Macross8299

There's a number of people who make this claim, some of them leaning towards more credible [0], some hysterical [1].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-...

[1]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

>Anti-money laundering/sanctions/stopping terrorist financing efforts are generally a good thing that not ideal from an economic perspective.

This is the same authoritarian reasoning behind things like China's capital controls, though.

>Why do you believe this has any relevance at all? People want to buy stuff, not exchange bill with serial number #abcxyz with stuff.

Because it solves the double spend problem [0] associated with digital currency without use of a centralized database.

I think that matters to people trying to avoid onerous capital controls or a government printing 31% of the money supply in a week [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-05/venezuela...

Some would argue that the levee system creates moral hazard by incentivizing development in dangerous areas.

And the GI bill comparison is disingenuous because it's disgusting to compare the millennial English literature major whining about being unemployable to men who fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

Yeah, I'm so privileged that I took on debt to go to university for a difficult subject and had to work and make lifestyle sacrifices to pay it back rather than voting for someone to give me a free ride.

Apples and oranges. Most of those things aren't fungible like money is. There's no moral hazard involved with someone receiving a new elective surgery. There's no opportunity cost to someone not receiving a non-existent vaccine.

GI bill is a disingenuous comparison because those people made pretty tremendous personal sacrifices in service of the country.

Well, the sentiment aside there's also the issue of the fact that you are subsidizing people that made less financially sound decisions and punishing those who made financially responsible decisions. What about the moral hazard?

i.e. if two people had identical student loan balances with $500 minimum payment per month and one person decided to pay $1000 monthly to pay it off quickly and the other person paid $500 and YOLO'd the other $500 monthly into instagram vacations, takeout food, Bitcoin at 19k, etc, you are effectively subsidizing the second group of choices.

>"I had it hard, so we shouldn't let these soft youngsters get off any easier."

No, they are presumably angry because they are still paying for being responsible enough to pay off their debt in the form of opportunity cost. If they paid 100k off in debt in the past, that's money they don't have now to invest or spend.

Also, having taxes imposed on you for something you didn't get to benefit from at all (but easily could've) is pretty angering.

Because the "eat the rich"-style taxes DO eventually effect Joe the Plumber if he owns a plumbing business.

Look at the people in this very comment section advocating for 70% marginal rates for income above 1.5x the average income.

Ah, so billionaires want to pay, but only if their ego isn't sufficiently damaged by voluntarily reducing their stack.

Because let's be honest, it's not like their living standards would be significantly damaged by paying a few more millions to the treasury.

The cynic in me says they are lobbying for more taxes on the upper middle class while knowing they can pay for accountants and loopholes on whatever taxes are imposed.

If the ultrarich want to be taxed, they are free to make a donation to the treasury any time. But they don't. Really makes you think.

Edit: consider the pirate game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game

>The volume of futures trading fell by 98% and the options trading market disappeared

You have to wonder what the second-order effects of the options trading market disappearing (or being severely reduced in volume) would be.

I know there are some pretty important businesses that depend on options to hedge against commodity prices. Airliners and oil come to mind.

>Everyone should want to allow people to access education.

Why?

So the existence of financially irresponsible rich kids somehow disproves the idea that it's possible to pay back debt if you act financially responsible by running a sensible budget and cutting expenses?

I dunno what sort of message this is supposed to send to people. "Fuck you if you were a big enough sucker to pay back your debts"?

It is not surprising considering how similar Vancouver and Seattle are and considering that the Vancouver mayor openly brags about how low tech salaries are [0]

[0]: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver-criti...

>that the only recourse is for the landlord to turn to AirBnB to turn a profit.

Just playing devil's advocate, but that assumes that the landlord didn't factor those things like eviction law into their decision of what type of property to buy and where to buy it.

Maybe the landlord made the decision between buying a rental property in a suburb and buying an AirBnB property in a city center and decided that the former case was infeasible due to eviction laws.

For instance, you can buy a small apartment building in metro vancouver for 2-5 million CAD. Same price as a couple of luxury apartments downtown.

>For example, you can charge them $100 to run third party background check,

How do you prevent this from becoming a form of abusive rent-seeking? i.e. randomly removing a businesses' credentials and then charging them the cost of a background check + a small fee to "verify"

> It's a hard problem to solve - there's money from 3rd parties to be made from spamming the maps. It's in Google's best interest to try and protect the end user from fakes.

A cynic would say it is being treated as an optimization problem from the perspective of maximizing revenue:

If we have the number of users switching away from Maps as a function of fake listings and fake listing up-bidding is allowed, how many blatantly fake listings (not even borderline cases) per query can we allow to maximize revenue before the costs of users switching away outweighs the gain from fake listings?

More transparency in the process for removing fake listings would be nice to alleviate the concern that this is what Google is doing.

>There is no such thing as private property

This isn't true from the perspective of the legal system and isn't true from the natural law framework on which US common law is based.

>In the meantime, it should be illegal to operate a social network

So what about the countless number of people whose livelihoods depend on social media in some capacity? They're supposed to just be fine with being irrevocably fucked over until the moral panic about social media subsides? (or, in your words, "we decide what is good for us all")

Where does the small business owner who depends on a social network factor in as a "stakeholder"?

