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I think the issue lies more with how regular people interact with the political process now, which is mostly political activism as a hobby rather than meme activism. Meme activism is just a consequence of that type of activism in contemporary society. Political hobbyists are a much larger issue because by nature the cost of participation is low (especially on social media) so many do not have much investment and are capable of being manipulated easily since they often lack the understanding necessary when engaging in difficult social issues. This leads to performative politics and eventually purity spirals. Social media exacerbates this since now you are easily capable of socially signaling to a much larger audience.

In the age of social media this can (and has) created huge social movements based on nothing more than feel good politics. While huge, these movements aren't very resilient because most people aren't actually very invested in their causes, and leadership is often nebulous and diffuse. As a result, these causes can be hijacked, subverted or can just fall apart as peoples interests move elsewhere somewhere along the grueling path of change. For most, their political activism begins and ends with the retweeting of some catchy hashtag or infographic, or attending some march with their friends for some cause without fully understanding the issues they are protesting. When push comes to shove, most will not be willing to make serious sacrifices for their cause.

I think the biggest challenge is framing the issue of climate change. "Urgent action" regarding climate change is a political/ economic issue. Innovation will have to happen for sure, but replacing current infrastructure will take a long time before economic incentives line up for it to happen naturally. The incentives need to be lined up for everyone to buy in, which is difficult in systems that are disproportionately effected by any changes that need to happen.

Domestically, people will resist change when they suspect that it will leave them short changed economically, everyone has seen how it has played out when other forms of deindustrialization have ravaged large portions of the developed world. When there is no real plans for people effected by such a change, you cannot expect these people to care about the suffering of humanity in 50-100 years when policy changes will cause them to suffer greatly in the meantime. These people need to be on board or there will be political costs that will threaten to undermine it all down the road.

Then on an international level it is matter of finding consensus between many players that have very different ideas on what is fair. Many developing countries do not feel it is fair for developed countries to dictate regulation when they have already done their exploitation to become developed nations. When one of those countries is China, who emitted more greenhouse gasses than the g7 combined in 2019, it becomes a tricky path to navigate. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest option, it can come across as developed countries making a moat, hindering other countries from catching up. That could lead to the double whammy of developed nations needing to both curtail their fossil fuel energy use, while simultaneously being forced to subsidize development of developing nations to get them on board, which is a very big ask for nations drowning in debt already. On top of that there are geopolitical ramifications that are at the foundation of any negotiation at this scale, especially when large players like China and the US are involved.

For the most part, most of these issues are ignored in popular discourse in favor of divisive rhetoric about being anti-science, probably because it is far easier politically to just dismiss them and kick the issue down the road then try to solve it because it is an extremely difficult problem to solve. Even those that are most vocal about climate change don't offer any real policy solutions to these issues outside of vague things involving printing a ton of money, going into a ton of debt or getting a ton of extra tax revenue.

Their new, but not really new anymore, redesign is so adversarial that the site is frustrating to use unless you use the old version or a different mobile app. Comments section cut off by a news feed, nested comments require loading a new page, but going back doesn't save your location because it was collapsed to show the news feed. The news feed preload lags way more. The new search basically has never worked.

It basically feels like you are constantly trying to fight the ui to show you what you want while trying to dodge the buffet of churned content they throw at you to try and keep you in the social media vortex. Like everything else that becomes mainstream popular, the demographic has shifted away from people who care about these things.

You are right, that was probably the most significant path not taken, though at the time it probably wasn't attended to with 1997 in mind which is why it was left on the back burner. By the time sovereignty negotiations began in the 80s it was probably too late.

The writing was on the wall well before it was even handed over. England was in no position to defend the island after the lease on the New Territories ended, nor are they capable of doing anything to prevent the CCP from slowly eroding institutions in Hong Kong now. Everyone else has little to no skin the game to risk anything significant. Their only hope was the belief that the economic development of China would usher in democratic reforms, which hasn't happened.

England never had any leverage in negotiations, so it makes sense that the CCP wouldn't care or honor anything because they correctly predicted that repercussions would be minimal. Over time, the importance of Hong Kong as a financial and economic hub/ gateway to China has waned substantially, so now the instability in the region isn't as costly anymore. The incentives were never there for the CCP to act in good faith.

It is incredibly unfortunate what is happening, but realistically it was only a matter of time before these things happened, the terms they agreed upon weren't much more than window dressing to allow England to exit gracefully.

The big thing that people get caught up on is the fact that the space is essentially permissionless and because of that there is no regulation meaning everyone is entirely responsible for themselves, a level of responsibility that is foreign to most people. Anyone can make anything they want, which will inevitably lead to projects that outright scams, or fail because of bugs or misaligned incentive structures. Of course these are the projects everyone here loves because it reaffirms their belief that the entire space is a scam.

