bruiseralmighty

Yes. You're a bit vague in what you mean here, but I will assume that you mean a private monopoly like Google or the Coke-Pepsi duopoly.

I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I take the same concept and run it one step further up the chain as an indictment of government as it is practiced today.

For example, we gave the responsibility of arbitrating disputes in a just way to a single monopolistic entity and then become surprised when this entity provides less justice (harsher sentences for drug crimes, racial/gender bias, etc.) for a higher cost (effectively impossible to represent yourself, lengthy trial periods, arbitration process that take so long and cost so much that 'lawfare' is a common parlance).

Monopolies are bad full stop. It is simply harder to replace the governmental kind.

This is quite correct. All of the parts of the United States that actually work are absolute monarchies.

Not the author, but even if 17 is undercounted, it seemed their argument was more about the perception that the number was closer to 1700; which is patently ridiculous. And the propensity for a single political team to believe that.

Or, just as ridiculously, something like 2/3's of republicans believe The Big Lie(tm). Granting that an American election could be stolen, we might put the odds closer to 1%, but there is a perception that it is closer to 99%.

I believe what the author is getting at is how far our perceptions our from actual facts on the ground reality. And further what is concerning that most people who are aware of this don't even seem to mind.

Personally, I'm not sure what else we would expect, apes gotta have faith in something after all.

I used to be a lifeguard. I am glad I never had to deal with a pool like that with so many people and inner tubes in it. Makes line of sight so much more difficult.

This is one of the fundamental principles behind Satoshi's white-paper and all of crypto currency.

This actually highlights the point well I think. The cost of walking away from Facebook is too high for most people even though they know its' bad for them.

Take myself for example. I only ever get angry when I browse my facebook feed and for some reason I've actually taken steps to ensure I get angry when I browse my own feed (chalk it up to silicon magic). I would like to leave facebook, but if I do I'd lose messenger which is the easiest and most consistent way for me to keep in contact with dozens of people (who mostly don't make me angry).

If facebook protocols were open source, then by now I would likely have dozens of different options to take my friend's list to a messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse.

Lowering the cost to leave is a benefit to everyone since it reduces the reach of that anger inducing feed.

I am intrigued by the framing of the 'banning' of non-competes as regulatory intervention. It seems to me like we would be asking the court to refuse to enforce a contract. But this refusal manifests as a distinct lack of intervention on the part of regulators.

I.E. prior to this 'intervention' you could be hauled to court and/or jail for failure to meet a contractual obligation. Post 'intervention' nothing happens and you simply continue to search for a new job as you always had.

I understand that in our given legal framework every change must be some kind of positive action, but it seems odd to me to frame it in conversation (as this article did) as a positive action rather than negative one which is how it actually manifests.

I'll just finish by saying that I agree with the sentiment that non-competes should be unenforceable. If you do have company secrets an NDA has long standing precedent and is less intrusive.

> Harmful content is disinformation about what something is.

This is the crux of the issue. Legacy institutions are used to determining what is true and therefore what is inside the bounds of allowable opinion.

This was their domain for decades but it can now be seriously challenged by relatively few people due to the amplification in sharing of human thought through the internet.

Their degradation was the only outcome likely from networking so many individuals together.

'Disinformation', even if you are inclined to trust legacy institutions, should be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism. Even if we grant that legacy institutions always had the closest approximation reality over the past several decades (and this is generous).

Everyone should now be able to recognize these players for what they are: self interested actors bending public perception of reality to convenient conclusions for their own benefit. Given this, it is not surprising that people are more motivated than ever before to uncover past warpings of past narratives. They are searching for their historical moment.

Now we can grant that it may be best to have these legacy institutions looking out for our interests rather than some unknowable future state of governance. But checking their past conduct is a textbook littered with dark chapters that is now being viewed with the understanding that these are the rosier sections. Not a good look. As we move forward in time the failings of existing governments will only become more apparent not less; and it will continue to make less and less sense to believe in them.

The alternative to this would be to either restrict information flow to some pre-digital age or to perpetuate totalitarian regimes in charge of protecting their own existence by manipulating the masses into passivity.

And here is the second crux, it is only the legacy institutions from the 20th century who are perpetuating the conflict. Were the doubters given license to control their own territory, we have every indication that they would leave the past well enough alone and forge ahead. But the 20th century just cannot let go its dreams of total domination of thought and reality.

