I created a side project to deal with this, but honestly, I’m doing a bit of rewrite and it should be considered beta.
1,517 karma · joined April 7, 2011
If you don’t have the ability to alter your feeds, taking a break from them is the next best thing.
I believe the article is factually correct-ish, but is sensationalized and is spreading FUD and causing unnecessary potential panic.
That's why. I'm downplaying because it needs downplaying.
Just because the article is ridiculous does not mean I disagree with every single thing in there. I just think it's ridiculous, particularly in tone.
And also, I stand behind saying there's plenty of food and water. So, by all means "conserve food and water" if you want to, but saying that people "need" to is overstating the reality.
Not sure where I said "don't shelter in place". Not sure where I said "don't listen to people more experienced".
All I said is that nobody is going to starve or die of dehydration because they ran out of food/water. I stand behind that.
Food and water is everywhere. They will not run out unless this thing lasts another week.
If some people run out, others will have extra. Of this I am 100% sure.
As someone who is not there, but who has been there four times and run build lead for my camp...
Rain is not unheard of. It's probably pretty muddy and less fun than it normally would be.
Nobody is starving or dying of dehydration, and there is no danger of that. Most camps (and many people) have a huge surplus of supplies. Last time I was there, I drove out with a few dozen cans of sparkling water that I just didn't get to hand out.
There are PLENTY of supplies.
The worst thing that could happen is that somebody has a medical emergency and are unable to be evacuated until Monday/Tuesday. That's a real concern, but there are plenty of platforms that can land a helicopter if that's necessary.
This isn't the catastrophe calling for FEMA involvement that the article makes it sound like. :rolleyes:
The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.
Having said that, "Streams of Wisdom" by Dustin Diperna is, IMO, the finest 40,000 foot view of meditation and spiritual development that I know of.
For an actual no bullshit practical guide to meditation Eckhart Tolle's "The power of now" is what I would point to. You really need nothing more than this book.
I've also done many healing modalities, including somatic experiencing.
From my perspective, we have taken "Buddhism" and "meditation" and we have done what us Westerners almost always do: we boil it down into "stuff that does stuff" and "everything else".
We are so intensely and impatiently interested in "doing stuff".
So, we have taken a tradition/religion that has existed for thousands of years, includes many practices and parts, and we have pulled out the part that "does stuff", and we call that mindfulness.
But, if you really look at the tradition itself, particularly in non-Zen forms of Buddhism, what you often see is what are called "preliminary practices". Used to, if the Westerner goes east in search of meditation instruction, he or she has to get special permission to skip the preliminary practices.
And what our preliminary practices? In the West we call that therapy.
So, this really important thing, that one must do therapy and what they would call in the East "purification" before one is ready to start meditating has been tossed aside because it doesn't yield immediate results like a few days of mindfulness.
In addition, the traditions are almost totally unaware of our understanding of trauma and the best they can do is use the language of "demons".
So, I'm aware of "mindful-based stress reduction", but I'm not intimately familiar with it. It doesn't make sense to me why someone would use mindfulness to reduce stress or in place of a therapeutic or trauma modality.
I mean, sometimes it is way more comfortable to not be aware of things than to be aware of things. And, in my experience, becoming aware of oneself is just a bunch of not fun realizations, including realizations like "I'm a people pleaser" or "I always sabotage relationships in a similar way".
These realizations are not fun because just seeing the truth or the pattern doesn't change it, so you sit and watch yourself doing the same shit over and over and not quite having the power to change it... That requires much deeper meditation and awareness.
At any point in this process, one can become too aware and too burdened with one's issues, and that can result in all kinds of stuff including breakdown and psychosis.
At the end of the day, meditation and mindfulness and all the rest is basically just the matrix movie... Don't take the red pill unless you really want the red pill because sleepwalking through life unaware of one's issues and happily eating the steak that isn't there is sometimes more pleasant.
Meditation is for those who want the truth, regardless of whether it feels good or not. For everyone else, there's therapy.
I believe that my soul chose this life to learn what I'm learning. And whether I'm conscious of it or not, the "higher self" part of me hangs around in the background to ensure that I learn what I need to. This isn't typically what one would expect from what other religions would call a "guardian angel", but that's kind of how I see it.
