andres_kytt

You are at absolute liberty not to do any of this. Don't like the non-monetary cost of free services? Don't pay! And, as already noted, there is always a trade-off between utility, security and privacy. You want an efficient well-functioning state that talks to you digitally? That assumes you trust the state with some of your private data. Or keep paying for the inefficient services and absorb the cost of identity theft and such. It is your iwn choice.

It's a feedback problem. People seek to solve problems and by doing so create new ones. Which also need solutions. That create more problems. Packaging, transpiling etc are already second order problems and there are third and fourth ones as well. This won't stop until js becomes completely unusable.

These coincidents can usually be explained by a latter analysis. That's the main point of the article: til now there is no logically sound string of events that explains the observed events, demolition, fire or otherwise. These events might indeed be of low probability but currently even the events are not known.

Russian doctrine of information warfare seeks to create confusion, distrust and ambiguity about truth. Part of this ideology is to label everything as propaganda, to claim there is no objective truth, that everything is influenced by the funding agent. This allows to claim, that Russian-backed news sources that form an integral part of their information warfare machinery and spread blatant lies, are as legitimate as any other source of information. This allows the state to keep the monopoly of truth which allows for removal of any accountability from government actions. Which perpetuates status quo of power.

There are in fact shades of grey. All journalists are biased by their world-view and of course backers at least fund the ones the views of whom they like. But there is such thing as journalist ethics and not all funders exercise the sort of control over the writers as the fsb does. Not all media is propaganda.

We don't get such articles about Saudi Arabia because there is no war there.

And when you have cash, a single robbery can destroy your life savings. Or police can come and seize your money. There was someone in the thread amazed about the trust people put in the complex stack. I'm amazed the trust people put in the ordinary paper-based process. A computer cannot be bribed and leaves a cryptograhic audit trail and does not burn but for some reason a stack of papers under my matress is more trustworthy. There is a lot of irrationality around the topic. I don't know who's right but very clearly it is to an extent about fear of unknown.

Cash transactions are anonymous only if most transactions are cash. I take x eur from the bank and give them to you. You put x eur to the bank. That's linkable. And the people sign up to all sorts of savings cards en masse making their transactions at the till completely traceable. It is not about what happens routinely, it is about what can happen. Banks don't give a damn about your transaction history as long as you account balance adds up and neither does the government. With cash, there is an illusion of anonymity. Without cash you actually know what happens.

Government does not meddle with interest rates. Not here, at least

I find this approach really curious. All the transactions can be monitored by third parties anyway as all the pos systems are networked and subject to even lesser legal scrutiny than banks. Random adverisers can and do build comprehensive profiles. A company is us claims to have full profiles of all Americans. And yet, if there's a chance a citizen might benefit either via less hassle as in the cash case or via better gov services, everybody goes "but think of the privacy". As a result, societies get downsides of both: there is no privacy whatsoever but no value generated for the citizen.

From system thinking perspective, addiction can be described pretty well with a fairly simple model of a few feedback loops. Regardless of the exact feedback structure, the mechanisms are both social and bilogical, human biology will get hurt in the process and the entire thing is likely to behave chaotically. This is why you can argue it's a disease (because you get biological causes and effects) and that it's not (because AA works by providing a balancing loop designed to be tolerant to substance abuse). And this is why you probably won't get to a clean medical diagnosis - a very similar set of factors can lead to a wide range of outcomes. Unless addiction is seen as a systemic issue, I can't really see how it could be better understood beyond describing less and less significant factors in more and more detail.

Dawkins and his memes should have been worthy of mention as well as Hawking with his model-based realism. The flat-earth folks just have a different model of how the universe works. It has sufficient predictive power for their purposes and, as a meme, apparently performs a function or it would have been eradicated long time ago by evolutionary pressure. That's probably true for many of the zombies. They have managed to carve out an evolutionary niche that allows them to survive for centuries. Which is rather impressive.

Yes, the pesky economy preventing good wages. The "economy" is not a magic thing that can be turned better or worse at will. It is a complex machine driven by feedback and some basic rules. Jobs for less skilled are not plentiful anywhere any more because automation and that's the problem. Work goes away. People drink themselves silly and get a ton of children in trailer parks because it is possible. You no longer need to work 12 hours a day so you do not die. It's not nice, it's not easy but it is possible. I do not have a solution but if we are to solve this, we have to look at the fundamental problem rather than complain about the "economy".

No. He key idea of Marx was that the person adding value should own the means of doing so. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what's happening. The key element of value creation is the mind and that is owned by the person. Marx has nothing much left for people who _do not_ add value simply because back then that meant being "the problem". He who does not work must not eat. But what if there simply is no need to work? You should not try to apply social theories of late 18th century to the one of early 21st.

That's not how entrepreneurship feels. That's how life feels. Why is it that "entrepreneurs" re-discover everything from religious practices to basic organisational theory and then feel compelled to spend their apparently valuable time telling others of their discoveries as if they were profound insights into The Magic of Entrepreneurship. I don't mind, please do, I'm just curious why this is.