolous things and outings with friends that distracted me from school anyway, and i ended up doing quite poorly (though i made it most of the way through a fairly prestigious school before it caught up with me).
eventually i transferred to a regional (but still quite rigorous) university and had to get a restaurant job to pay my expenses. i learned a whole lot about the world real fast. it wasn't so much that i learned about the value of steady work, but rather that low wage jobs in low margin industries really slam home the point that you will never have anything unless you put in the work, and i worked real hard from that point on. i still have bouts of procrastination, but i never just let things slide now, and every time i spend a dollar i feel the amount of my own labor that i am letting go.
You need discipline, not fun. Schools largely fail at teaching discipline, let alone self-discipline.
Yet here we are on HN on Thursday morning...
I had a very rude wake up call when I got to college.
I know high schoolers now and I encourage them to actually do the work. It's not that x,y,z topic may be important someday... It's the skill of doing the work, even when you don't want to, that will be important in life.
Fortunately we didn't have the uncivilized GPA system here so my first year indiscretions had no impact on my final degree.
The only real exception is if you’re screwing up so bad that they kick you out, in which case you don’t get the degree because you don’t complete the coursework.
Other larger companies that cared were Lutron, Epic, and a few more I don't really remember. I think Epic even asked me what my ACT score was.
Beyond that first job though, my GPA hasn't mattered at all, which is good because mine was pretty mediocre.
It didn't help that I went to uni to study Physics, either.
This still happens even though older semesters will tell any freshmen that they need to attend courses and do exercises to make it. What kinda works are mandatory exercises.
It might be "fairly easy" if you're lucky enough to have had a decent K-12 education, which is what prepares you to do what you say and do it effectively.
Far too many students graduate high school barely literate, without knowing how to learn, without sufficient direction or motivation. That's not to mention various emotional and psychological issues students might struggle with that keep them from applying themselves and making the most of their university education. It's also not to mention the fact that way too many students look at university as primarily a place to party, or to cheat their way to a degree.
I was in the military for 4 years between them (and I was not a good student before), but I decided to go to university specifically to learn something that interested me. And it was sad seeing my peers waste their time doing the same stupid crap I'd outgrown and become bored of in the military. (At least there I wasn't expected to learn anything hard.)
Tangentially related, I also read once that the main determinant in whether a doctor got sued for malpractise is not the actual blunder itself, but the doctors bedside manner and relationship with the patient and their family. (Obviously this relates to honest mistakes, more than extreme negligence) As a result, on any project I am on now (as a PM) I make it my practise to befriend as far as possible all the stakeholders in the project.
The other advantage is it also makes your time at work more enjoyable.
Hey now, I'd like to speak up for the sheep. Maybe a bit introverted but not dumb. In my experience they are quite opinionated and willful.
Ok maybe I am projecting a bit.
Instead of understanding a signal and backing off, they proceed and get shot. They win tactically until they lose strategically.
This is even more sad became coyotes are definitely smart enough to understand symbolic violence and audial signals as a substitute for real fighting, and use this in their interactions within a pack.
i had a similar realization in late high-school / early college, but worded a little differently. the rules themselves were never designed to be reasonable; they were designed to solve problems that the rule makers encountered in the past and afford them a "legitimate" means of recourse. no one ever intended to apply them consistently. this is why you can generally break as many rules as you want, so long as you don't actually cause a problem for someone. on the flip side, if you create a problem, they damn sure have an applicable rule on the books.
(Thinking about businesses & politicians)
My interpretation was that rules are only an approximation for what the rulemakers actually care about, and if you understand that, optimizing for what they want and not what they say will be a lot better for you than doing what they say but not what they want.
Yes, those of us that question and break rules can optimize for what is actually desired vs what is 'proscribed' and have better outcomes.
But many/most people rather just follow the rules/directions in the first place rather than break the rules or attempt to find optimal ways around them.
All this other stuff is about people looking for specific optimizations or ways to game the system that most people don't do.
Not sure where you're from, but a good 30-50% of people drive the speed limit.
