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Western executives only care about getting paid, they don't need to care about geopolitics because they will have already offloaded their responsibilities before it matters.

The state of cryptocurrencies is nothing more than a visible symptom of larger systemic issues that have clearly gotten out of control. It would be much more beneficial to try and understand why the market has decided to consider it valuable in spite of everything you have said rather than just blame and dismiss it based on its impact. We aren't paying the price for cryptocurrency, we are paying the price for policy that has made cryptocurrency attractive.

Homeless people are never in vogue, and therefore less marketable.

Because most people used ventrilo, teamspeak or mumble, which required running or paying for a server, and had limited chat/ social network functionality, and skype which was just terrible. It came at the right time as gaming hit its stride in the mainstream when people needed a place for 'local' communities that was basically frictionless and discord was there to capture that audience because there was basically nothing else.

All the features afterwards are mostly just them throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

It is at the intersection of pornography and parasocial online relationships (seen in Youtube, Twitch and other influencers), both extremely profitable. Looking at some of the revenue breakdowns the fees to message are just as significant as subscription costs.

On average I don't think it is particularly healthy to replace real social/ sexual relationships with parasocial ones and I think that is the primary use for these services. For the most part they lack real meaningful intimacy which is a significant benefit that real relationships provide. I don't think many who maintain healthy social and romantic relationships are the majority of users of the platform.

Not all bread is made equal though, I would suspect that something like Wonderbread that is shipped in from some factory would be closer to ultra processed than bread baked in house at the supermarket for example.

I think the idea is that everyone else in the world is doing that right now, and a huge portion of gains in recent times has been from a handful of companies, so I guess there is the choice between productive assets that are overpriced because everyone is dog piling in, debt that is basically negatively yielding against inflation or something like gold.

But 50 million isn't that much for a company like Palantir I would imagine.

Yeah they use Samsung for their current series but are planning to move to TSMC for the next irrc.

I thought they are using TSMC for their gpu, which means they will be part of the same bottleneck that is affecting everyone else.

This isn't the kind of thing that has an easy solution. All the actors in this issue have their own reasons as to why they are incentivized to act the way they have. For example, how news has increasingly become editorialized to try and remain relevant (and profitable) in a changing landscape of how people consume information.

A lot of these things change slowly (and are decades in the making), but aren't apparent until they have changed too much to easily fix so they require a lot of collective work to restore, which is extremely difficult because it often works against the incentives laid out by the environment that caused them to be this way. Using the news example, media sources could simply try to become more rigorous in their pursuit of being trustworthy again, but clearly society has incentivized them to move in the way they have. Running against those incentives runs the risk that it just makes them unprofitable again and then unable to report news all together when they go out of business (or become bought out by wealthy interests with an agenda). So the 'solution' would have to come in some sort of innovation in how people consume media that aligns journalistic rigor and being profitable, which nobody has really figured out how to do yet.

Misinformation is an issue because trust in politicians, the government, journalists, the media and the scientists they use as spokespeople has eroded significantly.

It is probably easier for them to dump 1B into something like this initiative than restore trust in those institutions.

While reading the article all I could think about was that it sounded like it was written by a bitcoin maximalist, so many things were framed in bad faith that it makes it difficult to take for granted that it is an honest attempt at discussing the issues surrounding Ethereum, especially when it is basically rehashing things that have been discussed many times before. It makes me wonder how this got to the top of HN, maybe an enemy of an enemy is a cryptocurrency skeptic's friend or something.

I feel like the threat of misinformation wouldn't be as significant if trust in institutions wasn't so abysmally low right now.

Everyone needs trusted sources to make sense of the world, and if politicians and traditional media sources have repeatedly demonstrated that they aren't very trustworthy, it makes sense that people will start looking elsewhere for their information. On top of that, advertising is pretty much just half truths and lies by omission at this point anyways.

Of course it is a lot easier to simply deflect this responsibility onto social media, but do we really want to be empowering these mega corporations to be arbiters of truth? Social media by design isn't really capable of moderating the inflows of content responsibly as it is.