Drugs, sugar, cigarettes are measurably and objectively harmful to your health and that's why they are regulated (or should be).

There isn't similar comparable scientific evidence that social media is nearly as harmful except for questionable non-reproducible psychology studies, so I don't think it's comparable at all.

I think Wall Street Journal/FT are different though, people pay for those because it's a valuable curation of financial/economic news and presents political news through a financial/economics lens and not entirely through the traditional left/right political spectrum lens.

Call me cynical, but what makes you think people subscribing to more politically-oriented publications are doing it because they want truly something accurate and not because that publication confirms their biases?

Seems like a classic case of moral hazard here.

I'm surprised cybersecurity insurance doesn't mandate best-practice auditable backups as part of the process to grant a policy.

>because social mobility on this scale is extremely rare

Rare only works as a qualifier when comparing it to some other probability of social mobility, either in an ideal or real system. The US has higher social mobility than most actual countries in the world and is pretty much middle of the pack in social mobility when it comes to developed (OECD) nations [0]

If I recall correctly, there was another case of a janitor working her way up to becoming a C-level executive at Microsoft and HP. Capitalism with a social safety net is what affords this social mobility because it doesn't matter what your credentials are if you can find a market for a novel product like Montañez did. You can argue about how much of a social safety net is required to prevent the poor from staying poor forever, but it's still capitalism that provides the impetus that lifts people up to where they don't need the social safety net anymore.

Compare this to a society where you're hooped if you're born into the wrong caste or without party connections and US social mobility doesn't seem that rare anymore.

[0]: https://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/inequality-and-opportu... figure 2

>In theory, the recourse is that the people can exert power over the banks by electing different politicians.

Ah, but there's the rub. When every major political party is beholden to banking interests, "electing different politicians" is an almost-insurmountable task. And even so, is no guarantee that a new set of politicians won't eventually become corrupt and beholden to those interests either.

If "electing different politicians" is an insurmountable task, then developing an alternative, trustless financial system beyond the control of politicians becomes much more feasible by comparison. Hence the motivation behind great-great grandparent's comment about the need for an online independent currency. The context of 2008 and things like the TARP bailouts are very important to understanding the entire thought movement behind cryptocurrency as a whole. Hence, the hidden message encoded on the very first Bitcoin block [0]:

>The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

[0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block#Coinbase

>If you are diagnosed with cancer and that diagnosis is confirmed by a second doctor, do you need to demand access to your labs so you can review them personally "with a medical attitude"?

When considering a medication that is being sold to me such as an anti-depressant with possible long-term harmful side effects, I absolutely want to be familiar with the clinical efficacy and peer reviewed literature on that medication to assess the risks of whether it's worth it for myself.

What about opioids? There were some studies conducted by experts and promoted by the Sacklers that said that opioids were not addictive. Surely I don't have a right to be skeptical of those claims because the surveys were conducted by experts, right? I'm not a post-doc researcher, so obviously I can't tell you that OxyContin is habit-forming.

You're basically arguing for blind trust on the part of the patient, which is very disempowering.

It's very understandable when you present unquestioning obedience and credentialism worship as the only alternative to taking active steps towards being empowered, why people would tell the "experts" to fuck off and trust their own common sense instead as Taleb describes [0]

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

Anti-vax stuff aside, the attitude of

>Trust experts or die.

is not a scientific attitude, it is borderline scientism and an appeal to authority. Remember when the tobacco industry paid medical experts such as ENT Doctors to endorse smoking? [0]

The idea that "the rubes" don't have to or shouldn't be allowed to see the data behind FDA decisions and should just trust the experts blindly is completely condescending and is probably a key contributor to anti-vax sentiment and the anti-intellectualism movements you decry.

[0]: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/01/big-tobacco-l...

Hate to be "that guy", but public blockchain technologies are another strong tool that people have for resisting censorship [0]. It's much, much harder to nullroute blockchain traffic as opposed to nullrouting a website with information you want to censor. It's also very clear that the CCP is afraid of such technologies [1]

The rub is of course, this censorship-resistance being predicated on the consensus mechanism of a blockchain not being concentrated in one country.

[0]: https://theconversation.com/chinese-internet-users-turn-to-t...

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-blockchain/china-im...

>Do they get it wrong? Yes, occasionally. Not frequently. Occasionally. But that also, is science. The FDA follows rigorous statistical procedures, but even p<0.05 (or <0.001) still means false positives can happen.

The issue is that there is a huge lack of transparency. When a third of the studies involved in approval of anti-depressants were withheld from the public [0] and even some withheld at the insistence of the FDA [1], what good do low P-values do?

Hard to trust the science when you're not even allowed to review the papers for yourself.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9802-2004Sep9...

Fishing boats could've been requisitioned from anywhere. Signs put up by party cadres. I think those are perhaps examples of propaganda that everyone on the ground there knows is false but are put up for the sake of the international media. I don't get the impression that there is much support for the pro-government side among HKers at all, from the couple I know living abroad.