My take: don't bother unless you have some time and are looking to be mildly entertained (very mildly IMO).
It's fluff. The central analogy is a little amusing but doesn't even roughly fit reality.
In chasing its premise the article ignores a key dynamic of "financial innovation" schemes, which is that the schemers largely avoid the negative consequences of their schemes. Well, the money spigot stops at some point, which the schemers see as a tragedy, but they generally aren't losing too much of what they grabbed before the end. In 2008, I think most had to endure talk of losing their bonuses (not actually loss of bonuses, just talk and sometimes a temporary delay). The real consequence is that they have to get back to work building up a new scheme so they can do it all again.
It devastated my family. My father was in construction. That market seriously ebbs.
I remember a faint feeling I had back then: resentment towards families who happened to be in industries that weren’t hit.
Not because I thought it was unfair that we were hit, I just resented that they didn’t even have to notice what was happening.
And I just had to check myself about this Great Financials Crisis. Lucky timing, I have been pretty employable the last 20 years. The “crisis” was always a political skirmish to me. I cared about it, but it seemed small compared to past crises.
Just now it occurred to me though, that whatever millions of people are going through exactly what I did, their families collapsing.
And I’m the one can not notice that.
I’d like to securitize those families.
Not sure I'd buy that coin.
It is all about finding the right sort of incentive.
:-)
A poor farmer whose livestock is a single dairy cow goes to the field one morning to milk the cow and discovers that she's dead. He falls to his knees and looks skyward, shaking his fists and cursing God for his misfortune. Suddenly a voice is heard from the heavens: "Your cries have reached me, my son. Tell me what you would like me to do." The farmer gazes upward and says to God, "Please, Lord, kill my neighbor's cow."
The OP says.
>> And they’re not that smart. I’d put our barn cat up against a raccoon any day on any sort of cognitive test. We think raccoons are clever because they have those anthropomorphic paws and those cute little masks and even a Marvel superhero with its own toy line, but please. Raccoons are takers, not schemers.
From Wikipedia
>> Zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons as "clever beasts", and that "in certain directions their cunning surpasses that of the fox." The animal's intelligence gave rise to the epithet "sly coon".[120] Only a few studies have been undertaken to determine the mental abilities of raccoons, most of them based on the animal's sense of touch. In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded they understood the abstract principles of the locking mechanisms and their learning speed was equivalent to that of rhesus macaques.
Learning speed equivalent to the macaques? You gotta be kidding me. These creatures are underestimated and the author might just not like them?
I mean, look at his eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_... That guy looks really smart and self aware.
Raccoons, in my experience, definitely seem intelligent. I think the author just needs a proxy for a villain. I can't be alone in thinking that the author has chosen poorly; the fault he finds in the coyote is, by his own admission, not shared by the raccoon. The raccoon is successful in both the mini- and meta-games.
I'm fairly neutral on coyotes but we've never lost an animal to them. I like their haughtiness, though I can get the same from the fox that lives around here somewhere without as much worry about what she might do to our pets.
It's really just the bear paw print that worries me.
It would be like reading The Lion and the Mouse and tossing the whole thing out because you think that a mouse really wouldn't be able to chew through all those ropes.
But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we've changed the landscape and removed & added various animals and plants to the landscape they've found niches that work for them and have expanded their range greatly.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-t...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal
[2] https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe...
[3] https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf
[4] https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotte...
Non-domesticated technology/industry/world changing innovators ("coyotes") will exist in any modern society and will still change the world. But an average young coyote cub could still be very miserable.
So I'm calling you out barn cat. You think you can sneak by having your cake and keeping your solidarity and standoff distance from the humans but also benefit from the free housing + healthcare + steady food when you don't want to kill mice + affection when you decide to wander over to the main house.
But I'm onto you.
