The prices of the passports would go up, yes, but the prices of property would go down.
166 karma · joined February 10, 2020
Hold a referendum to elect the constitution. Assuming it passes, you select a commission of people in charge of it. They get absolute power over anything relating to property - eminent domain, changing zoning laws, and giving building code exemptions.
It would only work if there's a democratic majority in favor of it, but if it did, what would be the issue? Then it would be very simple: just buy up some land, start building, and rezone anyone who complains as heavy industry and evict them.
I'm of course writing this in jest - hopefully they wouldn't have to be that draconian - but why hasn't anyone tried this? Is there not an electoral majority?
Instead of having people buy up the property and jack the prices to shit, just have some notion of "Californian citizenship".
* If you were born there, you're grandfathered in by birthright.
* If you move out, we'll pay you some money or whatever.
* If you want to move in, either pay a big sum of money or convince the government you're helpful.
Then they could use the money from these sales to invest in the community, rather than it going to property speculators.
Like, without going into too tricky political discussions, it seems like being physically present on the land gives you some form of title to it. And if the Palestinians/Arabs hadn't left, it would be much more difficult to run the Israeli state. They would have the right to vote, and so they might've voted e.g. against the Hebrew language or for autonomy.
Likewise, if Israel ended up collapsing somehow and Palestine taking over, then they would presumably realize that, well, the sooner these people are not here anymore, the less of a claim to an Israeli state can there possibly be.
If so, I don't see what it has to do with corruption, because it's just a basic fact of countries - one guy has to win and the other one thus loses, and it's a zero-sum game.
The way I see it, even if all of these countries were run like Switzerland, everyone involved would still quickly understand it's very definitively in their material interests to manage the other guys as quick as possible.
What's the way out of this conundrum?
Why not have a serious system based on punishment instead, after the fact? For example-
"If a company is found to be responsible for a material environmental disaster, whoever was employed by that company during the relevant period shall be sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 100% of their net worth. No liability should apply for occupations which can be conclusively demonstrated to be unrelated to the activities of the firm, such as janitors or security guards.
The statute of limitations shall equal the duration of life of the concerned natural persons or the victims, whichever is longer."
This would cause people to self-regulate, based on whatever informal information they hear ("3M is doing really dodgy stuff, I wouldn't work there if I were you"), rather than having to wait for regulation. It would be much better suited, and would allow for the government to scrap other bothersome regulation.
I'm not exactly a playboy, but I've really never had this problem at all in my life. For what it's worth, approximately half of the women I speak to (in my subjective experience, eminently normal people) use Android phones.
e.g.
1. Connect to Mullvad over Tor, authenticate with real-world user ID
2. Use this to sign a blinded token
3. Use this to connect to Mullvad anonymously after some delay
The first run would be kind of dodgy, but after that you could get new session keys on a fixed schedule and switch them out at a random interval.
If they see that user A authenticates and 10 minutes later, key A comes online, that can be traced, but if you then wait a week, authorize key B, and then wait a few more days to start using it, you should be good.
In practice, this has way too many issues to work in practice. It still requires you to trust them not to e.g. log IPs and correlate it that way, so it's all just snake oil.
Are you sure? I mean, it's a well-established principle of international relations that the people of a country get to decide what happens to it - this is why the Germans were expelled from Europe after the war.
My understanding is that the Israelis had to remove some people to make way for their state - doesn't this apply to the Palestinians too, if they want their land back? Or am I missing something, did they leave voluntarily because of dissatisfaction with the government etc?
Genuine question, just asking.
I don't think it's anything to be sad about; people use it because it works. It would be much sadder if it weren't used at all.
- torrents work if they are shared more than they are leeched, so it's just easier to have it run in the background. There's very little reason to not use the existing client/server models like transmission or tTorrent
- indexing and search still relies too much on third parties. Integrate magnetico (passive indexing), bep 33 (dht-based scraping) and bep 51 (dht-based indexing) and the user gains an order of magnitude of autonomy because they don't rely on centralized authorities anymore
- is there a possibility yo go further ? Make sharing files easier with bittorrent, or something like that ? Bittorrent clients should help with that
I don't think decentralized indexing is a solvable problem. There's too much crap, and too little in the way of useful signal to tell it apart.
What would be really useful, though, would be a way to separate indexing from the actual torrents.
Let me give you an example: say you're a member of a private tracker, and you see some release that looks nice. You click it in your torrent client. It then tries to find the same torrent on a public tracker (e.g. by hash), and downloads from and seeds to both.
If a system like this existed, then you could use private trackers just for the indexing, and then the computers could be left to do the actual work of finding the data.
Also, as a nice side bonus, this would allow for the "long tail" style of seeding that the more old-fashioned protocols have. If you're not seeding a whole torrent, but just a series of single files, nothing prevents you from just opening up e.g. the 'Downloads' folder to the public, and allow them to download if they can provide the hash of the file. This would make it much easier to find seeds, since the limit usually isn't bandwidth but storage.
