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The YouTube subscription just seems excessively expensive. I find it hard to fathom they would generate anywhere near as much revenue from me watching their ads compared to the subscription cost.

> I suspect they are better than stainless for long term storage of certain things.

I'm confused, how is that relevant to the topic at hand?

With credit cards, you have to give out your details to whoever you are paying. That party will save them somewhere and then there is a possibility that someone else will gain access to your details and abuse them. You won't ultimaltely lose money here, because your credit card company will reverse the transactions, as you said. Being the victim of credit card fraud is still a hassle, however.

With crypto, the only thing you give out is your public key. No one can perform any fraudulent activity with just your public key. It is of course possible to be defrauded with crypto, but then it will be partially your fault because you did something you should not have. With credit cards, you can become the victim of fraud through no fault of your own.

I do think that is a difference worth pointing out.

Well sure, I can send money around using third-party services, but the official banking system is not that fast.

> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge

This is certainly not the case everywhere in the EU. In Germany for example it usually takes days. Not sure about other countries.

> Bitcoin has yet to achieve price stability against real goods, because the price of bitcoin versus the real dollar goes up and down by tens of percent on a monthly basis.

True, but Bitcoin still has a fixed supply. If adoption continues (and it might not), it does provide protection against an inflated dollar.

> If you want price stability, use Tether.

But price stability does not protect you from inflation, which was the point here.

> we don’t have perfect code or computers efficient enough to do proof of work

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the point of proof of work precisely that it takes resources to perform this work? I.e. it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Yes, to make this clear: the actual image (or whatever other type of media) is not stored on chain, only a link to the image.

I don't think this is an example of Russel's teapot. In Russel's teapot, you are giving a solid explanation of what you are claiming, it just happens to be unfalsifiable.

In the example I was criticizing, the word "God" was used without any further explanation of its meaning (in a thread which hosts discussions on different definitions of the word "God" no less).

Of course, if you are a priori assuming that any definition of God is going to be unfalsifiable, you can draw the connection to Russel's teapot, but again, I don't think you can convincingly do this without knowing all the definitions.

Let's say it isn't the idea of religion I got growing up. There was no one around who could make a convincing case for Christianity, so I and everyone I knew thought religious people were completely delusional.

As I (very) slowly try to reduce my ignorance around the topic, I find that uncovering a more traditional understanding of it reveals something much more rich than I was led to believe. That's precisely my point :)

> But one of the reasons I don't like talking about religion on HN is that I've found a computer science centric way of thinking about some sub branches of philosophy and theology is a dead end. We're used to dealing with such pedantry and strict logic that I find we over use them in places where they're not nearly as useful as they seem.

Fair enough. I like discussing religion in circles like this one, because I'm convinced there is a lot of value to be found in religious traditions, but I find it hard to connect to the typical religious crowd.

It seems like a statement like this cannot be made without first giving a definition of God. Clearly, people have different ideas of what God is.

So either you are saying there is no evidence for one particular definition of God, but you are not giving us the definition or you are saying there is no evidence for any of the different definitions of God that might exist. The latter is a difficult argument to make in my estimation, because any one person is probably ignorant about a sizeable portion of definitions.

Interestingly this sounds like the new agey saying "We are the universe experiencing itself".

> Quran 2:115 states that wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah.

So Allah is everything or at least he is IN everything. The universe is everything.

> the Quran states that He specifically created mankind to know Him.

Mankind experiences Allah, the universe.

Would you agree with this kind of mapping or am I making any unjustified leaps here?

Interestingly, this line of thought seems compatible with the description of God in the bible to me. If you put aside all your preconceived notions of some dude in the sky and simply read the bible for what it is, you'll find things like "I am what I am", "I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end", etc. The Cristian God is called the Father. And what is a father but a source? The first link in a causality chain that leads to new life?

Sometimes I really wonder if our current understanding of Christianity is just completely different from what it meant originally.

From what I remember when I last looked into it: We underestimate how bright sunlight is. Screens just aren't bright enough. They only appear to be bright to us because they are one of the few light sources in indoor environments.