Every house cat owner knows that the house cat is the 'meta game mastermind'. Hell, they've engineered the system to care about their safety so much that it is cruelty to have them reproduce via the species own painful biology. Letting them out into the street is homicidal. If they get pests they inflict them on their caretaker and every other discomfort is communicated to the human caretaker willy nilly. When they want to exert themselves they can be amazingly cruel, subtle, unpredictable and unyielding. House cats win.
Every cat I have owned has been an indoor-outdoor cat. There are downsides. They tend to be less affectionate and more independent than house cats, but they also seem healthier and happier than the indoor cats I have known.
Also they don't need a litter box. That is a biggy.
In all seriousness I would rather take the time to care for a house cat than to deal with the possibility of roadkill/injury, disease, pests or other accidents of nature. If the cat is a problem for you then don't own one?
The point being, it's not that the cat is a problem. It's that some of us think nature should remain natural, not be pressed into service keeping us company.
The people who seemed smart won the minigames. They got good grades with little effort. But somehow, they ended up with no institutional support -- in fact, the school hated them. Eventually one of the teachers (who was visibly insecure about her own intelligence and competence) cooked up a nonsense pretext to get some of them expelled.
One kid's parents brought a legal challenge, the school settled for a year's worth of college tuition, and last I heard his parents had withdrawn him from college to pack him off to rehab for heroin addiction. The only other expellee I've heard from left the country, never to return.
The people who seemed like they worked hard didn't always get the best grades. But the institution went out of its way to make life easier for them, and they're all doing alright now.
Update:
I think the article insinuates an interesting take on the invention of cryptocurrencies (by coyotes), their bubble (by raccoons) and their suppression (by the state). But IMO in this case, the state suppressed the invention not just because they fear what the coyotes have produced but also what raccoons have done with it (with the whole ICO bubble, etc.).
Also because states aren't just trying to control / suppress Bitcoin alone but all cryptocurrencies. For example, here in India the central bank has banned all cryptocurrencies.
If their campaign was the bring this under their power, it cannot be viewed reasonably as anything other than a miserable failure.
Also the analogy to the metagame does not acknowledge the reality that actually those in power in the metagame are a predatory parasitic coercive force in themselves, and their brand of coyote cunning is just traditional machiavellian politics rather than financial innovation backed up with cryptographic peer to peer networks.
It's not a war between animal control and coyotes. It's a war between many coyotes executing different strategies. While both the sheep and the raccoons just try to get by as best they can.
However, the same is not true in the developing world where a number of countries have outright banned all independent cryptocurrencies and will be launching state controlled cryptocurrencies soon. Seems like they don't care much about anyone (coyotes, sheep or raccoons).
My question is, why does the human think coyote scat on the other side of the line was precisely placed and scat on his side of the line is an intentional provocation? A more reasonable explanation is that the coyotes don't know exactly where the invisible line is.
- By bailing out big banks and other institutions, the government signaled to these institutions to pile on risk because they'd just be saved by the government when things went bad
- Policy which gave incentives for risky mortgages under the intention of helping the poor
- Tax policy continuing to give incentives for people to buy houses instead of renting
This. In <blink> and <marquee> tags
Imagine a company that has a single customer. There's a 50/50 chance that the customer will pay. If the customer pays then the company makes a ton of profit, if the customer doesn't pay then the company goes out of business.
For the company, this is probably more risk than they want to take. But there's probably hedge fund out there who has enough money to survive the customer not paying and is willing to take that risk for a fee. So the company can go to the hedge fund and say "if the customer pays us in the future we'll give you all the money. In exchange give us 40% of it right now".
And the company is happy because they have a 100% chance of staying in business. And the hedge fund is happy because (if the risk was priced correctly) they have a positive expected value in the trade.
That's all securitization is.
In the UK we ended up with all sort of shenanigans like "self-certified mortgages" where the person taking out the loan was allowed to certify their ability to repay. with that kind of product it's very difficult to classify risk of non-repayment as you can't believe the evidence provided (necessarily).
And then quotes Jesus.
Way to stay true to your roots.
The gist of it is that survival strategies are only viable given the distribution of the behavior throughout the entire species or population. Similar to a finicial market, some strategies work only when a small percentage of the population exhibits the behavior.