Like, sometimes I can't take losses. That's deep family karma from being afraid of being poor. However, being unable to take losses means that you make poor decisions. Not being able to make good financial decisions makes people poor, and just continues the intergenerational cycle of poverty.
So, my unconscious "higher self" carefully arranges events such that I encounter maximum pain for going along with this karmic thing I'm supposed to transcend. The pain facilitates the learning, and thus the freedom from the karma.
Ultimately, the point of existence is to experience everything that can be experienced in every lifetime and learn everything that can be learned, resulting in ultimate freedom from karma and liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
Or, you can just meditate a lot, and I guess I'm working on that.
It always worked for me before. My investing history is a long string of huge successes beginning in 2014.
I've always invested in companies I believed in and that had solid fundamentals.
It appears the market doesn't give a shit about company fundamentals right now. Most small growth companies are down ~80%. The two companies I lost everything in are currently priced below liquidation value.
Yeah, I bought on margin, so that gave me 2x leverage, so if it goes down 50% you get margin called.
Like I said. I have learned lots.
I have lost about 95% of my liquid net worth this year, due to hubris, basically. The first half of 2022 for me was waking up every morning and feeling like puking a little as I get more under water, closer to that margin call, plunging through my stops.
After almost a year of this, I have found a perspective that is helpful for me and may be helpful for you.
It is my firm belief that you are meant to learn certain things in life, and your subconscious very carefully and meticulously arranges your life circumstances to learn these things. This is why you often find yourself shaking your head and saying "I got myself into this".
It may be different for you, but I have realized that the thing I needed to learn is that my net worth is not my self-worth. I realized that I've desperately been trying to make money my whole life so that people will like me and I can avoid the pain that I saw caused by poverty when I grew up.
I have been blessed to have money and realize that neither one of those things are true, and then I guess I have been blessed to be tested on what I learned the first time around by losing it.
I have also come to realize that I don't need all that much money to live a comfortable life.
These are the things that I learned. They may not be what you are intended to learn.
So, take it easy on yourself. What happened may have been completely out of your control, or it might have been something that you contributed to. Either way, it's done.
Take some time to feel shitty, because you will, but consider changing perspectives and start looking at what you can learn from this and maybe even what opportunities have opened up because of it.
It's very disappointing to see all of the knee-jerk reactions about urbit here.
I bought my galaxy from Tlon a couple of years ago before Curtis left the project. I don't know Curtis, only met him once for a brief lunch. I used to browse his blog, and honestly found it thought-provoking but ultimately wrong. To say that I don't share his political and philosophical views would be an understatement.
And yet, I find that the structure of the Urbit network means that it doesn't matter. I have my galaxy and I can do what I want with it, which will definitely at times not be what Tlon wants me to do with it, and if you are a planet or a star under my galaxy and you don't like it you can move to another. There are 255 other galaxies and 64,999 other stars.
I don't understand the criticism of this being digital feudalism. I mean, if you want to call a planet a "peasant", and you want to say that stars and galaxies are some sort of feudal lord, then okay, but specifically what do you mean? As opposed to Facebook, or Google, as a galaxy owner I don't have your data, can't look at your traffic, and can't monetize your personal information. I can't spam you. The only thing I can do is block you, and in five minutes you can switch over to another galaxy. As long as there is one independent galaxy out of 256, then every person on the network can switch over to that galaxy. There's no monopoly power here unless you own all 256 galaxies, which would basically amount to a failure of the whole system and frankly I don't see how that could happen. I'm not selling mine.
There is also a lot of criticism about selling address space. Well, of course there are 4 billion addresses, and at $10 a piece, that's a lot of money some day if the network succeeds. But if the network succeeds, we are talking about a new Internet, and I think $40 billion is modest. It's also important to be clear that for everyone who bought address space already, we certainly didn't pay $10 per address, so Tlon isn't laughing all the way to the bank. And as a galaxy holder, I'm figuring that planet prices go down and maybe go as low as five dollars each or free as a loss leader. The money will be made in providing hosting and value added services on top of the network, and what exactly is wrong with that? Right now, OS1 has a built-in blog application, a chat application, a slack clone, and a reddit clone. Short on features, sure, but if all of that isn't worth a one time fee of $5, then I would argue you're just being a stubborn polemicist.
