dumbfoundded

You should just make the right npm package. You could call it: "probably_correct_time" and it'd just add 137 to the year if it was less than 1937 or so. Then raise some money to fund AI research to decipher if it's about the great depression or something to guess the right year. I joke but honestly someone is going to build this and then get acquired by Grammarly.

I think your read on the parent is right but despite that, I'd encourage you to check it out. IMHO, the most interesting developments in computer science are happening right now in web3. Stay away from the NFTs/DEFI and just learn about the new systems being built. If you look into the technical details of these new distributed systems, game theory applications, and zero-knowledge proofs, I have a hard timing believing any programmer can't see the new features unlocked in how we build things.

It's also socially important for well intentioned people to join the system right now. Web3 is a thing, it will happen. Mobile happened and now two companies worth roughly a trillion each control it entirely. Web3 is roughly on the same path. It's being built right now to gate keep and capture value. If you don't want to the internet to continue to dwindle down to a privatized button pushing consumption app, the battle ground is web3.

Okay, that's a change in the narrative. It's not useless. It's only useless if you're not a criminal. But that's sort of backwards. Technology is just a tool. It doesn't decide how it's going to be used. Humans decide the ways in which tools are used, adding morality & legality.

What about this tool makes it criminal by nature?

It's censorship-resistant, private (if you want it to be), and very inefficient energy-wise. It's the logical extension of encryption. Encryption is also useful for criminal purposes and internet crime wouldn't really exist without it. Privacy != criminal. Also, do you know how much energy it would save if nothing was encrypted?

Every government in the history of the world has eventually collapsed causing devastation for its people. Money printers go wild. Corruption everywhere. People cannot afford basic necessities. If we can figure out a money that cannot be messed with, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

If you actually read the article, most of the scams of all types start on social media. Why is it so easy for a scammer to talk to my nephew on the same places he talks to his friends? If you look at actually consumer fraud (1) according to the FTC, crypto isn't even mentioned.

The abundance of crypto hate is confusing to me as one hand HN believes it's a pointless & worthless technology but also somehow this unstoppable force giving criminals limitless power to burn all the trees and rob the youth.

(1) https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2021/02/top-frauds-2020

Nukes also:

* Create EMP blasts potentially disabling electronics over larger areas.

* Start fires in every direction for miles beyond the blast zone.

* Delegitimize nuclear energy. Sort of indirect but fear of nukes is why we don't invest heavily in safe fission alternatives with no weapons path.

* Have no real theoretical limit. 50MT has been donated. Designs have been shown up to 10GT.

Tsar Bomba, probably the largest nuke ever used was ~50MT (1).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

It's more complicated than that. A few of the considerations:

* DNA/RNA are not the only options. Other nucleobases potentially exist and artificial ones have certainly been created (1)

* A completely unique sequence would indicate no shared ancestor even if it was DNA.

* We're not sure how life started on Earth either. It could've been more than once in more than one way. We don't know.

* Earth and Mars shared material as asteroid impacts ejected material that eventually landed on the other. Some microorganisms could potentially survive the journey.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase

If you have a specific interest, you should just research it. The world is a very big place and lots of smart people have already gathered evidence to answer questions about pretty much anything. Talking on a forum is fun but collectively, we're idiots and we're not going to teach you much of anything.

It's great that you have questions, but you actually have to follow it up with research and learning if you care. From the comments you posted, I get the impression you haven't spent 1 hour googling answers to your questions. That sends me the impression, you don't really care, you just like hearing yourself think.

You should just google the definition of culture. Lots of work has been done to study culture at numerous levels from nations to corporations to small communities. It's called anthropology.

If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.

It's called culture and large groups of humans are known to experience it.

Reminds me of that Futurama with Nixon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm4MH-Yf87Q

You really misunderstand the Baumol effect. It's about why jobs with no productivity gains have higher salaries over time (it's to keep up with places were wages did grow due to productivity gains). It's used to explain why jobs like musicians have increases salaries over long periods of time.