I should clarify, there is a pretty large split between big law and an typical career in law. Those that go into top (200) firms are starting as associates at ~190k [1] with partners making ~1mm [2] with a long tail end. However most others will follow a career trajectory starting around 60k [3], maybe less if they are public attorneys, moving towards ~150k [4] if they make partner in a smaller firm. Prospective lawyers are sold the big law dream but outside of that the career trajectory is a lot less enticing considering the upfront costs.

[1] https://www.nalp.org/0521research [2] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how-much-do-partners... [3] https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib [4] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/partner-attorney-salary-S...

Although average wages are around 75k, wages of lawyers are two tiered, the majority settle around ~55k and then prominent lawyers who went to good schools and were groomed to become partners make over triple that [1]. So it is a lot like other professional white collar professions like accounting where there are huge amounts of extremely overworked people in entry level jobs who were suckered into the perceived security of the profession and few that make partner and rake in decent cash, which is only like average FANG entry salaries, the only difference is that they have to go through a professional degree and often incur huge amounts of debt just to get there.

[1] https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...

Yeah, like a lot of large industries, big tech exploits the value of data and the erosion of privacy for profit while outsourcing the social costs for someone else to solve. Almost by design they have created something too big to control.

I think the difference is that the MTV sexuality scare was predicated on the belief that sexualized videos would normalize sexualization in youth with negative consequences, whereas in social media applications create the incentive structures for that behavior to thrive.

I assume the fear was girls would sexualize themselves because of what they saw was popular on MTV, which they believed would make them popular as well. I guess the big difference is that girls that sexualized themselves at that time never had an access to large audiences without perceived consequences like girls do on social media today.

I don't think depicting violence in video games is similar because I would say the violent aspect of games isn't the defining aspect of the content that people want to emulate. For example all the video game streamers and influencers, like girls who sexualize themselves, generally want the popularity, and the popularity is derived from being good at the games (or being the entertainer), not by being violent or emulating the violence from games, whereas the popularity of sex symbols is inherently their sexuality. It was starting with internet chat rooms, but there was really no way to broadcast your sexuality to thousands of people back then without exposing yourself to risks like doing it in the public. Social media both removed these risks by creating a physical separation between the audience and the person sexualizing themselves, and provided an audience that provides the attention that those sexualizing themselves desire. It sort of created the missing pieces for the incentive structures that reinforce the behaviors.

It isn't just sexualization too, social media has allowed many communities that were either too niche or 'undesirable' to thrive in offline communities to flourish and become normalized over time.

Policy has crept business in this direction by stretching wages low while maintaining the benefits of revenue of a developed society, and while there are some successful restaurants, a large amount of them aren't exactly swimming in money because the benefits of this policy are captured by the large corporations. Nobody starts a restaurant to get rich. If there is a hard snap back like what covid did with state benefits, it isn't a stretch to say that many businesses would be scrambling to find a new equilibrium.

Restaurants in general are relatively premissionless in that anyone can start one, which is why so many fail. They can run the gamut from low margin to high margin, poorly managed to managed very well, so its no surprise that some will do better than others. In fact, I would think that the large corporate franchises will have the resources to adapt compared to the small business, family run restaurants because they have the logistical acumen to subsidize the costs.

I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren't fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.

Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.

I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.

You need to remember that people actually wanted Google and tech companies to be arbiters of truth and moderate content. This is what people asked for, so the real issue probably has to do with why people are comfortable with giving this amount of power to companies like Google in the first place.

Because increasing minimum wage is popular politics but it doesn't really solve the issue, and that is even if policymakers are capable of coming together to agree on how to make a 'livable' minimum wage (a livable wage in rural midwest is not the same as NY or SF for example), and how to keep that wage at a livable level without having to go through the political quagmire we currently are going through every 10-20 years. It isn't even clear that the minimum wage should be livable in the first place, as that also has its own costs as capital is liquid enough to go elsewhere leading to a race to the bottom.