A bonus is that, like the phrase Too Clever by Half, Dawkins is also British.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
I can see very strong parallels with systems thinking and the role that systems engineers play within the V-model.
> Turns out that B̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ a AAA-rated tranche of Alt-A mortgages wasn’t the store of value that coyote-math “proved” it was, to the detriment of i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶ institutional investors who put a significant portion of their portfolio into these securities, and to the ruin of those who used leverage to acquire these securities.
Sincerely,
Infuriated of Norwich.
So, I get what the author is trying to say with this little parable, but the fact that the central facts it is using (coyotes losing out, raccoons are stupid) are both false, it makes me more than a little suspicious of the conclusion, when I otherwise might not be.
Well, the bunk kibble is round and likes to roll away. So in the course of getting at the good stuff, the round garbage unworthy for the princess scatters everywhere, gets stepped on, attracts ants, etc. Well, I'm left with a tupperware full of the mixed kibble that I have to use up, so I just pour it into the bowl so it doesn't scatter. Pesky poking has given way to the buffet.
I don't know if you knew you were playing, but good game, cat, good game.
In the case of Bitcoin, being such a foray into uncharted territory, I'm unsure of how you would be good at the meta game, or figure out how racoons will abuse your radical new idea. Maybe I need to improve my meta game, heh.
It is: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...
I agree, in a lot of ways, I prefer to make situations win-win because it leads to better long term outcomes. It's as much about framing as it is about succeeding in the short or long term.
Here's the thing about the meta-game: It's very contextual. Coyotes can't play the meta-meta-game of thinking about your context and possibly changing it. Some human beings can.
this is an odd proposition. evolution has not been replaced; rather, the evolutionary pressures have changed. in any case, civilization is not much more than 10,000 years old, which is pretty short in evolutionary timescales.
and although we employ some measures (ie social services) to prevent the weakest from dying outright, it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever. for instance, it takes 5-7 years for a high school grad to get a master's degree. can you really envision an adult hunter-gatherer working towards something for that long without seeing the fruits of their labor? their environment mandated a much shorter term focus to avoid starvation or lethal competition from other humans.
> it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever
is true for the minority only.
Of course any description of what's happening and what can be done to prevent it is to the right of the Overton Window and is thus illegal to discuss on this forum.
Not to mention that, as other commenters have mentioned, coyotes have been rather successful in spite of human encroachment, just like cryptocurrencies grow stronger in the face of looming regulation and sanction. Sure, it might scare off some raccoons and kill some coyotes in the short term, but it's going to be still there. And for all the "coyote institutions" that perished, there are still many more.
Government types developing an ill will towards the defiant cryptos is the neighborhood moms getting pissed at the bold coyote.
The animal control is the 2nd order game. Regulators come in and crack down on cryptos. Put the squeeze on exchanges, make it hard to cash out to legal tender.
The author uses this analogy to compare coyotes to financial innovators. His argument is that every time financial innovation gets out of control and the economy at large is impacted, larger powers step in and squash it. He argues tha this is what happened in the 2008 financial crisis with mortage backed securities, and that this is the same thing happening now with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
I disagree with the parallel he draws to cryptocurrencies.
While I don't necessarily think cryptocurrencies will dominate the world, and Governments may even succeed in reigning them in, they aren't in the same category as other financial innovation.
Mortgage backed securites were the coyotes stalking across the laws of suburban moms, hoping animal control wouldn't interfere.
Cryptocurrencies are a coordinated attack by a pack of coyotes on animal control headquarters.
They were designed specifically to be as government-resistant as possible. Now, animal control has a lot of firepower and they can call in reinforcements. Governments have a lot of resources and powers they can draw on to stop and regulate cryptocurrencies. However, these coyotes are well aware of the meta-game, who the true enemy is and they're gunning hard for him.
Before bitcoin, no currency that wasn't backed by a government lasted long before being shut down by a government entity. Bitcoin has been going for nine years now, and in that time further innovation has given us Monero and Zcash which are even more censorship and surveillance resistant.
