cwalv

> but if you look under the hood .. there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.

There are many valid criticisms of Musk. Saying that he has not added any real value in his ventures, or that he doesn't really know how to make money, just destroys your credibility.

> It scales linearly because the same ratio of services to people continues

That would be scaling with population, not GDP.

> The payors and providers share the same incentive to raise rates because they each collect a percentage of premiums

This must be an oversimplification. Why would insurers ever reject a claim, or spend time negotiating lower rates, if they're only incentivized to see health costs increase?

GDP increases are generally measured in real (i.e. inflation adjusted) terms, so a doubling of rent costs don't imply a larger GDP. If we're talking nominal GDP, then I'd agree we should expect gov expense to increase as well.

Another factor is cost of debt. In a decreasing interest rate environment it's possible to run with increasing deficits without any major issues, but once you bounce off zero, even if thos deficits are not currently a problem, projections show that they will be.

I think you're both right. The don't care (without a tax cut) until the most ridiculous line items are made public.

> While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.

Billions. I understand that it may be far from sufficient to prevent the US from entering a debt spiral if/when interest rates increase (or stagflation if/when yield curve control is enacted to prevent a debt spiral), but it's still a lot of money. No doubt mistakes have been made, but it's very unlikely that DOGE critics will be able to convince most tax papers that the pain wasn't worth it.

> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...?

Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease.

> What do you think should be cut, and how?

Given the complexity in the details, I don't think a 'serious discussion' about this is even possible in this forum. But if the question is 'do you think an effort should be made to look for things to cut', I'd say 'yes, of course.'

> Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?

Absolutely, it should be looked at! I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, but as RFK was confirmed as the secretary of HHS we should expect a lot of scrutiny on big pharma and insurers.

> Why shouldn't corporations .. be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?

By definition of 'fair', they should. But again, tax receipts falling as a % of GDP isn't evidence that they're not.

That was fast. Perhaps we should imagine this has nothing to do with Musk to avoid completely derailing the conversation

> Society changes, and stores of value need to exist outside that change

I completely agree. I don't think this is different from saying the store of value needs to stay liquid tho. Bitcoin is currently very illiquid compared to many things, but there's no reason to think it's liquidity will decrease, and based on trends and first principles of what makes something a good 'money', significant reason to believe liquidity will continue to increase

Fair enough; store of value additionally requires restricted supply so that the value isn't debased. But in the context of this thread, that just strengthens the argument that 'Bitcoin is different'.

> or is physically impossible in aggregate ... then the contract won't be fulfilled at least for someone.

> "There is more paper gold than physical gold" - regular Joe thinks there is a problem.

Is it a bunch of regular Joe's that are making gold "worth more in New York?"

> You are equating legitimacy with liquidity, and the that isn't necessarily true.

How so? Liquidity is a measurement of how easy it is to trade, and if it's easy to trade there are many people/entities that believe it's "legitimate" currency, or they wouldn't trade for it

> largely always just agreed upon make believe

The benefits of having a common/standard unit for an economic ledger are enormous, as it greatly reduces trading friction. That added benefit has real (i.e., not make believe) value, and the more liquid the currency the higher the monetary premium.

Even after hyperinflation, if you normalize to the money supply, currencies generally don't lose value without losing liquidity (being less "agreed upon") .. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"

Dollars are the currency Bitcoin is most commonly compared against, and for people who have easy access to USD it can be very hard to see how btc has utility. But if you compare to other things (e.g. commodities with a monetary premium, or fiat from a small country), it's much easier to comprehend.

It is work to 'get' it tho. All the info is available; I can't make it easier to understand than many others out there already have.

Bitcoin really is different. It's a commodity rather than a security, and proof of work consensus is essential for its use case.

> but every time I price out a beefier box I feel like the ROI just isn’t there, especially for an industry that is moving so fast.