Policymakers have shaped the economic system in a way that suppresses the value of unskilled labor, and simply forcing the increase has serious costs which most people don't appreciate, costs that are harder to bear for some compared to others, for example huge multinationals are much better equipped to deal with said costs compared to smaller, independent businesses. The appeal to emotion regarding this is especially dangerous since it often ignores the reasons why the problem persists, and when the problem is as difficult as this is, there are many potential pitfalls when creating a solution (especially a popular one), which can lead to making things even worse than before. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.

I think it is a little disingenuous to characterize people who are critical of concepts like a livable minimum wage the way you have, wage insecurity is a serious and complex problem that wont be solved simply by controlling the price of labor.

Ian Shapiro has a lecture about wage insecurity in his power and politics course at Yale that discusses UBI, minimum wage and other alternatives which I think provides a decent, but brief overview of the issues faced regarding policies like this. Here is a link specifically to where he starts to discuss the idea of 15$ minimum wage.

https://youtu.be/bldeaDRWJYc?t=2443

The best way to illustrate how absurd prices in Canada are is that oftentimes carriers in other countries offer better plans to roam in Canada than the plans Canadians get to use on their own native networks.

There really is no excuse for this when a country with similar metrics like Australia is able to have way more affordable service.

I went to university a couple years after that and also felt a similar sentiment that it was basically too late to get in on a good career before the industry got outsourced.

Of course then social media happened and everyone and their grandma needed developers so it didn't matter that people were flooding in because there simply wasn't enough labor to go around.

I think one of the greatest things that is missing from formal education is the encouragement of exploration, and the acclimation towards the failure that often accompanies that exploration.

Everyone in school is so caught up on checking off the right prerequisites in the curriculum for the next set of prerequisites all the way up until graduation, that there usually isn't much room for any sort of real exploration in the system until graduation. However, after graduating, a whole new set of real world responsibilities appear that often restricts the ability to both explore and fail since they come with real consequences that make failing a high school class seem like nothing in comparison. For example, it is kind of hard to explore in university when that year exploring will cost tens of thousands of dollars, or if you are on your own and need to find multiple low skill/ wage jobs just to survive.

I was just lucky that my dad had a stem job and had a computer, which got me into video games, which got me into hacking them, which got me involved in communities full of people way older and smarter than I was, which facilitated my growth in a way that school never could. Without that first computer, there is a good chance that I would have just been railroaded into some soul draining corporate job pushing papers.

It applies to the "My Book Live" version.

Because this is the kind of story that cryptocurrency detractors love, and that aligns with the general sentiment towards cryptocurrencies on HN.

I certainly hope everyone involved understands how precarious this path they are taking is. It should be well known by now from history that this sort of thing can be very dangerous, but it seems like there is a large part of the population that is more than willing to relinquish liberties for a perceived sense of safety without understanding the potential consequences involved.

Given the current political climate, I don't have much faith in things turning out well.

Outside of school where friends basically just enjoyed each others company, I would say most friendships now are made in the work related environments so there is often a layer of politics involved that make it difficult for everyone to see who is sincere and who is just networking. Nobody knows how they stand with each other so they are hesitant to develop strong relationships and trust with others.

Traditionally these bonds came about through other things like neighbors, communities and religion, but people are constantly moving for work, and society is more pluralistic (and secular) than ever so most don't begin to lay roots until they have a spouse in these roots aren't being laid, and there hasn't really been anything new that fills that gap outside of where you work.

Interesting to note that it wasn't even 3 years ago when everyone was making a big hoo-ha about Apple crossing the 1T threshold.

It is in vogue to make judgements on the past based on current moral standards without much more context or understanding. These issues are far more complex than the popular narrative of Canada needing to atone for the genocide of native Americans, that sort of hyperbole just makes it even more difficult to create meaningful solutions. These issues are specifically pervasive because they are extremely difficult to reconcile.