fsociety999

What makes you so sure the existing lobby are not the ones pushing for this? Also what makes you so sure that the banking/Wall Street lobby is not larger than the crypto lobby in terms of $$$? I suspect it is much larger. I also suspect they are the ones more ideologically aligned with DC here.

Proof of stake and other “environmentally friendly” consensus algorithms allow a select few to control the network and benefit the most from it which I suspect is the real goal here. The “environmental impact” is just an excuse.

It’s true that a large percentage of Bitcoin is owned by a few people, but at least now the benefit to them is only financial gain. Once you start to allow rich people to validate the blockchain itself, then they can begin to censor and block transactions or wallets from any individuals they deem unworthy or a threat to the powers at be.

We’ve already seen this happen with pretty much every traditional payment provider over the last few years to some extent so it was only a matter of time before they decided to come for Bitcoin.

Their real goal is to cripple and control the Bitcoin network. If they really cared about the environment they would go after energy companies or defense contractors or the banking industry who all use orders of magnitude more energy than Bitcoin miners.

As a sidenote, the executive branch has become much too powerful. They were never supposed to legislate like this. Every president since George W Bush has used extreme executive power, and no one seems to care. We are supposed to have elected representatives to legislate, not a king.

> Migrating from svelte to react, is months if not many man-years.

I’m not sure what your argument is here, but I’m pretty sure you have it backwards.

The fact that it might take a while to migrate a svelte project to react is not because of poor documentation or tooling or communication or anything like that. It’s because so many things work out of the box in svelte, and to do the same things in react would take tons of boilerplate or third party libraries. Some things may not even be possible to port, at least not easily.

This doesn’t show that svelte is bad though. It shows that react lacks functionality and is more difficult to use.

This entire study should never have made it through peer review for this alone:

> The effect of vaccination was not systematically assessed. In total, 144 participants received an mRNA vaccination between the baseline and the follow-up scan. We performed separate analyses for participants with vaccination as well as for participants without vaccination. The results were not different from the findings of the full cohort as presented. The cardiac effects of vaccination require further research.

144 out of 346 total participants is statistically significant, but this number only includes people who received a vaccine dose between the baseline and the follow-up. The study makes no mention of people who received a vaccine dose before the baseline measurement. Since the baseline group covered people who got COVID between April 2020 and October 2021, there is a high likelihood that even more people were vaccinated before they were selected to participate in the study. Therefore, it’s impossible to prove if the cardiac related issues have to do with COVID or the vaccine.

In addition, two of the three authors of this study received speaker fees and grants from Bayer AG who helped develop and manufacture COVID vaccines in Europe.

> It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.

Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?

Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.

> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.

It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.

If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.

That is a fair point. Perhaps that was the wrong classification, but “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” is a pretty extreme portrayal of events without any additional evidence/context.

If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.

The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes, and the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.

The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?

Is there any evidence that it is true other than the word of one person? The Cloudflare post didn’t provide any examples, and it seemed to be news to the Kiwi Farms people as well.

Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:

- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.

- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image

- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action

- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.

I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.

Crazy, this article was rising on the homepage of hacker news. Got up to number nine when I checked and then all of a sudden, I refresh and it was gone. Demoted to page two. It’s a shame too cause more people need to read this.

I think DALL-E will end up more as a tool to provide inspiration for artists as opposed to one that will replace them. I can see AI working the same way in other mediums in the future (music ideas for musicians, for example).

That is a ridiculous take. If you share a link to an article and Facebook decides to not show it on the feed for other people especially at the direction of the FBI or government, how can you argue in good faith that that is not censorship?

I think in some ways this is even more sinister than what Twitter did by blocking the article completely cause at least on Twitter you were told that you couldn’t retweet or share the link to the article.

On Facebook, anyone who shared it was under the impression that their friends were going to see it, but yet they most likely didn’t.

This is a somewhat misleading headline. Everyone who participated in the study was unvaccinated.

> Eligible participants were personnel of the Swiss Armed Forces (SAF) who were aged 18–30 years with a positive or negative RT-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 during their service between March 1, 2020, and Dec 31, 2020.

And the control group, if I am reading correctly, was all people who did not have COVID (nothing to do with vaccination status although some of them were vaccinated).

So this means really they were comparing the levels in people who had COVID vs. people who did not. The claim that the difference could be related to the vaccination status of the people in the control group seems to be a bit of a leap.

Now compare the $47 million they are down in dollars to how much the Government in the United States wastes on absolutely useless stuff. Ridiculous to gloat about their decision to purchase Bitcoin and how it is bad. It is a long-term investment.