I'm also a critic of the tendency to be obscure. Curtis' trollishness, without a doubt comes out in the programming language. Again, I don't really care. I don't know Hoon. Maybe i'll learn it at some point. Hoon school classes are constantly full. People will learn it. For those who don't want to, there will be APIs, so that I can write in my native language. That's totally possible, and the whole thing is open source.
Finally, the whole "I can't figure out how to use it argument" is not unique to Urbit. Yes, the documentation needs to be improved. Yes the sign-up process needs to be improved. That is priority #1 from the team. But really, how easy is linux to use? In my opinion, not. I've been a mediocre developer for 10 years, and I still can't maintain my own box. I set up a server 10 years ago, and I went to set up that same server, with the same software today, and running the same commands doesn't give me the same thing. All new versions, with all new dependencies, some of them conflict. I break out in cold sweats every time I have to do a security update or upgrade, afraid that everything is going to break. The only thing to do is learn the new magic phrases to make the box do exactly what I want it to do. For me Linux is totally opaque, obscure, and I've given up on understanding it.
I am assured by the team, and I believe them, that we will have easy, non technical installation and hosting by the end of the year.
And that's why i'm excited about Urbit. It's an IOS and app store that I own and control 100%. It's a VPS that (soon) will just work, that maintains itself, that keeps my data under my control. It's a merciful exit from this horrible, dare I say it, feudalistic system in which the lords of FB, Google, and the like own and use (abuse) my data as they please.
So, I get it if you have impressions of the project based on how it was two or five years ago, but you are mistaken. The core developers on Urbit are some of the hardest working, competent, and idealistic people i've ever met. It's a joy to be involved, which is not what I can say about a lot of projects.
The thing I love most about Urbit is it's not blowing $1 billion on marketing, or trying to be the cool thing on the block. Ever since I've been involved, they have quietly kept their head down and shipped. Even against all of the hate, and I have a lot of respect for that. Go watch the launch event for OS1 and watch one of the core developers talking about how badly he wants to build the best e-reader ever, and tell me that the passion isn't contagious.
The idea that healthcare can be centrally managed comes from people assuming it's way simpler than it is.
Vague and handwringing up front.
Then the truth is buried at the bottom where nobody is going to find it.
Turns out, the rule was passed in 2011. It was challenged in court, and the Supreme Court upheld the challenge. It appears the Obama administration was using dubious logic to calculate the "co-benefits"... which is what everybody knows is going on anyway.
This is just a fancy justification to let the Obama administration kill coal power plants. I'm not for or against it, but it seems obvious.
If a previous administration passed a rule, I don't know what argument we can use to say that a future administration can't change that rule.
And anyone knows that it's pretty easy to lie with statistics and estimates, so the Obama administration surprisingly decided that the rule brought more benefits than costs, and the industry surprisingly says that the rule costs $1500 for every $1 in benefits. The truth is somewhere in between. I don't know what the truth is.
The only thing I know is that the NYT isn't helping us get there and appears to think the truth is irrelevant.
That said, I have never seen any convincing argument that LN routing can't work in theory... Especially because the lightning network is not completely decentralized on purpose. It works off the idea of "hubs", in which you will connect to a hub, likely one hop, and then the hub will most of the time get to your destination in one or two hops. I'd really like to see someone who claims that we don't have the ability to connect two points in a graph separated by three, or even four, hops. This is just made up nonsense.
The middle part of your comment is just "kids, get off my lawn". Why would anyone need anything besides venmo or cash? Do you mail cash to purchase things online? How many large Internet retailers accept venmo? How many people are implementing micro payments using venmo?
The rest of your comment is just an ad-hominem. And not only is it that, but it's also nonsensical because maybe I have some bitcoins because i'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Also, the travelling salesman problem is bullshit and irrelevant, because LN doesn't need to have the shortest possible route to work, it just needs a workable route.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/attacking-the-motive-fallac...