The primary attack vector, the only one that's worked, has been made by the "racoons" at Blockstream and their investors from Visa and the banking industry. This is a much more subtle attack than direct government intervention. In a nut-shell, when Satoshi left the project, he left a guy named Gavin Andresen in charge. Gavin trusted the wrong person with commit access to the project, who was co-opted by the banking industry and who then booted him from access. Thos current group of developers crippled Bitcoin by repeatedly refusing to expand the block size and moving forward developing the "Lightning Network" which is nothing more than a copy of the current inter-bank payment system and which, quite frankly doesn't work.[1][2] They also took over the r/bitcoin subreddit as well as the bitcointalk forum and completely censored it.[3]
The fact that the racoons have taken this more subtle approach, suggests to me that the enemies of Bitcoin now believe that attempts to shut it down by more direct mean will fail.
However there are still a lot of coyotes working on other cryptocurrency projects. These coyotes are clearly playing the meta-game, and for now they're winning.
[1] Summary of what the lightning network is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g [2] Discussion of a developer who tried to implement micropayments with lightning network, but had to switch because it did not work well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0 [3] A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...
Ho Ho!
Tell me more brother. I am curious.
This links up with David Krakauer's ideas I'll bet.
No it isn't. It's positive punishment.
Nothing says dbag like Alabama man who now lives in Connecticut crying over dead asshole financial firms.
We've had 4 (or more) of these banking/finance ripoffs in my fucking lifetime. Bankers and finance assholes are the scourge of mankind.
I got a degree in Finance just so I could avoid the bullshit these fucking assholes use to rip everyone off. A State Bank as the author is so scared of, like the one in North Dakota, won't run into any of these issues. Because their goal isn't profit at any cost, it's providing banking and investment services.
tl;dr; fuck this guy
Laughable.
My life isn't representative of everyone on this planet. I won the birth lottery.
I'll pick the future, since it's a futile exercise.
There are obviously tons of problems still but the improvements that have been made are vast. I get that we still have a lot of progress to make, but the cynicism of the person I was replying to is inappropriate when you look at the facts.
I'll be copy pasta'ing this comment to every top level comment about animal abuse here. Shock collars can be used for abuse. But fuck, they can do so much good.
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I'm happy to see you down voted here.
I have had to employ shock collars for foster dogs who were capable of jumping 10 feet fences in the past and these things work a damn charm.
They were the last option available to me after trying every other option. But damn do they work. After a day or two the 'beep' of the shock collar is enough negative reinforcement to stop the dog(s) from retrying the ol' 10 foot pole vault.
And before I let my dog(s) use it I tried it on myself.
The shock it's self was pretty harmless, certainly not comfortable, but the longer I stayed near the perimeter the more often the shocks were deployed. I learnt my lesson quick enough.
Except for one of my foster dogs anyway, he was a 60kg athletic failed pig hunting hybrid mongrol named Loki, looked like a Bull Arab crossed with a Great Dane. I named him Loki because of his tenacity and ingenuity for getting in trouble.
He learnt if he ran up the adjacent wall (attached to the house, that didn't have an invisible fence line) quick enough, he could be mid-flight before the shocks were administered and when momentum is carrying you through the air at 12 feet, over the shock line, the shocks don't do shit. You're already flying. And the shocks stop well before you hit the ground on the other side so you can gracefully land and wonder a few streets to go meet Nani at the local Cafe for free biscuits and pats for an hour. While I rode my bicycle home to 'rescue' him from getting fat.
Alas. Similar to the Cayote. His abuse from prior owners saw him lose the meta-game in the long run. The abuse saw massive changes in behavior between loveable giant to dangerous beast from the smallest changes in environment. Even after 12 months of behavioural monitoring and professional dog therapy from I and his rescue organisation, he was not for long for this world. The level of risk from his occasional aggressive outbursts at times were just too high.
Still one of my favourite dogs. Miss the guy every day.
