injeolmi_love

EA’s primary philosophical foundation is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism in its standard form only cares about outcomes that maximize global utility for humanity. It does not accept any deontological ethics.

Utilitarianism is evil because it allows evil actions to be taken as long as that maximizes utility, thus justifying the unjustifiable. Utilitarianism is wrong because it is still evil to commit fraud even to save human lives. However utilitarianism is popular for people with power, because they can use it to justify their evil actions as for the greater good. Even if they are sincere, their actions are still evil; even if SBF succeeded instead of failing, and sincerely wanted to stop climate change, he would still and rightfully be a criminal.

Most EA adherents focus on process not outcomes. So from an EA position, the fraud outcome doesn’t matter. Imagine if SBF gambles paid off they might say, and that potential outcome must be probablistically weighed against the negative outcome. Since crypto in most EA is viewed as a sin industry, the negative impact is minor relative to the positive impact of SBF political and charity donations, so even a slim chance of success should be taken.

However EA logic is wrong because utilitarianism is wrong. It doesn’t matter whether stealing and fraud create good outcomes or not. Theft and fraud are evil in themselves irrespective of outcomes. To put it in an extreme sense, even if it would save the planet you should still not steal nor defraud others. The fact that some actions are in essence evil is enshrined in the legal system, is commonly accepted, and philosophically sound.

It is a buzzword now. Originally it meant a decentralized p2p app stack. For instance IPFS for file delivery, EVM for computation, and Greenfield for database operations. In this view bittorent would be an early example of a web3 application. The idea is open and permisionless p2p apps can provide better user service than centralized web2 apps.

Now it’s mostly lost it’s origin meaning.

Almost everyone I knew who was homeschooled had no noticeable social problems. Most had successful careers and marriages. Of course the fact that I knew them meant their parents were allowing them into a variety of social situations.

You should consider fleek.xyz private gateway instead, you wouldn’t be violating tos, fleek use filecoin, and the sdk is more reliable. But it’s in alpha so you’ll need to request access on their discord. I’m a customer myself.

There’s over 1.8 million crypto tokens. You can find one for any concept that’s been thought up.

Media blackout

> land is not substitutable

Then why do realtors do showings for multiple locations? It’s because the locations are substitutable, with buyers balancing price and amenities. Land is substitutable.

> confusing second and first order

Prices are a second order effect, not a first order effect (unless there’s price fixing). LVT makes land with amenities relatively less attractive, which lowers demand. Lower demand then moves the price, but the quantity demanded will still be lower since the demand curve has shifted down. This causes an exodus from urban centers to the periphery.

>property taxes disincentivize development

True. Assuming constant revenue, a move from property to land value tax would create a relative migration from city cores to a highly developed exurbia. If the LVT was high enough, we’d get single plot high rises with multistory garages only accessible by freeway surrounded by untouched nature reserves.

Remember when reviewing the impacts of a new policy, they are always at the margin. So the appropriate situation to imagine for your bookstore is one where the benefits of land in the core are slightly greater than benefits from land in the periphery. Since LVT makes land in the core more expensive due to taxes, on the margin all businesses and residences would migrate towards the periphery.

Property tax creates its own distortions, just like all taxes. But it is less distortive since going back to the example of a manufactury or a bookstore, no matter where they locate the property tax changes less than a land value tax, meaning the decision on where to locate is based on efficiency rather than taxes.

First order effects are usually stronger than second order effects.

Imagine you are considering to start a small manufactory, say for artisanal socks. You can purchase land anywhere, since the bank will lend to you at a cheap rate backed by the land as collateral. You consider two options; option 1 is in a dense urban area, close to your workers and walkable with lots of public transit. The land is expensive due to nearby amenities. Option 2 is some exurbian land that is accessible via commute. The land is cheap. Assume without LVT that option 1 is preferred because it provides a better lifestyle for your workers. Now add LVT; the tax rate on the urban land is set based on rents, so the fact that a bank would lend cheaply against good collateral no longer matters; you cannot afford the land because local rents are too high.

It’s just a thought experiment to demonstrate a simple principle; society gets less of whatever is taxed.

Whenever something is taxed, less of it is produced. In the case of LVT, the tax is on land that is in a desirable location with lots of nearby amenities. LVT encourages urban sprawl by punishing retail, industrial, and residential concerns that choose to agglomerate with higher taxes. LVT means less walkable cities and more LA style sprawl.

Japan has had a privatized rail system with none of these issues.

Even taking the writers premise as true, it’s not scalable. Most teachers do not have the necessary capabilities, even with training, to run whole classroom engaged learning experiences. School is designed to meet the capabilities of teachers as much as it does the needs of students.

That said, most students don’t have the capacity to benefit from personalized learning either. The whole problem with the discussion of improving education is the assumption that a proper education process can increase the size of the “glass” by pouring in more “water.” Not everyone is capable of every type of thought, and that’s ok! Every type of person is valuable.

People who are unusually intelligent should be given free time to self teach, and if possible tutored. Traditional classrooms work well enough for everyone else, except for the drug issues.

At least at the firms I’ve worked with, new records were digitized and old files were undergoing digitization. Maybe it’s different in your country?

There’s always some process a firm must use to make digital records available to an auditor - it’s at this point in the step code must be trusted even if it’s supposed to be as simple as “make everything available “.

The position is visible to regulators via code - if the code is fraudulent or buggy, the regulators will believe false information.