But in this case it seems a lot more clear that it doesn't matter if it is the original or merely something that resembles the original. I don't care about the actual bytes on a hard drive, the grooves on a vinyl or whatever else the medium may be. This is all just a manifestation of something which is beyond the material realm. I care about the song, not the specific way the song is represented in the world of matter.

While it is true that incidences of myopia are increasing, we don't quite have the evidence to assert that it is due to phone and computer use. Indeed, many studies suggest that the reason might actually be a lack of bright light (i.e. sunlight) and that deliberate exposure to bright light may actually be a good intervention to prevent myopia (see e.g. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26635-7, https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2355431)

While you make a fair point, it seems like the alternative is to assume that the consensus opinion is the correct one and discard everything else. That doesn't seem like the way to go to me.

It's clear that Rogan himself is not an intellectual. He will be the first person to tell you that.

That seems to be the appeal of his show, though. He talks to experts (not all of them intellectuals) without being an expert himself. That's useful as a listener, because chances are you aren't an expert in any given field and listening to two experts talk would be borderline imcomprehensible to you.

So they are taking steps which are ostensibly geared towards this drug dealer vision. But is it working? I can only look at myself and the people around me. There was a time when we would go on Netflix binges and there probably was something drug-like about it. But now? I go on Netflix, I scroll around for a bit, can't find anything I would like to watch, and I close Netflix again. The only reason I'm still paying for it is that I'm sharing my account with other people and it would be a hassle to cancel the subscription. And it's not just me, everyone I talk with is reporting the same thing.

Counterexample: SpaceX. Sometimes, starting from scratch can be very helpful.

I simply take it as a description of reality. As a child, you are nothing yet, but you have the potential to become almost anything. As you get older, you trade in that potential for something specific. It's up to you to choose. You can trade all your potential for one thing only or you can divide it up to become multiple things. The right balance is debatable. The real danger lies in taking it to the limit. If you try to become everything, you divide your potential up into infinitesimal pieces and end up remaining nothing at all, a child.

In any case, there is some real wisdom in Peter Pan, but it was completely lost on me as a child.

There really seem to be different ways of quitting. You can quit while remaining addicted, but you can also quit by getting over the addiction. Clearly, you have taken the first path, i.e. are playing on hard mode. I know this path well, but for my final attempt somehow managed to take the second path after 10 years of smoking. It was easy. It continues to be easy. I don't know, but I suspect if I had one cigarette today, I'd be back to a pack a day tomorrow, so in that sense I'm still different to someone who has never smoked in the first place. But I don't have the slightest urge to smoke that first cigarette.

If we could get a clear understanding on how to facilitate this second path, that would truly be helpful to a lot of people.

If you can't manage it every day, a less frequent habit will still have benefits.

I've been doing strength training once a week since the pandemic startet, and it has been great. Obviously I could have made much more progress with more frequent training, but I still look much better naked and more importantly, I feel much better. So many random aches and pains have just disappeared.

In the context of their relationship (comedy), Chappelle is certainly much higher status than Rogan.

The issue with an approach like this is that it's merely fighting the symptoms of the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that you have more demand than supply and something is preventing the market from rectifying this problem. Capping rents can only make the underlying problem worse, because there is now less incentive to create new housing.

Now, of course, you might say the thing that is preventing the market from rectifying the situation is that there simply isn't enough space. And that is partially true, there are real physical limits here. But it's not like Berlin is a super high density city, so I find it hard to believe that we're anywhere close to reaching those limits.

Methamphetamine is sometimes prescribed for ADHD under the name "Desoxyn". While medical professionals appear hesitant to do so, patients who are prescribed Desoxyn rate it much higher than other ADHD drugs.

Here is my take: Writing is thinking. As long as you have some topic to write about that has been on your mind for a while, writing about it is a wonderful opportunity to structure your thoughts, make explicit and conscious what has thus far been floating around in your unconscious and thereby see the topic more clearly, come to new observations and new conclusions.

Yes, that assertion sound like it's coming from someone who has never actually used Bitcoin.

There are cryptos which are instant and without transaction fees (e.g. Nano for payments and maybe in the future IOTA as an alternative to Ethereum). So there is some hope for the technology, but it remains to be seen if any of this actually takes off.

Transaction fees appear to be significantly higher than $5 at the moment (see e.g. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-transaction-fees-hit-recor...).