Same, esp. if you factor in the cost of renting. Even if you run 24/7 it's hard to see it paying off in half the time it will take to be obsolete

Agreed. They wouldn't have to use so much that they suffered the negative affects to use enough to get past their borderline irrational hangups

Putting the affects of marijuana abuse in the same category as meth or heroin is dishonest and dangerous. It destroyed their credibility.

I agree that short term memory loss being a side effect of heavy use is common knowledge to anyone who is or knows a heavy user.

But I think you shouldn't be so confident that smoking when young is a huge problem long term.

I would have been in the 'heavy user' category by the time I was 17, and I've had the odd experience of persistent short term memory loss (e.g., having multiple people tell me 'you just asked me that' with a bewildered look). I also quit smoking when I was 17, and haven't had any noticable symptoms since I was 20 (> 20 years ago). I doubt if anyone who knows me would say I'm not 'successful.'

Not recommending heavy use, to be sure. Just saying that it's not necessarily a permanent, long-term effect.

You write the 'add item' event regardless, and when building the 'cart' view you handle the limit.

I didn't fully understand the details when they were explaining it to be, but iirc something was disconnected around the corner, and they couldn't just reconnect it because it wasn't the right hardware.

This played out over several months

I wouldn't hold my breath. At my previous house, CenturyLink/quantum site said it was available. I called half a dozen times to get it installed, each time some contractor would show up and tell me it's not available. I was confused because they spent months very visibility installing it throughout the neighborhood. Talking to some of the contractors, it was interesting to hear stories about why it was available in some areas but not others just a few houses down.

Eventually, one of them did figure out how to get me connected.

Same here ($65 -> $75); I think it's an "equipment fee." I don't even use the router. My employer covers the cost so I haven't called to complain, but I suspect if you do you can return the router and lose the fee.

That's how it is in Vegas presently: CenturyLink has fiber service but it's scattered around unpredictability, and in areas where it's not available it may never be. Hopefully Google fiber (un)availability doesn't overlap too much, but I expect that it will.

You think the major complicating factor of rolling out e2ee was that they used react?

How speedy is the rust-language tooling itself these days? I remember wishing for a 'optimize nothing' or even 'just interpret' mode. Compile times noticably contributing to the feedback loop are a serious killjoy.

> Which they can do anyway if they have root access to the CA.

Until you turn it off. If they exfiltrate the keys, it's more complicated.

This goes back to your comment:

> Creates a two-tier PKI... on the same device. This completely defeats the purpose so you can't revoke anything in case of key compromise

But the root key is just created; it doesn't stay on the device and can't be used to sign anything.

> What actual problem does this solve or realistic threat does this prevent?

The problem is exfiltrating the key without physical access. Whether or not that's "realistic" enough to matter isn't a question that can be answered generally.

> Hard to say if those extra 9's need an external RNG for extra entropy.

IMO it's not. In the author's words: Optional, but fire

> Complete overkill requiring the use of a YubiKey for key storage and external RNG source - what problems does solve? For a Yubikey to act as a poor man's HSM you have to store the PIN in plaintext on the disk

You still can't exfiltrate the key material.

> If it's to protect against physical theft of the keys, they'll just put the entire Raspberry Pi in their pocket.

Just because someone has compromised your device doesn't mean they have physical access. That's the point.

> They're generating the private key on disk then importing into the YubiKey. Which defeats having an external key storage device because you have left traces of the key on disk.

The traces don't have to be left behind. Is this excessive 'overkill', or is the 'digital duct taping the windows and doors' insufficient?

> An instance of openssl or xca covers 99.9% of "homelab" use cases

The interesting thing about this article is that it adds a few 9's that are covered, and it's both easy and cheap.

> propose whatever alternative you have to the normie in middle america and watch their blank stares.

We also overestimate how important the web in general is to many 'normies'. It was only a little over 10 yrs ago that I had to convince my wife (20-something at the time) that she had a reason to get a smartphone. We're so far apart on the adoption curve that it's very difficult to understand each other. As generations shift, I expect attitudes about lock-in, privacy, dependency etc will as well.

Or .75x the capacity of lake tahoe