I think this is ignoring the problem of the global market. Studios found that it was more profitable to cater to multiple countries and cultures simultaneously.

For example, even if 100% of America went to see a film, that only represents approximately 1/3 of China's population. As a studio, ignoring that market would be seen as throwing away money. So you will see immense pressure to make your movie marketable in China as well as America.

Even if many American consumers choose to watch a film catering to them that studio would still be pressured to view that film as a commercial failure.

It doesn't seem to matter so much what the local consumers want since their demand is dwarfed by global demand.

2021 being the new 1791 makes me very happy.

Please god make King County (Seattle) its own city-state. We've had enough.

Had it with these Federalists. Why did we even rebel if it wasn't to say 'screw you' to Georgie. I'm not interested in replacing a a single king with a panel of busy bodies. I'm interested in 'No Kings'.

Now excuse me while I tend my marijuana farm while being blisteringly drunk.

I would like to agree with this, but given the state of corporate media in the United States its difficult to determine whether even bottom-up movements are organic.

I got a mask early and asked to stop travel as well, but that was from listening to media. Which would invert the pyramid back to top-down.

About Insulin?

Look for ways to make the patents unenforceable. If diabetics had the ability to make their own safe insulin at home that would be best. Then all they would need is an internet connection and some basic components. The closer we get to that ideal the more empowered they are.

This would actually solve a lot of price gouging for drugs.

However that's only a stop gap measure. What's happening with gating access to insulin is happening to a thousand other products in a thousand other industries right now. Start looking at alternative governance structures. Lord knows everyones got a blog and a half-assed plan to run things better at this point (since the bar is so low).

Just don't poke the bear. As cathartic as hanging 'congresscritters' would be it wont actually solve the problem.

Basically act like you don't expect anyone else to fix this problem for you because nobody is going to; especially if you voted for them.

I guess I am not understanding something still about this spoof protection.

What prevents me, an attacker, from making (or simulating) a bunch of hardware with different identities? Perhaps by setting up my hardware to run through multiple different 'self' identities and then trying to talk to other hardware with each disguise.

If the address space is small and cheap, it seems that I could quickly map any decentralized hardware at low cost.

I really feel like both the author and the post on HN should specify that these vulnerabilities are specific to browser/online password managers.

Got very confused until reaching the end of the article where 'online' was mentioned specifically.

I think you make a good point that centralization provides a lot of value today. However, if the protocols that youtube used where open-source then it would be easier to create generic user interfaces open to all content makers. Similar to what another poster said about RSS feeds.

I think one of the deeper critiques you and several others have made is that someone still has to pay for storage and streaming. Today I am paying. I bought the additional hard disk to store this on. In addition to my time and effort to collect the files. In the future I would pay some amount each month to stream what I have if it gave me access to everyone else's (essentially staking my video files).

I don't mind paying for a good peer-to-peer service. In fact I feel that I am losing a lot more by staying with a legacy system. Hence backing up the videos I like even though I have no method of distributing them.

Hmm, it's such a shame that we have a single point of failure for so much of internet culture, not to mention people's actual creative lives.

This is one of the reasons I started using youtube-dl. I wanted to create an independent backup of all my favorite creators and contributors in the event that they have to leave or delete their channels.

This content should belong to everyone. I wish I could trust that all my favorite videos will be there forever, but this is just not the case. Removing the comments on music videos already hurt a lot.

I find it a bit odd how accepted a child mandate has become when it comes from the CCP with the global community.

For instance, it seems that a large reason that China is hesitant to lift any limits whatsoever is a belief that rural women will have large families and urban women will not and that this would be 'unfair'. This cant help but feel like a eugenics argument about not wanting to swamp the gene pool with 'low IQ rural undesirables'.

What would be the foreign response if some of the more distasteful ideas behind mandated birth rates were brought to the fore-front:

* 'all able-bodied women must have at least one child.'

* 'citizens in these jurisdictions can have as many children as they want.'

I believe we would see a lot of outrage in other countries over these policy, but I worry the CCP sees no difference ethically in mandating one or the other. Instead opting for whatever is deemed necessary.

This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.

Crypto currency itself can be completely anonymous, but the difficulty is in the on-ramp and off-ramps to and from state fiat money.