Here’s a link debunking the tulip mania myth [1]. Put shortly, the myth was created as a moral campaign against speculators. Interestingly, one of the propagators of the myth was complicit in pumping the rail bubble, which did far more economic damage.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

Inflation as long as it’s predictable doesn’t really matter, since the future cash flows just get bigger with more inflation. However real interest rates do affect the discount rate; higher interest rates relative to inflation discourage investment since you could just put the money in a bank instead of taking risk. That means inflation does have an effect, since higher inflation is historically more volatile which raises risk thus real interest rates. That’s all assuming a free market without government price fixing interest rates.

It’s good to see Cloudlfare finally admit that they have been blocking human users. I’m one of the people that gets the infinite reloading cycle that Cloudflare claimed can’t happen in previous hacker news threads. In this post they finally admit they have been blocking human users they didn’t know about before. Gaslighting over, hopefully?

In order to maximize cash flows, Tether has an incentive to grow the wider crypto ecosystem. Matt Levine wrote an excellent explanation in one of his recent “Money Matters” newsletters.

After the BUSD debacle, it’s clear that onshore and regulated reserves for stablecoins are a huge risk for defi dapps built on top of them. US policy regarding USDC and other such US regulated stablecoins are at risk of change at any time. Since well designed defi dapps are not upgradeable, future policy risks must be considered when choosing which stablecoin to utilize. USDT’s offshore and opaque balance sheet is proven safer for defi dapps than US regulated stablecoins. I wish this weren’t the case, but it’s proven in practice.

Right now? Short term t bill holders. They rollover so fast that interest rate hikes don’t affect the principle, since you just wait for them to expire then immediately grab the new higher interest rate.

Tether (issues usdt) is winning big right now because they mostly hold short term t bills.

How does agile fit into TDD? Thinking about it while writing this, perhaps the answer is to write a set of specifications that are deliverable within a 2 week period, write tests based on those specs, then deliver the code to meet those tests in that period then review. Yeah that could be a smart way to handle projects I would consider trialing - especially since trying longer term waterfall schedules dont work anyway, even though non software dev actors demand them.

I’m somewhat conflicted on principled TDD. Often when writing code I find issues with the specifications, sometimes serious enough that interfaces need to be redesigned. Or even more often, problems that were assumed to be simple turn out to be far more complex with lots of edge cases no one thought of when writing user stories, meaning that substantial refactoring has to be done. For the more extreme yet still frequent instances, these situations would mean not only throwing out the code implementation but also the tests. If you write the code first and test after, you throw out 1/4 of the code than you would in TDD (usually tests are several times longer than the implementation in solidity).

Any thoughts on how to manage these risks?

Some accidental Americans may not even have known they owe capital gains tax. Not every jurisdiction taxes capital gains, and many have differing rules. It can be quite shocking to get a tax bill from a place you’ve never lived!

If the problem is version control, why not use git? It’s also easy to fork, and it’s much cheaper than a blockchain.

There are a variety of ways to write smart contracts on BTC; it’s simply factually false that smart contracts are a primary differentiator between btc and eth. BTC has supported scripting from the beginning while lightning and taproot allow more complex contracts.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/why-bitcoin-smart-cont...

Can you explain this in more detail? That’s not my admittedly limited understanding of the consensus mechanism BSC uses.

Users decide what the purpose of a blockchain is, simply because the blockchains that gain the most market share are chosen by users. Users follow developers that provide quality services, and developers pick the chain that meets their application needs closest.

Of course it’s great when people experiment on their own hobbies, I’m guilty of that pleasure myself all too often! Just please don’t use it as an excuse to attack people doing something different from you, as we see the btc and eth communities doing sadly too often.

If it’s interesting to you, his public advocacy on his blog for L2 goes back to 2017[1] where he dismisses block size scaling as a centralizing risk. Of course now that we have ofac geth, liquid and cex staking; Parlia Consensus and other consensus methods where the number of validators is capped (usually at a few hundred) but voting is done through delegation are in actual fact more decentralized than ethereum. To be fair though no one knew this is how things would turn out on 2017; back then the idea that just a few hundred actors could control a blockchain was scary. Now it’s a success compared to chains where just 3-5 actors could attack a chain.

[1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/31/sharding_faq.html

The purpose of blockchains is to fulfill users needs, not to allow developers to enjoy creating what they view as perfect and clean solutions. Vitalik pushed hard for L2 scaling over L1 which lead to the set of biggest user headaches on ethereum; ecosystem fragmentation. Individuals and small projects can’t develop experimental dapps on L1 because the gas fees are too high, but if they use an L2 then they only access a small portion of the userbase. Contrast this with development on BSC where there’s enough L1 scaling to make experimentation not excessive expensive, but L2 solutions are still available for large projects that need it and have the developer resources to make cross chain dapps painless for users.

It’s kind of funny because btc had the same issue, where scaling the base protocol was rejected. That decision allowed ethereum to emerge as a competitor. Now eth has followed that same path with predictable results.

In 2022 alone, central banks purchased 1,136 tons of gold[1]. The us government holds over $500b in gold[2]. Gold is still valuable as a reserve asset because it’s highly liquid, demanded by every economy, and has low inflation. Central banks frequently do settle balances between each other by transferring gold (often just involve moving the gold from one part of a warehouse in London to another part). Gold hasn’t gone away, and it’s not fading out either.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/central-banks-bo... [2] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/gold-repo...