I think the real story is the insatiable appetite for get rich quick schemes in today's world, because without that many of these projects would simply not be used. IIRC they had some insane yields of like 50k% apy on their token, anyone with any sense would know to run away from anything promising that.

I think it starts early and the little things compound throughout most domains in childhood development which leads to these men feeling completely lost and unable to navigate the current society that doesn't really care about them unless they are the antagonist to some narrative. Outside of family, nobody really cares when they are falling through the cracks, and nobody really cares to try and pick them up afterwards.

Just look at the behaviors of people who are participating in society, why are they on average getting married less, later in life, having less kids, and buying homes later if ever, when these are all supposed to be important stepping stones of adulthood. The incentives that used to be there are harder to reach for people that actually have it together, and getting further out of reach for average people. When life sucks, might as well drop out.

I think it is a case of popular politics but poor policy. It appears like Canada has decided that they do not want to be in resource extraction for environmental purposes, but in their bid to be socially responsible, they are for the most part ignoring the potential political and social fallout of such a policy. Sure, it will make oil and gas operations more untenable in Canada, but ultimately that probably wont matter much since other producers that already dictate the price through cartels will quickly fill demand to their own benefit.

Whether or not people want to think about it, Canada exports a lot of natural resources, and if they want to stop, which is fine, they better have a real plan for transitioning those industries, and have an idea of what they will do in lieu of a that huge chunk of their exports going away. Its really easy to say something like "just transition away from oil" but history has shown that it is very difficult to do, especially for a province beholden to federal policy.

These costs are massive but are largely being ignored, or just offloaded as only Alberta's problem. They are running the risk of hollowing out a huge portion of the economy without any real plan which has pretty severe consequences as seen in places like the rust belt, which will end up sowing the seeds of populist resentment amongst communities that will feel used and abandoned, especially in places that already feel largely ignored by federal politics like western Canada.

Data feels like the next resource (like hydrocarbons or other resource extraction) where it can be exploited for massive profit while its costs externalized for the rest of society to bear.

Like how it took decades for society to come around to human influenced climate change, it will probably take a while for people to accept the social and mental health costs associated with the extraction and use of this resource, or we will get to a point where people are manipulated enough to be insulated from such a realization.

By random backwater I meant some random place that wasn't involved with the major colonial powers during that period. The reason most of the offshore tax havens are what they are is because they were remnants of colonial empire that could be exploited.

I think the path dependency is what made the City of London the hub, and their trust system is how non citizens were able to access their financial system and those in their territories as well. I'm sure now there are ways to access services in these places directly now, but historically, the majority of the infrastructure dedicated to this stuff in these places was built out from England.

I believe it is more the case that the banking sector in the City of London is the institution, and the secrecy jurisdictions are tools that it developed and uses. Historically money ended up in England because of the Eurodollar system, and from there banks use the secrecy jurisdictions to create trust systems across different jurisdictions for opaqueness. England as an intermediary is preferred because there is a level of trust there with their institutions that isn't there with some bank in a random backwater.

iirc money mostly enters Britain because they use it as the way point for the tax havens "controlled" by Britain; their overseas territories and crown dependencies. Then it disappears into the land of political and financial voodoo of nameless holding companies, trusts and such, where nobody knows who is responsible for what, in both holdings and regulations. Mossack Fonseca's Panama Papers were a fairly big deal, but in reality that was the tiniest glimpse into that opaque world, and the revelation ended up changing nothing. Politicians still campaign about tax rates as if they mean anything when they can just be avoided.

As a casual outside observer, it feels like a lot of people are throwing the blame in one direction or another, but while crime may be bad in SF, the level of crime in general is bad in most metro areas in the United States when compared to other developed nations. So there are probably bigger, more fundamental issues at play. SF itself is interesting in that they are so wealthy, and so much power is centralized there, yet it feels like their policy is either ineffective or makes things worse. Like how can a city so rich have things like a feces problem so bad that people make poop maps to track it, and rows of people abusing drugs in bart stations during the day?

It isn't just crime, it seems like there is so much "societal debt," issues that needed to be addressed but were instead kicked down the road. Policy makers are either paralyzed/ gridlocked and cannot even attempt to fix things because they are already in over their head with all the accumulated problems that appear to be festering and getting worse, or they have been captured by powerful interest groups that prescribe selfish policies at the expense of the public. This leads to whatever actual policy happening being something that is akin to releasing a bunch of coyotes to solve the rabbit problem, only then to be left with a coyote problem, escalating up the chain of trying to solve smaller problems while simultaneously introducing larger ones.