You could make this same site for people who invested in pretty much any tech stock over the same time period as most have declined by even more than 45%.

It’s pretty amazing that these programs used 128KB of memory. Nowadays, it is rare to find a program that uses less than 128MB.

I know I’m being a bit hyperbolic. There are definitely apps that use less than that, but my point is more that the actual capabilities of the software have not always increased at the same pace as the resource usage.

Gold markets are manipulated like crazy. This article talks about it a bit https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/gold-silver-pr...

There have been a number of cases of banks being found guilty of it as well: - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-metals-charges/u-s-ch... - https://www.reuters.com/article/jp-morgan-spoofing-penalty-i...

Look up naked short selling if you want to see how this works. Essentially, futures markets allow trading gold without holding any physical gold so banks can take dollars and use that to short the price of gold. It has gotten to the point where more “paper gold” is bought and sold on futures markets than physical gold that exists in the world.

I have noticed that people come on here to gloat about things like this due to the pure hatred of crypto flowing through their veins without realizing that they are cheering on regular people suffering ultimately at what will be the expense of big banks and Wall Street and governments.

What I mean is when these cryptos have problems or are hacked, regular people are the ones who stand to lose everything in most cases.

You can believe that people are dumb for “falling for the scam” in the first place and deserve it, but if you really believe that then I feel sorry for you.

It’s pretty obvious and has been for quite some time that the ultimate goal here is for a central bank digital currency (CBDC), and stories like this as well as the UST collapse play right into that hand.

I guess what I’m saying is be careful what you wish for. A government/central bank issued digital currency will be far worse for privacy and security than any of these insignificant stablecoins. Imagine the government deciding when and where you are allowed to access your money or what you are allowed to spend it on and what items or stores you are allowed to shop for/in.

I feel like it is even possible that Wall Street is BEHIND the collapse of these stablecoins. They couldn’t pay for better press to help convince the public that a CBDC is necessary for the future. I suspect the CBDCs are already ready to go, but their last step is convincing the public they need one. The push for a cashless society has been going on for a number of years now and seems amplified lately.

> All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.

This is pretty shallow thinking. I’m sure the traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more energy than crypto, but you don’t hear about that cause the “studies” about crypto energy use are funded by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo. In fact, you will notice most of the studies critical of Bitcoin focus on how much ENERGY it uses as opposed to its fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely intentional.

Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter probably use more energy than Bitcoin too, and it is debatable how much of what they do actually creates value in the world.

The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and Congress nearly unanimously gives them hundreds of billions of dollars every year with very little debate or scrutiny or oversight.

The waste of natural resources and energy will not disappear just because crypto goes away. If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy. Some estimates say that over 60% of Bitcoin mining now uses renewable energy, and it is trending in the right direction [1].

> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech

“Worth doing” is subjective so that’s a non sequitur, but I will give you something blockchains do that is only possible using blockchain tech: they allow control over the supply of money without a central authority. Separation of money and state, if you will. Some may scoff at this idea, but currency debasement has contributed to the collapse of many empires and governments in history [2] so the importance of this invention should not be understated.

[1] https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... I’m aware this study may also be biased in a similar way as the ones mentioned earlier, but it at least includes the methodology and sources.

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the-collapse-o...

> I think using Svelte was a mistake

Why do you think that?

> One “of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening is the profound change that’s taking place in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama told an audience in a keynote speech at a symposium at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.

This is some pretty impressive Newspeak.

The reason Democracy is “weakening” is because people have been lied to by elected representatives in both parties as well as institutions and traditional media outlets for decades.

Social media has finally given the public a chance to learn about a lot of things that would have simply been covered up or ignored otherwise.

What it sounds like Obama is really pushing for here is government/totalitarian control over what speech should be permitted, the exact opposite of free speech.

A healthy representative Democracy requires information flows that are complete so the public actually knows what their elected representatives are doing. Without this, it creates a situation of mistrust and people do not have the relevant information they need when they go to the polls to vote for their representatives.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant as they say.

This is the real fear that most of these people have when it comes to Musk buying Twitter. They are afraid he will remove censorship controls already in place on the platform.

Right. Very valid point. It’s entirely possible removing them was partially politically motivated or perhaps more accurately, it was politically motivated to LEAVE them off after the work was complete.

It has traditionally not been in the best interests of many politicians (in both parties) to promote renewable energy over fossil fuels sadly.