Anyway. Thanks for reading. And PS, as a last option. Shock collars are great. They save lives.
You're making assumptions that I didn't exercise or allow my dog(s) outdoor time. Wether it was daily visits to the dog park or visits to the beach or the hinterland on the weekend. You're wrong to assume that the dogs whether adopted or fostered where ever deprived of anything. Shock collars are barbaric but they are means to an end, and an effective one once all options are exhausted.
Plus the whole, let your dogs roam free in a country like Australia would come at a significant cost to the local wildlife where wild dogs and cats are pests and not all of us live on farms, I'm not sure what you would have suggested for the dogs under my care. Or if your opinion here is almost entirely biased?
That's disgusting.
Nothing wrong with that, is there?
There is a good business in hunting feral cats and dogs that were pets and have been left to fend for themselves in the wild because they were no longer wanted.
(a small town in a rural county)
It is also applicable to cats.
Because I'm in the position to know that this is not the case. My partner's father has a farm with animals, including dogs. The farm has a fence and the dogs can roam freely inside it.
That being said I think if I was in their position (and again, I'm very far from it) I think I'd prefer having an actual physical fence.
Is there an objection to handling a dog in this manner?
The reason this is used instead of a fence has nothing to do with the dog's preferences (which of course we can't know), safety, or convenience. Instead, the reason seems to be cost. I don't see how it's possible to justify avoiding the cost of building a fence by mistreating your animals. If the man who has this farm can't keep dogs without delivering electric shocks to them, then maybe he shouldn't have any dogs.
1) The electrical shock is not truly painful. It's startling and highly unpleasant, but it's not painful, for short bursts. I can't speak for all systems, but for the ones I tested (albeit holding the collar in my hand, not on my neck), it was no worse than typical electric fencing, which is widely used.
2) These systems have the benefit of not affecting other animals, and dogs and other animals cannot get stuck in them. We had an electric fence around a duck nesting ground growing up, and I'll never forget the morning we found a whimpering fox that had somehow gotten tangled in the wires. I guess it had jumped at the shock and pulled a wire off the fence? I don't know. But it had the electrified wire wrapped around a back paw. At least it was a pulsing fence (rather than constant current); so the fox didn't appear to have a bad burn, though I'm sure being stuck in it for hours was terrible (and truly painful).
2b) They also do not impede the traffic or cut off travel corridors of other wildlife, which can be a real problem in some areas.
3) Ordinary fences are (often) less effective. Given enough time and a large amount of fence that cannot be thoroughly checked & repaired regularly, dogs will find a way to escape. They'll dig under, they'll jump over, they'll climb, they'll chew holes in, etc. We had a super smart lab who figured out how to climb a chain link fence. Depending on the risks of escape, this can be highly dangerous.
4) The risk of shock is typically very low. When these systems are installed, they are typically buried along natural boundaries, and when they aren't, you put temporary flags in the ground to show the dog where the boundary is. So the dog very quickly learns the boundary, learns what the beep means, and rarely gets a shock after the first couple of days.
Overall, I don't think these systems are signficantly less humane than other types of fencing – probably more humane if you're comparing them to traditional electric fencing.
That said, these fences aren't perfect either. I have another friend who installed one to keep his husky from leaving his ~3 acre yard, because the dog was breaking into a neighbor's chicken coop. It worked for a while, but eventually that husky realized she could just get a running start, jump over the boundary, take the brief shock, and then be free. The drive to get those chickens was just too compelling. Of course, the drive to return home was not quite as strong. So she'd sit at the edge of boundary, whining to be let back into the yard.
A traditional fence might have been more effective in that case, though I think that husky would have found a way out. She was relentless and clever. They had to get rid of her eventually, when their neighbor threatened to put out bowls of antifreeze – now that's disgusting! (To be fair, this was in rural Alabama ~15 years go, and that neighbor depended on the chickens/eggs for food. Still disgusting, but the frustration is understandable if a dog is literally taking food out of your kid's mouth.)