To be fair, rarely do people have an accurate grasp on what normality is. Just the breadth of human experience is impossible to capture much less experience and process, not to mention the experience of people that is never expressed (I may be having a bad week, but I wouldn't express it, much less share it openly with coworkers)
My problem here, and correct me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, is that web3 calls only for decentralization around current authorities and proposes recentralization around new authorities. The web as it is already has the technology and possibility for "decentralized" content creation and publishing, but as with all things it is easier to do so on "centralized" platforms. I don't see what web3 offers beyond that. We will still rely on DNS, BGP, and all host of other technologies to connect our digital world, and within this framework decentralization is ingrained.
I posit that this depends entirely on the social hierarchy of the country in question. The more egalitarian the society the more the eradication of poverty is possible. Unfortunately for the majority of countries this is highly unlikely, and while the end of poverty is possible, I highly doubt that will ever happen.
Oh but interestingly isn't that a kind of conviction itself? They've been fed some kind of idea of 'freedom' that they now strongly adhere to until death (I assume a lot of anti-mask are also anti-vaccine and are now the ones dying in the hospitals).
If you look at American politics over the past 5 years, trump has almost become another napoleon in how fervent the support he has, and how the idea of 'freedom' has held.
In addition to the pop culture issue here, I think the other side of the issue is bike-shedding. In general I don't think people are all that knowledgeable in a very broad sense, so whenever they're approached by a topic they know one thing about, they'll talk about it as if it were the most important aspect; bike shedding.
to follow the example closer, you need to put in work every day, however small (continuous river flow), and that will carve the channels in your life (eh?) to enable the torrent of work that might come when conditions allow.
Personally I've ordered a new thinkpad but it's slated to come in 3 months, with the delivery date extended once already. I went to Target and bought some lowend (slightly higher than chromebook) laptop and ubuntu is running fine on it. Of course I can't do anything too memory intensive, but regular dev work is decent for a <500 dollar machine.
To your third point, investments in an inflationary environment are necessary because otherwise people would _lose_ money by doing nothing with it. It's better to risk for some return, than lose it by doing nothing. That's what separates it from an deflationary environment in that people gain more money by doing nothing with it. They don't need to incur risk to gain more.
This leads to your first 2 points, where people might still want to invest to get a potential higher return than the base deflation rate, investments would drop compared to an inflationary environment. In the inflationary environment investments are necessary to prevent the loss of value, whereas it isn't in a deflationary one.
On its face that would appear to be a bald assertion. Investments inherently contain risk which would dissuade potential investors if they have a stable source of growth. Investments would have to have very high upside to be worth a stable but lower rate of deflation. Secondly, I'm not sure how you can be certain that investment returns, without regard for risks, could be higher than the deflation rate.
So the only way bitcoin isn't deflationary is if demand for it continually goes down over time until it's irrelevant. If demand either goes up or stays the same, it will behave deflationary (wallets getting lost). This doesn't seem to be a good performance pattern for a currency.
A couple things. Your first statement appears to be circular, it doesn't answer the question of why an entity would want to invest their money on an uncertain venture when it would just be worth more doing nothing with it. Secondly, I'm not sure what the rest of the first paragraph is in aid of, it seems like you're stating that capital is useful which I don't think was ever in question.
Sure, the article never mentioned anything about deflationary currency, but you were responding to a comment that a deflationary currency would have issues that you seemed to respond in opposition to. If you don't have a stance on deflationary currency, what is your argument for or against?
On that note, I believe that bitcoin fits the definition of a deflationary currency, and having looked up 'stable' money supply haven't found a consensus on what that means. Could you explain how you define that?
I'm not familiar with Hayek, so you may need to fill in gaps where I may have them, but the argument in the article (as I understand) specifically establishes the context where savings are presumed invested into capital. How I understand deflationary currency is that investments are not incentivized, and would therefore not lead to the situation as described in the article.
The linked article doesn't address the effects of deflationary currency at all, it describes the notion of including capital in the description of economies.
What are you referring to here? Assuming s&p500, I've calculated an average of 10% increase over any 10 year interval (of course not ending in a crash).
I'm unsure of what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that you're not able to buy the same # of shares of an index fund as you were last year?
WRT the market doubling, there has been a lot of different reasons for it, QE increasing money supply that has been plowed into the stock market inflating values, top performers generally doing better relatively to society, and higher income individuals and families generally weathering the pandemic much better than low-income individuals and families.