The crime, working and middle class insecurity, homelessness, issues with law enforcement, overwhelmed judiciary, captured/ gridlocked legislature, drug abuse, the crisis in mental health, race and demographic changes and whatever else. All of things are big issues, and the United States is dealing with them all at once, causing all of them to cascade into each other and exacerbate everything. It is probably so overwhelming that it is extremely difficult to address in a system that requires elect-ability in the short term. It is probably really hard to get elected on a platform of completing step 1 of a 50 step platform that would take years more than you have to implement. On top of it all, these things can hardly be discussed in when everything is so polarized, everyone is too busy preaching to their base and blaming the other, and they are all pretty much is in a continuous state of whiplash from the spin of news media working in overdrive, who are themselves also fighting for their own existence too. For most people, things probably feel like they have been falling apart for years, decades even, while the well off have hardly noticed a difference at all. I don't even know how you would begin to dissect this situation.

Maybe, but machines also don't really pay taxes or into social security as well, at least not yet.

It will probably hit them (as well as other Asian countries like South Korea) harder because they have not had the same levels of immigration to buffer the demographic change like in the west. Overall things have just gotten increasingly uncertain and insecure throughout the developed world, retirement at 65 is probably a pipe dream for most millennials.

I pretty much think this is the case too, most of these things are soaking up excess liquidity that is leaking from the financial system. It feels more like every canary in the coal mine is going off, but people are focusing too much on the birds passing out and not the things that are causing them to do so.

If you haven't checked recently (within the last year) it might be worth it to check again, I started playing at around the same time as you so I have noticed that some cards, even from sets that were "overprinted" like Ice Age, have shot up in value considerably. You can check dawnglare to get an idea of what things are like now (https://mtg.dawnglare.com/?p=viz).

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise.

People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is probably related to other questions like why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically (GME et al), why have politicians been unable to be effective policymakers for decades, and why many institutions, both social and political in nature, appear to have become less trustworthy in the eye of the greater public? These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception.

Bitcoin is just one of many things (pretty much everything) that have been able to use energy profitably, while subsidizing the costs by externalizing them via climate change, that part isn't new. People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it (not just from a technical perspective), so it is really easy to dismiss. Singling it out in that manner seems silly.

My take on it is basically nobody knows what it is about. Like you said, even people with deep understandings of the technology probably aren't capable of fully understanding its implications, anyone that tries to tell you definitively is speculating. It is like "satoshi" made a sandbox and everyone else has been spending the past decade either trying to figure it out, or dismissing it as a scam.

It's a gold rush in the wild west, it starts off very inefficient, actual scams abound and crazy speculation is everywhere, like a gold rush at the end of the day there is probably something with value under all the craziness, that is what happens when things are new and people don't understand it, they are the ones that are establishing the parameters of its function, what it can and cant do. It seems like all mainstream blockchain related discussion is basically people circle jerking about how it is 100000% a scam or how it is the new paradigm with no space in between, which is pretty disappointing.

I think the majority of the value in art nfts will be derived from being part of the provenance, or being part of the history of the beginning of 'owning' digital art, much like owning a famous painting. By extension it could be applied to digital culture, for example the tiktok guy riding his skateboard is selling that meme as an nft. So if collectors are good (and lucky), they are basically able to buy their way into a niche of history by being associated with works that represent periods of cultural significance.

Sure that may seem stupid to most people, but most people don't even get why regular art is significant or can be very expensive. Personally I would attribute it to my lack of understanding rather than dismiss it outright.

Do you have a source? I have been keeping an eye out for stats regarding this but everything is mostly just derived from the Cambridge data.

For most things that are traded they are liquid enough that individual short positions aren't meant to effect the price. They are basically bets based on research that indicates the thing being shorted is overvalued and will fall by itself. Of course people try to help it along by publishing their position and research, but the catalyst is not the short trade itself.

Gamestop went up because people discovered a fairly unique short squeeze opportunity. People piled in enough (through options) which caused a gamma squeeze exacerbating things as market makers needed to buy more stock to hedge their positions.

The 'price' of things is, simply put, the price between the bid and ask order books, so everything being traded has a list of people that will buy at a certain price and people that will sell at a certain price. For example, Stock A's price is 1$, but has people that are willing to buy it at 99c or below and people that are willing to sell at 1.01$ or above. When you buy, you actively fill the order of the guy willing to sell at 1.01$. Say he was the only one willing to sell at that price, the next person willing to sell is at 1.02$, so the spread moves up. If enough people buy, they will fill out the orders and move the price up. Others that were originally willing to sell at those prices may move their orders to a higher price because they see that people are willing to pay more which helps move the price up further. Selling is the same. This way the price is determined by how many people are willing to sell or buy at a certain price, the spread between those prices. Usually things are liquid enough that they are the same price and price movements are gradual.

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