1,511 karma · joined February 25, 2014
Shareholder capitalism has fucked up the minds of so many people (especially Americans) where they think the purpose of a company is to extract maximum value for the shareholders. Sorry, no. The purpose of a company is to either a) fulfill their mission to the best of their ability (which is never “maximize shareholder value”), or b) provide quality goods/services at a fair price.
For me, Stealth Mountain is a much more whimsical form of art than the diarrhea taco stand. But there are plenty of uncomfortable works out there that firmly fall within the category of art. I’ve seen a literal shit machine at a gallery [0], and it would only take a few seconds of searching to find dozens of performance art works to make one uncomfortable.
While that is indeed a logical fallacy, doctors are in the business of evidence-based care. How could a doctor responsibly recommend a course of treatment for something which has little evidence, as something unproven would have. Many treatments have both positive and negative effects, and a doctor would typically only recommend a treatment when the good outweighs the bad. On the flip side, there many unproven or proven ineffective treatments patients frequently self-prescribe/self-administer which a doctor would let slide on the basis of it also being harmless. After all, the placebo effect is powerful in and of itself. Taking a wholistic view, medicine is about maximizing the quality of life for patients, as opposed to just being about curing everything. It’s not clear to me how a doctor could responsibly recommend any treatment with potential downsides to a patient with an unproven diagnosis. Such a treatment might indeed help the patient, but it’s a risk/reward tradeoff that needs to be balanced, and while the patient should absolutely be involved in deciding where to draw the line, the vast majority are simply not knowledgeable enough to accurately assess the situation.
It’s a shame that to be able to run an above-board _Internet_ Archive one needs to bend to the whim of anachronistic copyright law and forego all the benefits of the internet in the first place. This seems like it would inevitably mean that any _internet_ archive that is truly accessible over the _internet_ would be forced to operate illegally in a similar manner to SciHub.
I know I hold a rather strong opinion regarding copyright law (I’m not looking to debate it here as I know others hold different opinions which is totally fine), but IMHO copyright law has been a major blight on humanity at large and especially the internet. Major reform is in order at the very least, if not total abolishment.
My intuition would say there are 3 cases when content ceases to become available at the original site:
- The host becomes unable to host the content for some reason (bankruptcy, death, etc.) in which case I assume the archive persists.
- The host is externally required to remove the content (copyright, etc.) in which case I assume IA would face the same external pressure? But I’m not sure on that.
- The host/owner has a change of heart about publishing the content. This borders more on IA acting as reputation management on the part of the original host/owner. Personally I think this is hardest to defend but also probably the least common case. In this case I’d think it’s most often to hide something the original host doesn’t want the public finding out later, but that also seems to make it more valuable to be publicly available in the archive. Plus, from a historian/journalist perspective, it’s valuable to be able to track how things change over time, and hiding this from the public prevents that. Though to be honest I’m kind of in two minds here because on the other hand I’m generally of the opinion that people can grow and change, and we shouldn’t hold people to account for opinions they published a decade ago, for example. I’m also generally in favor of the right to be forgotten.
Would appreciate your thoughts here.
I know from talking to my American colleagues that my total comp is around the same level as theirs, so at least at my company they don't undercut US citizens.
Your listed PW does seem quite low, and I don't know how they actually measure it. I certainly agree that companies will do whatever they can to lower wages for all worker, and not including stock or bonus in the prevailing wage is ripe for abuse. Perhaps some reform for this law is in order.
This is commonly stated but is not true. US companies are required to pay the "Prevailing Wage" [0] to H-1Bs, so they cannot use foreigners to undercut US citizens.
However, foreigners whose presence in the US is dependent on their employment are certainly more likely to be abused by employers
As someone coming from the PoW worlds of Bitcoin and Monero there has always been something about PoS that gave me an ick, but I could never quite place my finger on it. Especially when Ethereum clearly seems to have PoS working well in practice. I’ve always had a suspicion that Ethereum could have never gotten off the ground, at least to the success level it currently has, if it had been PoS initially.
The mechanics of slashing not working are interesting. Do we know of any abuse attempts by validators and have we seen any validators get slashed yet?
Your point about PoS not being truly permissionless is a big one for me. Aside from it being fundamentally opposed to the core promises of cryptocurrencies, what’s to stop TPTB from slowly accumulating enough of a stake and then bam, we’re back to the legacy permissioned finance ecosystem but with MUCH more fine-grained tracking and telemetry. That seems like an extremely pernicious attack.
The point about trust is another big one. Cryptocurrencies are meant to be trustless. That means a user doesn’t need to trust anyone else as they can fully validate their view of the world for themselves. Of course they may trust other participants for efficiency, but they don’t need to. And caveat emptor, as with all distributed systems you must assume (trust) that you are not currency inside a partitioned network, since AFAIK there is no way a system can internally verify that it is not.
How much these things matter in practice only time will tell. Ethereum appears to be working well at the moment and just keeps chugging along.
I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web. First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks. Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle. Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently. Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website. Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.
I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.
0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens...
[0] Freak_NL says: "OpenStreetMap meets 4chan"
What? Have you ever visited 4chan? It's WAY more offensive than anything here.
[1] amsterdorn says: "Yep, I don't like it. Amplifies racist and ignorant voices."
AFAIK there is no mechanism to artificially favor any particular view. There is only the thumbs up/down mechanism meaning what you see is what the userbase finds useful or amusing.
I am genuinely not seeing what the problem is. Can someone please explain? If you're going to say something like "Black people live here" is racist then I'm sorry I'm going to have to disagree. Observations are not racist, and if the labeling is inaccurate _then give it a thumbs down_. Not every site on the internet has to be a sterile, advertiser-friendly, corpo walled garden. Ever heard of having fun? I'm trying really hard to not pass judgement but it honestly seems like so many people commenting here have a stick up their ass.