jeremyt

This is mostly nonsense.

If you don't want to use an LN hub, then create your own. If you don't have enough money, then raise some capital and start a LN hub business. Hell, create a non-profit LN hub! If you don't want to pay for the service of using other LN hubs, then send a direct payment. Of course, this will cost real money, but you always have that option. If I'm sending money to purchase a house, you can bet I'm going to send an actual transaction and not use the lightning network. For cups of coffee, I just don't need the full decentralization.

Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem, but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why the clients are in BETA.

Your link is bullshit, as I mentioned the network is in BETA. Of course people don't have a bunch of money on the lightning network and can't route large payments like $67. That's because the network is in BETA, and all of the platforms are expressly telling people not to use it for large payments.

I might suggest taking a look at Blockstack and Urbit, which are efforts to do the exact same thing through two completely different approaches.

Look, if you are going to be a critic then you can't stand behind ignorance.

The "fees are just too high to buy a cup of coffee" is an old trope that is no longer relevant. One can go download LND 0.5 and use the lightning network to make instant practically free payments for a "cup of coffee" today.

The only thing I'll concede is that it is still in beta, but the question of whether it's going to exist or not is no longer a question.

Is it just a tad ironic that Facebook just got hacked and people are recommending that you move to a Facebook owned messaging platform as a solution?

Telegram is not secure. It is optionally secure.

Bribery. I'm only half joking.

There's lots of dark international money slushing around out there that happens to make it into someone's wife's friend's company.

No it doesn't. It teaches you after about 20 times, that all sites are equally bad and now I can just safely ignore these popup notices.

It promotes apathy.

Hard to tell these days.

So we have no moral standpoint to criticize child brides...because we must be inclusive of all parts of every culture?

No, i’m talking about the fact that bitcoin is literally property according to the government.

Also profit != property.

That’s not true. For example, owning bitcoin gives you property rights.

I have no idea why I was downvoted. To even touch the surface of Ken Wilber’s critique of Nietzche would require on the order of 10 pages, and I know that because I’m writing it right now.

I also find it extremely ironic that a person in a different comment is criticizing me for not being able to quickly boil a philosopher’s entire approach down to a few sentences, in a comment where we are arguing about people wrongly boiling Nietzsche down into a few sentences

I’m flogging Ken Wilber these days. Perhaps take a look at “The Religion of Tomorrow”

In this, I think Nietzsche was dangerously wrong. I don’t have the time to go into detail at the moment, but the better prescription is outlined in Ken Wilber’s “A theory of everything” or if you have lots of intestinal fortitude “The religion of tomorrow”.

Nietzsche is dead.

Your comment assumes that educational achievement is a "randomly distributed result". It may or may not be, but you can't just assume it.

Try reg A+

In what world does milk "keep fine in storage"?

Well, I guess you can take that position.

I take the position that what the media reports isn't true, or at least it's some sort of propaganda and I look for who's benefiting from the information, unless I see evidence to the contrary.

Regarding the news article you linked, it looks to me like those three companies are indeed running a PR campaign to pressure the administration to give them a deal.

Which is why I said confirmation bias.

Sometimes your confirmation bias is correct; sometimes it isn't.

Well, that's my point.

I am willing to put my money where my mouth is and take a bet saying that in exactly one year, a significant number of these $2.5 billion of contracts will have miraculously found a way to happen.

Yes, of course.

If it turns out that the number of contracts canceled is much less, then it changes the calculations completely.

If it turns out that this story is completely bogus and the "cancelled" contracts were already going to be canceled before the tariffs and the delayed contracts end up going through, then that means there was actually no effect.

There are two ways to look at this story.

You can take it at face value and you can wring your hands over what this story apparently is trying to convey.

Or you can understand the way companies and politics and the media manipulates perception to get outcomes they want.

On the second point, let's read between the lines.

So 2.5 billion is "canceled or frozen". Okay, what percentage is canceled and what percentage is frozen? How many of these projects were actually going to happen anyway?

I have been a part of numerous attempts to manipulate public opinion by claiming that projects were canceled that never were going to happen anyway or making a big show of "freezing" things, when everybody knows the project is going to go through eventually.

In many cases "freezing" is indistinguishable from "we can't do anything right now and we are just waiting to get everything rolling".

I mean, I used to be involved with a company that made up a whole PR campaign about switching to another company for a key contract just as a negotiating tactic, when internally we knew that we weren't going anywhere. This campaign came complete with actual (truthy) quotes from real engineers at the company saying we were considering switching vendors. Of course it wasn't a lie, because we did have a five minute conversation internally about how we were thinking about switching companies, but the intention was never serious.

I am aware of a venture just several weeks ago that fed the media completely manufactured narratives, and these narratives were dutifully swallowed uncritically and subsequently disseminated as fact. In this case, the company needed justification for doing something, so it called up a "friend" and had the friend issue a press release that a certain thing was getting "canceled". We all know internally that it's bullshit and eventually this thing will happen.

So maybe everything here is really true, and may be $2.5 billion of contracts aren't going to happen. Or maybe this is the solar industry playing politics and attempting to create a narrative and pressure the administration to lift the tariffs.

So, I would ask people to re-examine their confirmation bias and/or stop being so credulous.

That is his whole point. Bible stories...archetypes.

It's like saying Sam Harris would make a lot of sense if he'd just stop rambling about consciousness, ethics, and AI.

When a doctrine mocks itself.

So, what evidence would you accept?

Because there’s suddenly a bunch of money available from the tax cuts.

You’re missing the point completely.

I’m really glad to hear that I’m not being targeted. However, I don’t much care about what the intent is, I care about what the effect is.

And what I see is a law that is vague and enforcement agents are given broad discretion. What this looks like is that each case become “facts and circumstances” case, which is an absolute nightmare from a compliance standpoint.

And the additional paperwork and personnel requirements appear to be non-trivial and will add a significant amount to the minimum necessary capital and labor needed to start a startup .

The inevitable and undisputable result is that at least some startups on the margin which could’ve made it before the law was passed will not make it after the law was passed.

Supporters would argue this is a good thing, but I would argue it is not.

Your comment sounds so Orwellian I can’t help but cringe.

Bullshit. Sometimes regulators want to shut down your company. Bureaucrats are not immune from politics.