anon9001

From what I understand, China does the same. Ban the easy things, only bother to crackdown on the harder things (like VPN or cryptocurrency) when they start to get out of control.

Internet libertarian here. That's not the argument at all.

We could prevent tons of harm by tightly regulating all aspects of life. Banning fast food or cigarettes would undeniably be a public health win, and I don't think many libertarians would disagree with that.

The argument is that it's simply not the government's job to prevent people from hurting themselves, even if it could be done at scale and effectively. It's a question of the role of government, not so much about whether loud music or fireworks cause harm (they do) or if it's enforceable (it is).

If you ban everything that's dangerous or unhealthy, I'm not sure you'd be happy with the culture that results. Humans are experimental by nature, even if sometimes that results in harm. These types of restrictions that can't be bypassed hurt our experimental nature.

In the beginning of the pandemic, and even now, a lot of attitudes were shaped by the lack of government regulation. If the president isn't wearing a mask, and there's no legal requirement for me to wear a mask, then it must be safe to not wear masks... right? That's the kind of thinking that a highly regulated society produces because we've insulated people from danger for so long. At this point, it seems most people feel that if you can do something, it must be safe, otherwise it wouldn't be available for you to do. That's even more dangerous than loud music or fireworks.

Would any of our Russian comrades reading along care to weigh in on how they're feeling about getting the vaccine on release day?

I would think the invisible hand of the market would re-route all that pollution to areas without the tax and the earth wouldn't see that much difference. It's not like they're going to stop selling oil if the EU and US agree to stop burning so much of it.

I agree it's complex, but I think carbon taxes might be part of the complexity. If we're going to start messing about with markets, we should outright ban the offending activity and regulate harshly. If we're going to apply tokenomics to the problem and pretend we fixed it until we're too old to care, that seems worse somehow.

Or we can just do nothing and hope technology saves us. That's what the actual bet is whether we like it or not.

There was this particularly transparent example by the Director of the CDC a couple of years ago, about buying tobacco stocks when put in charge of programs for reducing tobacco usage: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/cdc-director-tobac...

Also this story about how FDA appeared to bend to political pressure to greenlight an experimental treatment due to political pressure, bypassing the normal guidelines for demonstrating efficacy: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/why-did-fda-autho...

There's also been a general failure to respond appropriately to the pandemic. We're so many months in and PPE is still an issue: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/8-months-into-pandemic-...

And that's not even counting what the White House is doing, which is not good. Especially with the recently leaked audio tapes from Woodward from the same time POTUS was publicly downplaying it: https://youtu.be/-cfd_pJVYiM?t=179

Plus the hydroxychloroquine thing...

There's a lot of buzz lately about how the administration is trying to influence the CDC, but most of it is journalism/politics blue twitter insider type chatter:

* https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/politico-trum...

* https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/trump-e2-80-99s-att...

* https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/politico-trum...

* https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-appointees-sou...

But there is a lot of it, and that's pretty unusual for an organization like the CDC. Maybe it's all disinformation, but keep in mind it's the President's job to appoint the Director of the CDC: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/trumps-cdc-dire...

I'm not saying every smear against the man is true. But after the last director had to resign over the tobacco thing, and the current director is now clearly affiliated with the President, so I'm skeptical if he has the public interest at heart.

I've never had less faith in American institutions, and I think it's for good reason. There's a lot of corruption at the top, and it's clearly infiltrating the institutions.

If they say a vaccine is safe to get, I don't think I can trust it. I'm going to need to dive deeper into opinions of professionals when it becomes available before I get it.

Ironically, it's largely due to successful Russian efforts that I no longer know who to trust for advice on vaccines.

From what we're hearing so far [1], it seems that POTUS will promise a vaccine is on its way just before the election, but then never deliver it. What I'm worried about, though, is that a vaccine will simply show up and start being rolled out by a compromised CDC, or FEMA, or Army, or whoever the administration can force to do it.

[1] https://www.axios.com/trump-cdc-redfield-vaccine-d266121c-88...

Question: what do you think about the litecoin mimblewimble features that are supposed to happen later this year?

Litecoin is already so widely integrated in the ecosystem that it should become the largest "privacy coin" overnight, but I don't know enough to say if it's any good.

Good overview of threats.

Also visited his page. Does not disappoint: https://mango.pdf.zone/

Once I found the company and nailed the interviews, I got an offer ~30% lower than the SF salary because of CoL adjustment. My position was that if my salary could be offset by much riskier equity (aka more than the 30% cut, but essentially free for the company), I would accept the position. So I ended up getting a larger total comp than would have been available to me in SF. Also I don't even need 50% of my salary to live outside of CA anyway, so it's a major lifestyle upgrade.

This only works because I get to choose any company in the world. That means the equity I get is something I would have invested in anyway given the opportunity.

For the first time in my career I feel that I negotiated well and have confidence in my employer, and it never would have happened by just being another dev in the bay area.

But seriously, if you want to cheat California, just leave and move to a more business-friendly state and do your business legally. It's 100% not worth it to operate illegally in California, especially for the registration of an entity that's intended to protect you legally.

Oh, also fun, don't forget to explicitly close out your CA business when you finally give up and move out. If you don't, they'll hunt you down for your $800/yr several years later with penalties and interest.

If you're a good developer with experience, it doesn't really matter where you are. I actually get paid more total comp than I would in SF, my cost of living is lower, and my tax situation is much better.

The problem is it's not about you or me tolerating the special exception or not. It's about recourse, and we have none.

> a new exemption for these people just because they have money

The people with money can donate to all the politicians and make them aware of their needs, in exchange for the donations continuing. That's their recourse.

> This should not be understood as an infight by HFTs.

But that's exactly what it is. Multiple entities with money lobbying the same government for favorable results.

Sure, maybe technically in some way, but absolutely not in any meaningful sense.

Technically true, but practically nonsense. We're at no danger of under-population. And if we were, it would be the government's job to subsidize having children, not Facebook's.

People who work in tech and choose to have babies are doing it as a luxury, not to push society forward.

You can choose to have a baby or not, and I don't see why you should get special treatment at work because of that decision.

I understand meritocracy is an illusion at best, but it's an important illusion to maintain. If someone is pulling less weight, they should receive less compensation. They certainly shouldn't be rewarded for taking weeks or months off to work on on side projects, which is essentially what a baby is.

But maybe I'm just being harsh by thinking of children as side projects, and I should be more sensitive. Fine, let's say that having a baby is a medical condition. For any other medical condition, your options are burn all your PTO or go on short-term disability. Why should having a baby be any different?

That may be true in theory, but in practice most lawyers will protect other lawyers, and their regulatory bodies do very little to discourage bad actors.

I won't be surprised to see Discord pivot to b2b in a few years and completely destroy Slack.

The people under indictment wanted to have reputation in the scene, so badly that they were willing to commit a lot of crimes that are way more severe than watching pirated content.

I think the takeaway is that if you're torrenting content, you're probably fine. But if you're running a pre with unreleased content, the law takes that pretty seriously.

I think the better question is: what are you going to do to stop me from downloading whatever I want?

Sure, or I can just pirate content. That's another way to deal with it.

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to have a problem because you're trying to keep your bytes a secret. Pretty much everyone has accepted that you can't stop piracy, at least once the content is available on p2p.

This article is about topsites that were probably involved in hacking into content sources directly. That's a much bigger deal than everyday civil copyright infringement.

Some of us actually do want a future where you can download a car.

My goodness that's a lot of ketamine.

A "strong" recreational dose would be about 1mg/kg. 2.5mg/kg and the person is anesthetized.