For example, I want to buy ZCash that is untraceable to me. I need to exchange ownership of a hardware wallet (like a physical USB device) for a pre-determined amount of state fiat, lets say USD in this case. In order to facilitate this I need to find a trusted seller, arrange a meeting, verify the actual value of the physical wallet, and make the exchange. There are non-physical means of making it harder to trace state fiat back to you, but not impossible. The state has simply had too much influence over these places of transaction for too long for anybody to be truly un-findable given a long enough period of time.

Assuming I can find someone willing to on-ramp me like this I will need to take steps to ensure that our communications are encrypted and untraceable. This means not only do I need a decentralized encrypted messaging service, I also need to conduct this communication in a way that does not give away my geographical location and is not vulnerable to security logs (say by checking the cafe's video feed from the time I was messaging my seller). Then I need to go to the meet, exchange the physical wallet for cash, and verify the amount in it is accurate (and also preferably not stolen). I need to do this without revealing my identity to my seller and avoiding security logs once again. This is all now possible whereas before Satoshi it was impossible, but it is still difficult.

Alternatively, I could just sell some kind of digital asset in exchange for ZCash to begin with. Now I do not have to worry about an on-ramp. If I control my distribution server then I can erase or encrypt my sales logs in order to prevent any estimation of my total sales for the year.

Off-ramping is much harder. I either need to become a seller of a physical wallet which has all the same problems that plagued me before, or I need to live in an economy where off-ramping is not required. This would be a physical location where all transactions are conducted in secure, anonymize, cyrpto-currency transactions. Similar to my earlier problem, this is now possible but extremely difficult. An individual or a group of individuals is going to have to bootstrap an entire local economy.

Being localized is also an issue since there is nothing preventing the USG from simply rolling in the tanks to break up this localized tax haven.

Isn't this just a better reason to switch to decentralized anonymous exchanges like Bisq or used anonymized transaction technologies like ring signatures and zero knowledge proofs (Monero/ZChash)?

I've used Coinbase so far to learn about crypto, and I fully intend on paying all taxes owed, but Bisq seems like the next best on-ramp if it can help avoid the headache of treating crypto transactions like stocks rather than currencies.

Of course I understand the sentiment that people should pay their taxes to society, but I wonder if this is not just going to result in an escalating arms race. This was prevented with dollars since most dollars earned by the populace can be traced back to a paystub, but once you've earned crypto in an anonymous transaction, it seems like a losing battle to try and tax any aspect of that.

I can't help but feel the IRS would be better served by taxing at the off-ramp like a sales tax at a POS rather than trying to fold this into an existing income tax structure. A government can kind of control a brick and mortar retailer or Amazon more so than an individual person who say sold a book direct to consuers for Monero or sold their car for ZCash.

Is the federal government prevented from creating a national sales tax for some reason?

This points to the heart of the issue. A single BTC key is not fungible in the proper sense as it can be tracked.

There are ways around this on BTC that do not require protocol changes. For example, you can use a coin mixing service like whirlpool to essentially `wash` your BTC. However, this solution is incomplete unless everyone agrees to use it and in doing so `taint` their own BTC supply.

> "If we are all using stolen BTC then none of us are."

The proper way to fix this is with a protocol change as mindslight said. This already exists in a half-way form called ZChash. This is a fork of the BTC blockchain that updates to protocol to allow for `shielded` transactions. These protect anonymity and, I believe, transaction amount as well.

However, ZChash only gives the option to perform a `shielded` transaction. Most transactions on the ZCash blockchain do not utilize this function since it is slower than a standard BTC transaction.

The actual proper implementation of `shielded` transactions that I know of is called PirateChain.

> "Look Chuck, I'll believe it when I see it."

Fed only reluctantly raised rates several years after '08. I would be surprised if they began staking them higher anytime soon regardless of any 'strong recovery' narrative.

The banks and courts still haven't dealt with a wave of evictions and the resulting property consolidation that will result when the moratoriums are lifted.

Plus, if you believe in speculation, the markets are frothy right now. Survey says: S&P500 is held up by FAANG, corporate bonds 'a fiasco' [zombie companies], SEC snoozing as usual. If market adjusts, then rates will have to remain low; or perhaps go negative. If you believe speculation.

