jollybean

"this should create new prosperity for those who have been unable to enjoy access to fair courts and binding contracts. "

This is the heady mythology of those who said 'Crypto would create XYZ for those who cannot'.

Except it's been 10 years of Crypto popularity and they have no material function, are a huge drain of energy and human intellectual capital.

Contracts are subject to legal oversight of a Judicial system, the credibility of which is require of a system to function.

Digitization of a 'contract' really doesn't make sense so much at all in terms of it's 'legality'. The algorithm whether it's in regular code or Ehterium makes no difference.

If someone really wanted to 'help those without legal recourse' they'd just use a foreign legal system for transaction record. So, contracts between 2 people in Haiti could be designated under 'Canadian Law'.

But even that would be besides the point: It's not the 'legal system' that makes things work, it's the integrity of the system overall, maintained by a 'legal system'. Canada isn't rich because it has a 'legal system' - that's just one component. It's rich because people and groups act with integrity. The 'law' is involved very rarely.

There's no technical utopia that will replace 'integrity'. Or frankly 'values'.

Ehterium is a neat experiment, that's all it is for now.

"So you can implement legally binding (and unstoppable) contracts "

No - they are not necessarily legally binding.

They are just called 'contracts'.

We have no idea what they mean, and each individual 'contract' will have to be scrutinized by the Judge, or else it's not 'legal' anything.

Gaming does something i.e. entertain.

Crypto does nothing. Or you could argue, it 'entertains'. But in a way that is unnecessary (it's a distraction, not entertainment), and in a manner that creates unnecessary energy costs (PoW vs PoS).

It's not paper or digits it's a social contract i.e. 'power'.

The lesson for 'management' is get better contracts and don't invest and develop people who will walk out with your stuff.

Item 'A' is a bit more reasonable, people not getting paid is bad.

But item 'B' is not. Sorry, you don't just get to ask for a better deal after the fact, because it finally worked out and now in 20/20 hindsight you want a cut.

It's fair for employees to ask, it's fair to be told know.

"You cannot apply copyright to the knowledge of your employees. "

? Absolutely you can, legally.

But the issues is just as much moral one.

The owners put it together and paid for the employees to make all sorts of mistakes etc..

It would be shameful if they did that.

All of that said I don't think that's the case.

That's what I mean. And because it's CEOs and not CTOs it's likely a Zero-Day related to something geopolitical.

The West is at war, my downvoting detractors are naive to not contemplate that the world's #2 Army is not running shenanigans as they have literally publicly stated they would, and we have direct evidence to support it. And literally Biden gov. urging US businesses to 'patch up' at the start of the war. They are looking for whatever leverage they can. And there are other capable enemies notably China and North Korea.

If in fact this rumour is true, i.e. 'CEOs doing this at the same time' then this could very well be a national security issue.

$150B is a small amount of money that is otherwise just sitting there. Nobody is using it for anything and it's not growing.

It's generally a riskless thing thing to put your money in so it's not surprising that a few funds have gone big on it. They will fold the bet eventually.

Yeah this story has a problem.

An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality.

It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.

Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails.

It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'.

Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy.

Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity.

It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided.

I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward.

Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team.

[1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...

FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again.

I would reserve judgment on these situations.

Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.

Your 'convictions' will not help you predict where a herd of cows will move or stampede. And that's all BTC is. Whatever a crew of people believe it will be worth. Other currencies are integrated into the economy, which gives them a baseline value from which valuation isn't going to go to far away from.

Moreover, the entire philosophy of holding BTC as some store of value destroys the notion of BTC as a viable currency.

It should not have been any kind of 'investment' in the first place.

"If there was some crypto without any incentives of hodling long term, "

The opposite.

Cryptos that are anchored to USD have no appeal. They're less useful than USD, and, there's no 'get rich quick' aspect. So what's the point.

The Ponzi Mania is what drives people into BTC and to talk about it incessantly on the Internet etc.. Without the mania, it's not going to spread.

An institutionalized crypto, like one by the government, and which had some kind of stability (i.e. central banked) would probably get critical mass and therefore have some utility.

El Salvador leader is basically criminally derelict, he should be jailed.

For sure. Critical technology companies for sure have these kinds of plans and things ready.

And these big brand companies with international offices are full of spies it's good cover.

Yeah, I think the hint is that something is going on here.

Like possibly a national security issue of some kind.

'We' are at 'war' with Russia, after all.

It doesn't really matter what they believe, judicially.

Trump believed he won the election.

The students should also be given actual leadership, so that they can contextualize their concerns, and understand when they're being tits.

Some of them want to be tits, which is fine, so long as they aren't being overly vindictive or violent, being a tit is not illegal in most cases.