It may have changed since then, but even the “Green New Deal” originally did not include cutting tax subsidies for fossil fuels as part of its terms.

This article puts “roof repairs” in quotes to suggest that was an excuse, but it sounds like that actually happened from what I can tell. I think this answer on Quora provides a more reasonable explanation about why they were removed:

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Reagan-administration-remo...

At the time they were not very effective at all and super costly to operate. They were intended more as a public relations promotion than anything else.

Came here to say the same thing. It is pretty ironic that in an essay that is basically criticizing people who can’t put up with heretics, he is doing the same thing with regards to "anti-vaxxers" without even realizing it. It doesn’t help that the term specifically (according to Merriam-Webster) is defined as:

> a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination

It is a loaded term that is used mostly as a means to vilify people. There must be a lot of people who are pro vaccine, but against government mandates, so where does that leave them? Also, it is possible to be generally pro vaccines, but also skeptical of new vaccine technologies rushed through development and regulatory approvals in record time where the companies leading the push have a history of putting profits ahead of public health.

The fact that your comment shows up in gray here is further proof of the exact dynamic that he is referring to in the essay:

> But occasionally, like a vector field whose elements become aligned, a large number of aggressively conventional-minded people unite behind some ideology all at once. Then they become much more of a problem, because a mob dynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each participant is increased by the enthusiasm of the others.

Congratulations. You knew exactly what to write to make it to the top of Hacker News. Sadly, it doesn’t take a whole lot of original thought these days. Just repeat the establishment talking points that crypto is a bubble and will be worth zero someday, and you will be blessed with hundreds of upvotes. This is echo-chamber, groupthink at its best. You are, of course, free to believe whatever you like, but the way you write about it comes off a bit arrogant and smug.

People have been making similar claims about Bitcoin for over a decade now, and meanwhile it is still alive and kicking and shows no signs of slowing down. It is especially useful in places in the world that don’t have easy access to banking and countries where their currencies are being debased. I encourage you to watch this video if you have any interest in challenging your beliefs:

https://youtu.be/1rbu32PO5jY

You shrug crypto off as not being “genuinely innovative” which I think shows a big lack of understanding. Personally, I think the invention of Bitcoin is perhaps the greatest innovation since the internet itself. It cannot be understated how powerful it is to create money whose supply cannot be controlled by a central institution or power. This is the kind of invention that could literally change the world (and likely will).

Your second point in claim 3 is the exact talking point used by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. I think this represents an extremely narrow view of the world. Look at the US dollar which is dangerously on the verge of falling into an inflationary spiral. If you feel safe keeping your money in dollars then godspeed. I personally feel very unsafe given the current political climate. The dollar has lost over 99% of its purchasing power since the creation of the Federal Reserve and the current strategy of printing more money to solve every problem has been much more of a “detriment to people’s lives and livelihoods” than the gold standard ever was. You should research The Cantillon effect which seems to be more and more relevant in today’s economy.

An alternative to the boom and bust narrative is that the banking elites of that time period created the boom and bust cycles themselves through control of the gold supply in order to lobby and justify the creation of a central banking system that would benefit them and ensure that if they ever got into a pinch they could bail themselves out by having easy access to the money spigot. Remember history is told by the victors.

I agree with you that governments are unlikely to let go of control over monetary policy and won’t do it willingly or eagerly, but I think it is already too late for them to kill Bitcoin. They can cut off exchange access to buy and sell for dollars, but by forcing people to use dollars and cutting off access to crypto, I think it will actually expedite people’s willingness and acceptance of crypto. People and businesses will start accepting crypto directly for payments. It will take a long time for this to actually materialize in the real world because there are so many people like you who have such a narrow-minded view of crypto, but when you are faced with accepting a currency that is losing 10-20% of its purchasing power every year, or accepting Bitcoin, eventually people will understand that Bitcoin is the better money.

I expect to receive an onslaught of downvotes for this reply and going against the grain, but so be it.

While what you are saying may be true, you shouldn’t look to the west for answers. The idea that we pick our leaders based on political debates is ridiculous. Just look at how our debates are structured. If they are lucky, candidates have two minutes to describe their approach to fixing something like income inequality or climate change which have been around for decades. Certain candidates are purposely given more airtime than others, more positive press coverage than others, etc.

Western news media has the opposite problem of Russian media in that it is mostly propaganda too, but it hides behind the veil of a “free press”. The defense contractors, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Wall Street control the news cycles and the politicians, but they do it from behind the curtain. If you ask me, this is much more sinister. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, if you will.