My definition of inflation is simple: dollars to gold. If you measure things in grams of gold, our current situation makes a lot of sense. A random basket of good subject to complicate macro trends makes no sense. Pretty much everything takes less gold to purchase these days. Assets like property, health care, and education actually require less gold to acquire than 50 years ago but not that much less. Products like consumer goods, require much much less gold now. This makes sense. We can develop property faster and cheaper but we can't make land so it's only a bit less gold. Mass produced goods are an order of magnitude cheaper due to automation.

Now let's go back to dollars. Every time the US prints dollars, it taxes the system. The total value of the system is the same but now the US government has some spending cash and everyone else holds a bit less. Why would any want to hold dollars?

Partly, no one does. The richer you are, the less of your net worth you hold in dollars. But the world is forced to use dollars. Originally, the US & England came together to create an international gold backed currency system to logistically enable transactions without shipping tons of gold. In 1970, President Nixon abandoned this system (1). Please really do look at this chart and it's impossible to ignore when it happened.

Our military & economic momentum are the only reason any uses dollars. It's complicated to describe all the ways but the biggest is that our navy guarantees safe global trade without piracy and fragmentation. If the US Navy disappeared, international shipping would quickly dissolve to squabbles on laws and borders. Small military conflicts would break out around the world. China's already hinted at as much in the South China sea. The Strait of Hormuz would become a war zone. We can argue about specifics but long story short, the world uses dollars heavily and doesn't want to. Every country would of course rather have everyone else use their currency. I think we can agree that the world uses dollars despite not wanting to.

Domestically, the move away from gold is killing the middle class. It's a disgusting trick the wealthy have pulled. Essentially by creating the dollar, forcing everyone to use it, and then printing more, the owner class has stolen gold. Cheaper consumer goods from automation & global supply chains has lessened the impact but this newest generation is finally realizing they never afford a house or education for their children. The fact that the average life expectancy has gone down in the US is the craziest thing ever and should be a source of deep shame.

To fix this, we only need two things: Fix the dollar to a specific amount of gold & Transfer a massive amount of wealth from the rich to the poor. It's obviously complicated and a bit fuzzy to describe but any denial of the general situation is like denying climate change. Gold was $40 and now it's $1800. The numbers are right there and pricing everything in gold makes it simpler to see.

(1) https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

I think it's a lot worse than what you're saying. The price of gold was $45/oz in 1970. 52 years later it's $1,800/ounce. That's roughly 7.6% a year or 45x increase. If you use the inflation provided by the government, CPI, (1), they say inflation is only 3.6%/year or roughly 7x since 1970. Obviously we have a discrepancy. Is the dollar worth 45x less than 1970 or 7x times?

When we look at prices of things like education, housing, and healthcare, the 45x number makes a lot more sense. Education has 30x in price over the same time period (2). If you're comparing prices in dollars, it feels like education got really expensive compared to the basket of goods the BEA tracks but in reality, education requires less gold than it did in 1970. Our incredible supply chains and manufacturing automation have lowered most consumer prices such that we don't really notice inflation but when you look at things that can't get much cheaper like housing, healthcare, education, asset prices of all sorts, you can't miss the fact that they correlate more closely with gold than the USD.

Since we went off the gold standard, the US government has been inflating the currency which in effect, taxes holders of USD. The US gets away with it because of its military but how long can that last? The absurd rises in prices aren't crazy. They're catching up with reality. We can't just keep printing our currency and hope our military is strong enough to enforce this economic fantasy.

(1) https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1970?amount=1

(2) https://www.yahoo.com/now/average-cost-college-jumped-incred...

They are absolutely no joke.

For the small uncovered diode laser cutters, I'd recommend setting it up & running it remotely. If you use a laptop with a webcam & some remote desktop software, you can operate one safely it from a different room.