This is all to say that market performance is not tied to the pandemic in any particular way (in this case). Back to your other statement of not being able to purchase the same # of shares (if that was your point), it doesn't matter the # of shares you can buy per year, only the value of shares purchasable. The thread above you isn't calculating the # of shares increasing by 5% year, just the value of total shares . I care that the total value of my investments increases because that's what eventually matters when I start withdrawing, the # of shares I have could increase, but that wouldn't matter if the total value stays the same or decreases.
Sure, like all systems, there are overhead costs involved. But with something like a typed system, the overhead costs are minimal compared to the benefits you reap from them.
One of the projects I worked on during my transition to typescript was to convert an existing project into it. Sure there was a lot of head banging against walls at some point to get the types to work out, but during that process I finally really understood how everything fit together and gained a sense of assurance that I could use a return of a function with complete confidence. Developing on that project afterwards was also a breeze, moving faster and more confidently knowing that the object types were set, and that guardrails were in place to prevent myself from shooting my own foot.
It's a new system to work within the guidelines of, but guardrails are there for a reason, to prevent you from falling off a cliff.
I don't think that's the only result of that line of reasoning. We don't have to poke fun of other cultures in order to appreciate the differences. Sure, the lowest common denominator of these types of mass-produced articles are to ridicule or present as a freak show, but I feel that in a more curated and personal space like hacker news we can identify the differences and explore their deeper meaning without succumbing to the mean.
To stray away from "blanket statements" and "general impressions", can we find the sale of microwave meals differences between the US and Europe? I would imagine that would be the most telling statistic.
I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to be more well known, but CreditKarma has allowed free filing of taxes (incl. capital gains), and was recently acquired by Intuit. Last I read they were under investigation by the Department of Justice because of the implications they were eliminating a competitor.
I've used it for the past 2 years, and it has worked great for me, albeit I don't have very complicated taxes. I'm actually afraid of what happens if the acquisition goes through, definitely expecting the free tax filing to disappear soon after that occurs.
Is that accurate? I can't believe that decomposition releases _all_ of the carbon into the atmosphere. Certainly a good amount of it is sequestered into the ground (e.g. coal). Thus a standing forest is never completely carbon neutral.
Perhaps part of a new breed of middle class. Instead of a distance or management friction, this is a scaling friction. In order to scale, programmers are required. Maybe this correlates with doctors and lawyers, albeit a different friction, one of artificial scarcity (limits to who can attend medical/law school, and whatever certification is required afterwards).
Where did you get that quote from (2nd paragraph)? I can't find it in the three articles on horse nomads.
WRT your last point, I didn't read the conclusion to say that GRRM maliciously cause harm, but through his incomplete knowledge of history and his assertion that the culture he portrayed was historically accurate was causing harm. He simply noted the deficiencies of GRRM, and the resulting consequences of such.
And to the point that you've brought up about a difference between this article and the last 2, I would counter to say that all three have had the same conclusion, that GRRM has been inaccurate with the portrayal of horse-bourne nomads, only here he has laid out the consequences that it entails. If you're fine with the predicate but have issue with the conclusion, I would suggest you make a counter to his argument, otherwise it would appear to be in bad faith to lambast his conclusion yet agree with his predicate and have no word on his argument.
I would say the author provided all the evidence for you to draw such a conclusion, but never insinuated as such. The most concrete thing he ever said was that GRRM lied when he said that the 'Dothraki were an amalgam of ...'. If you were led to such a conclusion without the author even making that argument, I wouldn't say it was preachy, but impactful.
Well to take the argument at it's base, GRRM claims that the Dothraki are an amalgam of steppe / plains nomads. The blog then goes through great lengths to disprove that statement in as many different facets as possible.
If through the reading of the several blog posts that you don't agree that the Dothraki are NOT an amalgam of steppe / plains nomads then I'm not sure what argument you're making.
But, as the author of this article noted before, we don't live in a world shaped by ancient star battling empires. We currently live in a world shaped by our history, and continue to shape our world based on how we understand ourselves and our past. If we distill our past into stereotypes we will forget where we come from and make decisions based off of inaccurate assumptions.
If we see the Native Americans as murdering rapists, how likely are we to give them restitution for the massacres we've inflicted upon them, or begin to provide them social support? And if you don't currently see them as such, how will fiction that impresses on the greater public of its veracity that it isn't so, and that the general impression of their culture is completely fabricated?
Fiction definitely shapes our society and our understanding, and if fiction as popular as this one claims to be realistic there is a responsibility to either confirm or counter it. Yes, storytelling is more important than accuracy, but when you claim the latter you had better prove it.
I've come across this in the past that worked really well til the integration with spotify broke and I didn't try and fix it. https://getconcertmaster.com/
If we are to take the predicate at face value, evil people prospering is a temporary movement that will globally trend towards good, good being the divine purpose.