> [A large liquidation] could cause chaos, putting a strain on the Solana network. Liquidators would be especially active and spamming the liquidate function, which has been known to be a factor causing Solana to go down in the past.
> Letting a liquidation of this size to happen on-chain is extremely risky. DEX liquidity isn’t deep enough to handle a sale of this size and could cause cascading effects. Additionally, liquidators will be incentivized to spam the network in an effort to win very lucrative liquidations. This has been known to cause load issues for Solana in the past which would exacerbate the problems at hand.
So, according to Solend, there are two issues at stake here:
1. The network might have technical problems processing the amount of transactions.
2. DEX liquidity isn’t deep enough to handle a sale of this size and could cause cascading effects
What they mean by this second point is that, should a sale happen, then:
1. not enough people will stand willing to buy at a favorable price ("liquidity isn't deep enough")
2. this price crash could cause others to get liquidated in turn ("cascading effects")
This is a statement about the impacts on prices, so IMO it's not editorialized.
Correct. Theft is included in GDP, as is spoilage. As I said, it doesn't matter how 'good' people's consumption is, only that they consume. This being said, theft isn't ideal, because it could depress the prices for the items later on. Loss would be better.
> You seem to be applying a macroeconomic template. Individuals can and do behave somewhat differently.
That's correct, which is why the state - if it wishes to remain relevant - has to get them back in line, lest it be consumed by someone who does.
> I don't have any responsibility to prop up your economy with my spending and you have no responsibility to prop up mine, but please do. If I spend less and you spend more, I hope you spend it on my services and goods, so I get your money and you get my designer throw pillows or whatever.
You don't understand - it's not about "propping up an economy" - it's about making sure that people work. If you stop spending, there's a risk that it would cause you to stop working. This is the risk; the consumption itself is damaging for the economy, and it would be preferable that people lose their wages to less damaging forms of consumption (e.g. buying scalable forms of entertainment services)
> The vast majority of the wealth of the wealthy is in unrealized gains which may be spent someday, it sounds like you're calling them economically unproductive.
The money isn't economically unproductive, because money isn't what makes production, but people can be unproductive, and this is the risk.
In practice, the losses from this are very small, because it's held by a rather small billionaire elite, and so the losses to rentiers don't actually end up in a lot of real-world consumption.
> Desiring not to spend, and desiring not to earn, are vastly different.
Different, perhaps, but they are brothers. Spending = earnings + borrowing, or, conversely, earnings = spending + saving. If you don't consume, your net saving goes up, and those savings are like a ticking time-bomb that can be sprung on the economy at any time to seriously cut the GDP.
It's correct to say that you can spend less on petroleum and more on other stuff. It's even more correct to say that, from the macro-economic view, you have to. (And if you don't want, you will be forced to)
In particular, the smaller the GDP, the less military spending the country can support. If the country can not support a sufficient military spending owing to a lack of consumption (production), it will be conquered by someone who can, a bit like private equity buying out an unprofitable company with good potential. (c.f. Ukraine - very poor GDP, but decent possibilities for growth w.r.t. arable land, supply of young human capital, seaports, industry etc, thus currently undergoing hostile takeover)
> You assume people don't even consider saving somehow. Why is that?
There's no such thing as saving; if I save money, it's to consume it in the future eventually. So this has to cancel out over the long term.
If people are saving money and never withdrawing (e.g. never using the freedom bought by the past work to avoid future work), that's fine too, but if they withdraw it, it decreases national production, so it only works if people are prevented from withdrawing savings, at which point nobody would keep them.
Basically, people have to work, and this is the fundamental premise. That being said, the basic nature of the consumption is irrelevant. This is why digital services, gambling, and financial services are so important - it's much more socially efficient for people to dispose of $100 worth of money through slot machines or Netflix subscriptions or overdraft charges (all of which are effectively free to "produce" in terms of national resources) than by e.g. buying a new car, which requires actual steel and semiconductors and rubber and ... which require the expenditure of resources (land, labour, capital) in order to produce.
Well, not really. The basic problem is that production has to equal consumption. And so there are three possibilities:
1. People consume all of their income 2. People work less 3. People work, but get paid less
In a fair economy, the third point won't happen. In a country that wants an internationally competitive economy, the second point can't happen. And so people have to consume 100% in order to work 100%; this choice maximizes tax revenue.
The lowers are the only regulated part in the USA.
At the very least, you should compare life-cycle $/MWh, not $/GW.
I do not speak a word of Arabic. There is no circumstance in which my life will be materially improved by correct RTL text rendering. I might want proper display of individual characters so I can copy-paste them, but I have no use for RTL text.
On the other hand, RTL causes a lot of unpleasant problems like this. Why can't I simply coerce all foreign languages into LTR?
The end result is a less moral society, because people have to change to stranger and stranger business just to keep their place in the hierarchy.
Instead of having a normal ('communist') job, you have to get involved in dirty tourism stuff. The end result of this is as in New York City or San Fransisco, where anyone with a 'normal' job has obviously had rent go up way more than income. Granted, they too could go into tech or finance, but the benefits to society of this are most unclear.