I would actually prefer a media where you KNOW it is propaganda from the get-go cause then it puts you in a mindset to think critically about everything being presented. Here in the U.S. people inherently trust the media and the government as being the arbitrators of truth and righteousness, despite the fact that they lie to us constantly.

Our “leaders” are also tied to intelligence agencies like the CIA, but again they often go to great lengths to hide these connections. Most politicians here could note engage in a serious debate with anyone who challenges their positions either. We are given a “choice” between the candidate on the left who works for Big Pharma and the military industrial complex and the candidate on the right who works for Big Pharma and the military industrial complex.

Everyone should be opposed to a central bank digital currency. If you think tracking and censorship is bad now with tech companies, wait until the Government can control your access to money and cut off access to the financial system for any or no reason. Not only that, but the surveillance capabilities will be better than even George Orwell could have envisioned. Imagine if your wallet is restricted so you can only spend money at certain locations on certain days or times.

I am aware that technically the Federal Reserve is not part of the Government, but the reality is that they are ABOVE it which is even scarier. They are not accountable to the people via elections or any other means.

I do not know how they intend to spin this as a positive for society, but I am sure they will come up with something. Perhaps they will say that it makes it more easier to track down terrorists and criminals, or that it is necessary because Bitcoin mining uses a lot of energy, or that it is necessary to control Russia, but make no mistake, this is and will be an attack on regular working class people.

In Bitcoin land this is ancient history. It has already lost all those gains and then some.

Why don’t you cut off United States citizens while you are at it? The regime that has probably done more damage and caused more instability to the world than any other country. The U.S. uses the entire world as their playground couping any Government that disagrees with them or refuses to bend to their demands and bombing their citizens and civilians. What about the atrocities and war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Syria? Libya? Yemen? Etc.

Just because it is covered up or whitewashed by the media in the U.S. does not mean it is not happening.

Blaming the citizens of a country for the actions of their Government is absolutely atrocious behavior. I used to have all my domains on Namecheap. I have since moved them, but now I will make sure I never use your service ever again and will never recommend you to anyone else either.

Also the argument that tax money is supporting the regime is ridiculous. If citizens could CHOOSE how their tax money was spent it would be one thing, but in the U.S. our tax money has literally gone to providing weapons and training to terrorist organizations.

Again, this doesn’t EXCUSE the actions of the Russian government, but taking their people hostage to use as leverage is disgusting and despicable.

This executive order was signed in 1981… Shows how afraid people are to mess with the CIA. They shouldn’t even be allowed to operate in the United States let alone collect information on American citizens.

One thing I’ve always wondered is why Snowden exposed the NSA mass surveillance, but didn’t say a word about the CIA despite having worked for both agencies. It is, of course, possible he didn’t know about the CIA collecting data, but I find that pretty hard to believe.

Perhaps the most important part of the entire paper is the final sentence:

> While our findings may be more applicable in some modern circumstances than others (e.g., when a virus is particularly deadly for younger adults and children or when remote learning opportunities are limited), our paper cautions against over-extrapolating from the 1918-19 pandemic when making decisions about optimal policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is unfortunately not going to stop many people or politicians or media outlets from citing this paper as a justification for (or to defend) COVID-19 policies.

> That's very different than what you said before

Well, it is what I _meant_ and what I believe the op meant that you originally responded to.

> The trials being ongoing is immaterial

No, it is not immaterial, because people have to be notified of “the significant known and potential benefits and risks of such use, and of the extent to which such benefits and risks are unknown”. The fact that the clinical trial is ongoing means that many of those benefits and risks are, in fact, unknown.

You can spin this however you like, but my point is that most people who are receiving and have received shots have NO IDEA that clinical trials are ongoing and the actual data has not been made available to the public (even to their doctors who are likely recommending it). This is the reality whether you would like to believe it or not.

Yes, I am aware of that. I was referring to informed consent related to people who received the drug under the EUA. See here for more context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30017165

I understand that, my point is that as part of the EUA, patients are required by law to receive information about the treatment.

See section e-1-A-ii here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/360bbb-3

  (ii)Appropriate conditions designed to ensure that individuals to whom the product is administered are informed—

    (I)that the Secretary has authorized the emergency use of the product;

    (II)of the significant known and potential benefits and risks of such use, and of the extent to which such benefits and risks are unknown; and

    (III)of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.

So I am saying, what percentage of people who got the shot actually received this information? Since the trials are ongoing, that should have been communicated to 100% of people who received the vaccine as part of informed consent.