That there is no easy way to contextualize all of this is insane.

People seem to take one of 'either side' and can't find where a reasonable landing point is.

It's hard because the 'system' in Academia is judicializing their moral perspective, aka referring to protesters as 'terrorists' off hand is considered 'crime' when really it's 'insensitive and irresponsible'.

I should not be that hard and these schools and unions need to be reformed.

Yes, you can. The whole point of white collar work is to escape Little's Law. Automation, outsourcing, better processes etc..

So that's neat, but not what I was saying.

This is completely the wrong way to think about division of labour.

We started to figure this out 300 years ago for god's sake.

It's not helpful think about our tasks as a series of bits of work to be accomplished that we hire spigot-workers to do. White collar work is mostly not labour in that sense.

Thinking about your organization like a CPU doing calculations is utterly the wrong analogy.

More like band, playing a song - most tasks have some level of optimal participation you don't want to be below or over, and/or it might be incrementally harder to improve quality depending on variables. And 'talent' usually matters more than anything.

There's a fundamental difference.

He said something he thought to be true - he was making a rhetorical point, in an uncomfortable and insensitive manner. He doesn't really come from a position of power and notably, has wasn't 'going after' anyone, just making a dumb comment.

The person representing the authority or power in the equation ... it doesn't matter much what their statements were, the fact is they went after him (and others) in a systematic and authoritarian manner.

At most, he should have been asked to apologize for being insensitive.

The school, however, needs to be investigated for systematic oppression of profs. using their weird internal investigations to harass people (aka '9 hour interviews? That's fing STASI like stuff, it's what the FBI does to serial killers. Could you imagine your employer grilling you in a room for 9 hours?).

He spoke out of line, the school acted with retribution using arbitrary authority.

"The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. "

WTF? This is a bad way to think about the 'division of labour'.

One man cannot ever get over a 10 foot wall.

Two men together can absolutely do it.

'Work' is not the measurement, 'productivity' is.

Even the fleeting thinker, who works only 1 day a week, but shows up every day, may be absolutely critical to making things work. Paid for that input, when it matters, not 'daily wages'.

I think they mean to see children are not curious in a concientious and applied way.

All kids are a bit curious, but it's hard to get them to 'stick' to something.

No, this is definitely not about money, and it's not even about ideology - it's petty backstabbing vindictiveness. These are adults beating each other up on the playground.

The professor is literally and obviously a victim of an ideological and authoritarian mob attack on his career. Blatant.

Claims of victimhood by any other group are debatable in any general context.

I'm ashamed that intelligent adults on HN could somehow come to the conclusion that ganging up on professors who have opinions different than one's own is somehow warranted. It's repulsive.

Twitter is not an 'agent' of the US Government, that's completely ridiculous, as is the lawsuit alleging that somehow the government (really political entity) somehow 'forced' Twitter to do something political. There's nothing there.

It's not Twitter.

The problem is vindictive people in positions of authority, with no constraints, and heavy ideology aka Universities.

Most American corporations are not ideological, the public sector is a highly constrained place.

Universities allow profs to have their petty adult beefs with each other, veiled in intellectual language or moralisms etc..

We need to do far far more than re-instate the profs - the school adminstrators need to be investigated, and damages need to be paid so as to keep them from these shenanigans. Finally, they need to change the administrative situation so that these things never happen again.

???

An adult female and an adult male having a consensual relations is related to 'rights' in what way exactly?

Because I don't think that has anything to do with the situation.

Exploitative by whom? Students don't have to f** profs, it's never been that way.

Your posture is actually sexist, implying that somehow adult females cannot make their own choices.

There's an actual 'irony' in those that have difficulty grasping the difference between rhetoric about perceived social victimhood, and actual direct victhimhood, sneering about 'irony and victomhood'.

Whether or not Black people are victims in any given scenario is debatable. Firing this prof is obviously ridiculous and speaks to the actual authoritarian systems on campus.

Because it's not arbitrary, that's the point.

Also, having 'a good job and good family' would likely also be a form of 'eudaimonic' happiness.

'Hedonic' happiness is more like being in a 'joyful state of being'.

It has nothing to do with 'yimby/imby/anarcho' anything.

People who live in quiet communities generally don't want their areas turning into Manhatten, that's it, it's the same everywhere.

You need to come around to the fact that people who live in areas have the right to live they they want.

You need to come around to the fact that 'density' is a worthless metric, that has little advantage.

It's laughable that you think 'boomers' are the one's who want to live in peace and quiet, that's 99% of people. Almost anyone, were they able to move to Atherton, would not want low cost density next to them.

FYI people are leaving Cali, build better transport and it'll solve a lot of these problems.