There are many covered desktop ones that I think are a bit safer though. Ventilation is also a big concern.

It's just an example. I've worked with industrial laser cutters (100+watt CO2) before and even with all of the protective equipment built into the machines, you still wear glasses. The idea that you could use something like this in an exposed way is crazy to anyone who's actually worked with them. Any mistake is instant and permanent. You can't make a consumer product out of this. Maybe like a large box that only mosquitos could enter but at that point, you have easier methods than a visual system moving a laser to mm tolerances.

We use lasers in lots of consumer products, we don't really have any with exposed lasers. You just can't guarantee that someone doesn't flip a quarter and blind themselves. It's a cool idea but pretty impossible to be safe.

I don't think people really understand how the entire world is a complete fiction. The idea of ownership is made up. Your house deed isn't a statement of ownership. It's a promise that if ever someone ever comes with a gun to take it from you, a larger group of people with guns will take it from them and give it back to you. The whole world is a fractal fiction invented by other people. NFTs like any other symbol of value depend on the collective social fiction.

I don't think most people cash out and move to the forest where the consequences of their actions never reach them.

Because of the mass recording of our society, I actually think a reckoning of some sort may happen. At least, future generations will have quite the magnifying glass to judge our actions.

Ethics pays more than in good feelings. If you decide to be unethical, eventually you'll be only surrounded by unethical people.

Death is necessary for evolution. Shorter lifespans mean more rounds of genetic mutation meaning evolution can happen faster.

I think overall the point is right but I'd a lot of nuance.

- The evolutionary ideal lifespan for any creature is certainly limited but asking about the potential is more of a biochemical question and somewhat orthogonal to evolution.

- Some creatures fill extremely long lived niches proving that at the level of cellular dynamics, longevity is certainly possible.

- Humans no longer really depend on evolution. We'll start genetically modifying ourselves soon and I'd be surprised if there weren't any gm people walking around already.

- Our biggest limiting factor is experimentation. These experiments take a long time and aren't ethical to perform on humans. We'll certainly figure out how to make immortal rats before people.

If TLS signed the messages with a public key, you put any TLS conversation on-chain immediately. Some web2 apis already implement signed responses that can be used in this way. TLS doesn't though, so you have a provenance problem. You can prove the integrity of the data but not the participants of the conversation. I'm building the piece that works with TLS to add identity verification.

Escrow is using middlemen to prevent any potential loss or theft. Every transaction has some counterparty risk. Who goes first, the domain transfer or the wire? To be sure you won't get robbed, you deposit the money with the escrow agent and the seller transfer the domain to the escrow agent. If one party falls through, the escrow agent gives their property back. In web3, the smart contract is the escrow agent and 100% automated. So you deposit your money, the seller puts in the ENS name, and now instead of a % basis for the fee (escrow.com is like 0.9%), you get a flat cost of running the smart contract based on the network fees. It's just like how you can transfer $1 of bitcoin or $1B of bitcoin for the same price.

Some things are cheaper in web3 than web2 and web3 can do everything web2 can so it's all going to get rebuilt. The same thing happened with mobile phones. Mobile completely changed the internet and the only "invention" there was the form factor and battery. Everyone all of a sudden needs an app and the whole internet was rewritten for IOS & Android.

The promises for how it changes society are pretty weak. It could change nothing or a lot. Web3 is just a better cheaper tool for humans to use so it'll get used. How it changes society is up to the people using it. Just like how the internet didn't usher in a utopia, web3 won't either, but it will change a lot.

Governance tokens & DAOs are helping to bridge the human divide. Not everything can be coded, humans have to make judgement decisions sometimes. The smart contract is just the agreed upon structure of cooperation.

For cases like escrow over digital goods, it should be perfect in a p2p context without human involvement. It already is for any web3 good like tokens or nfts. Bugs happen but these contracts are often simple and used lots of times. We'll settle on more and more common standards to implement simple transactions.