Yes you are correct. I should amend my previous statement.

>It was only afterwards that evidence of holocaust was verified and/or believed.*

The reports from the Polish government in exile did not make front page news. I'd still stand by the earlier statement:

> Saving the Jews was not on any country's radar entering WWII.

You might argue that Poland wanted to save the Jews, but at the point that reports of mass murder were coming out of Germany in 1941, the Polish government no longer had a country to manage. They had exited WWII as losers.

Reports of mass murder of Jews weren't verified by the USG until 1942. I would still argue that saving the Jews did not even crack the top 10 reasons for the USG invading Europe. After all, they verified these reports and still waited 2 years before making landfall.

Man I never thought of it that way, when you state it like that its almost poetic.

What could make me love the established media more than a narrative that 'uncensored truth' would turn me into some kind of QAnon zombie.

I simply cannot handle it.

Saving the Jews was not on any country's radar entering WWII. It was only afterwards that evidence of holocaust was discovered.

Isn't this just a case of increasing irrelevancy?

I can't think of a single release from them I would describe as 'ambitious' other than Diablo Mobile which has the distinct honor of being dead before arrival.

Speaking anecdotally, no one I game with or any of the forums I go to talk about Blizzard games. Many of the Discord servers I play with used to be big into HotS and Starcraft I/II, but I don't hear a peep from them about either anymore.

Perhaps worst of all, several of the Path of Exile players I game with are no longer even worried about a Diablo 4 launch affecting the long term health of their favorite dungeon crawler. It's just expected that Blizzard will deliver a polished but shallow experience that will be over within two or three months at most.

Maybe they just aren't nimble enough anymore to leverage their huge war-chest of experience and cash.

I keep a non-commercial installation of SQLServer on my machine for this reason, but this is likely overkill for most purposes and requires a Windows machine.

It does have some nice import features for CSV data though.

I bought some address space (like for a web server) in ETH the other day. I think the Ethereum contracts system is quite nice and logical to put on the block chain.

Changing stock trading protocols to go on a block chain with full public transparency would be a useful application. No need for PoW, you can just have the Fed mint new blocks out. This would prevent a lot of the shenanigans and gatekeeping that occur in capital markets. It would greatly improve price discovery.

On a less directly applicable level, I feel that the only realistic strategy for governments in the long term will be to become more competitive with the crypto-ecosystem (currencies, contracts, encryption, etc.). The hope being that by allowing individuals to freely choose their own legal and financial rule-sets the systems that will remain relevant will become better. Having more freedom of choice for which government you'd like to be a part of is ultimately a good thing. Whether that will actually shake out is anyone's guess, but I believe something along those lines is the fundamental hope of this area of technology.

Actual nonsense coming out of this government. As a life-long resident one of the main reasons I continue to work in Washington is the lack of an income tax.

Exempting real estate is just an extra middle-finger to anyone young and trying to save.

This is so painful and short-sighted. Earmarking for education is yet another typical smoke and mirrors 'saint-hood' performance that this government puts on for its low-info voter base.

If all of that money can still be proven to be going towards childhood education by 2023, I'll deep-fry my socks and eat them. Hopefully we can get a State Supreme Court judge to knock this down as unconstitutional.

> Progressivism is the new Christianity

> No conservative in the 1970s would have thought, everyone in Britain should be a conservative

Like the points your making. I would add that by the standards of the early 20th century when progressivism started even a 1970s conservative is a progressive.

Even taking American conservatives, who are more conservative that than their British peers, conservatives are fine with social security, medicare/medicade (NHS), and fine with government run education, and fine with an unbacked U.S. dollar funding this modern welfare state. I.E. even American conservatives are mostly fine with the lasting policies of FDR; perhaps our most progressive president.

What am I getting at?

My broader point is that Progressivism is indeed the current state religion. Both parties are 'progressive' parties by historical standards. The only recent development is that we are now approaching near total domination of the cultural, political, and legal rings of influence by Progressivism and this has resulted in a new popular interest in actual reactionary politics as people wake up.

> everyone in Britain should be a conservative

This is important to understand because it is how we got here. Reactionary ideologies are not interested in global leadership, but rather local control. Progressivism is an expansionist ideology interested in global domination; which is why we are currently either all progressives or former progressives (like yourself).