As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two.

Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks very different. My biggest prediction is that fundamental protocols like TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols.

Web3 isn't just a scam or waste of resources. It will enable us to do things we already do but much cheaper than we do them now. Lots of smart people are flooding into the space. It will take at least a decade but it's already happening.

A lot wrong with your statement. Weed isn't imported. It's grown domestically. Here was a billion dollar field in California that got caught (1). There are many more.

The next part of slave labor is just false. Trimmers I met were earning $500 to $1,000 a day. $100 per lb trimmed was pretty common. If anything, creating an import model will guarantee we use slaves. Columbia exports cannabis legally to Europe already with a lot less worker protections than in the US.

(1) https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-county-sheriff-m...

No, $25M is the open market price for a license charges a company to pick up a license. Looks like someone sold a license for much more (0). Only 22 licenses for companies in Florida have been granted (1). In Florida, companies have to vertically integrate their whole supplychain and not mix with any other cannabis company. It takes opening like 50 dispensaries under a license to break even. Florida sells $1.2B of cannabis a year & $500M in acquisitions were completed in Florida last year.

(0) https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/10/15/fo...

(1) https://mjbizdaily.com/florida-medical-marijuana-operators-b...

(2) https://mjbizdaily.com/cannabis-msos-on-buying-spree-in-flor....

It's not just the taxes. It's how hard it is to sell weed legally. All of the hoops and expenses add up. In Florida, it's like 20 licenses that cost $25M each. We should make it as easy as selling alcohol and then the prices will match.

Additionally the taxes create operational overhead to stay compliant. Every product follows a chain of custody similar to pharmaceuticals. Even the scales used must be of the same spec used for gold weighing and cost roughly $1,500 each. It's not just the dispensaries but the wholesalers, processors, and cultivators need to buy these scales and register them once a year with the state for $100. Furthermore the batches sizes are too small for the cultivators and processors. In Oregon, it was 15lbs each. An outdoor harvest may bring 1,500lbs an acre. Each test costs roughly $50 plus the labor for a human measuring it. Even if it was all going to biomass processing (think isolates and distillates used for edibles and vapes), the same process applies.

Part of the reason to justify all of this regulation was to ensure that the blackmarket would update accordingly. Instead, rich investors took control of the cannabis market and the underground market thrived without enforcement pressures. Poor people who actually suffered the consequences of prohibition received none of the benefits of legalization. This issue is certainly economic and racial.

Now the legal cannabis market wants to expand but can't. Now it has to compete with a market thriving due to enforcement evaporating. One way is to reduce taxes. This would make it more profitable for the already rich existing investors in cannabis to make more money. Taxes are extreme and certainly need to be reduced but the real issue is supply chain and access to market.

It's really difficult to sell weed legally if you want to. More importantly, it's expensive. We should make it cheap to sell weed. You should be able to sell weed like alcohol. Alcohol licenses are much cheaper and with much larger quotas. Additionally alcohol is more standardized than cannabis while facing less supply chain inspections & requirements. There should be strong exceptions to small producers. Also, interstate sales should be allowed. Illicit markets serving out of state customers won't go legit if they can't ship across state lines. Especially to adjacent states with legalized cannabis. Isn't it crazy you can't ship weed from Oregon to Washington?

Lowering the barrier to market would have the additional benefit of enabling smaller market participants like the people who did it before it was legal. I actually have no problem with very high taxes on the larger companies. Maybe it'll fund building schools and hospitals in the places ravaged by the drug war. It's a great disgrace that our laws have prevented any reasonable path for going legit while demonizing them in the process.

The problem isn't logistical. Numerous solutions exist to make books available in some form that doesn't create much risk. The problem is the lack of desire to create more humane conditions in US prisons. Many large companies depend on prison labor and they somehow found a way to have their whole supply chain go through a prison. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could throw in a few books.