194 karma · joined April 29, 2014
No, it makes it a lot harder. It's easiest on a short-term basis if I constantly echo a phrase over and over in my head, like an internal metronome. I can't do that and talk at the same time. Nothing really helps, it is actual physical damage to your brain and nobody knows how to fix it. The best thing is to just accept that your brain is really broken and start finding mnemonics and workarounds to get by.
Solitary confinement causes brain damage so severe it is visible on a CT scan. The area that it damages is the hippocampus, which is key of in the perception of time and spatial memory. I can still perceive time on an immediate basis, in terms of music and speech, but a year goes by in a haze. Short seconds, like walking into another room, seem to pass slowly against the rapid progress of my thoughts which are now unanchored to the immediate physical realm and I forget what I went to the other room for if there's not a persistent reminder such as hunger or the need to use the toilet to remind me. I write what I plan to do into a notes app before I move anywhere, even one room over in my own house. Living a normal life has become impossible.
Be careful what you wish for, generally going around throwing your political enemies in prisons has frequently had longterm consequences for the safety of the people doing so and the people that support it.
Though I was unjustly convicted under false pretenses by federal prosecutors willing to lie and misrepresent the law and my rights were deeply violated, having been to prison in the process I found it filled with quite a large number of people who absolutely should be there. One drug dealer, for example, laughed about forcing a desperate woman to fuck his dog for dope. There were also a pair of twins that tried to acquire a toddler for use as a sex slave.
There were also some people that shouldn't have been there, perhaps not put in prison on false charges like me, but taking years off their life was a basic injustice that did nothing to advance society and likely encouraged further criminality.
All nice and stable societies have long-term incarceration. Japan has notoriously hard prisons, even worse than most federal facilities in the United States. If I could, I would change how the prisons worked and treated their prisoners. I would definitely segregate off some of the categories of prisoners from others, and we surely have enough facilities to do so. But without the ability to denaturalize people and permanently expel them to a prison colony, you are going to need large numbers of people in longterm confinement. I'd say society would be much better off if half the prisoners I met never walked free, and a quarter were never incarcerated in the first place. The US justice system has 3 major problems: it convicts too many people, lets the wrong people avoid prison, and has too many people given kid glove sentences who really should go down for a lot longer. Even having been falsely convicted and tortured by the United States, I am not so foolish as to believe in prison abolition.
loses to GPT-4 as it apparently geogates infrastructure, which GPT-4 does not.
More importantly, the vast majority of anonymous transactions occur via ownership secrecy havens. Quadrillions are held and transferred in offshore havens like Nevis, which has beneficiary and ownership secrecy baked into their constitution. Monero democratizes transaction secrecy, allowing the middle class to have the same level of financial privacy that criminal organizations attain regularly by incorporating in an offshore haven and hiring the appropriate lawyers. If transaction secrecy were a legitimate concern of yours, you would be eliminating it where it actually happens and facilitates crime first.
Before you call me lazy for not patching, there are a lot of vendors that have very long patch times. If you have an environment that is mission critical, you would be well advised to not use x86 at all in the server environment. My entire income is based on cryptocurrency, so if I get owned it would result in large uninsurable losses.
It is possible that Libgen's proprietors are known to law enforcement but never stepped within reach of Western legal authorities. Certainly, had Z-Library's staff all stayed within Russia, they never would have been arrested.
Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.
Anyways, I don't know who would win in a Carlsen - Ding WCC. Nobody does. If the game statistics are to be believed, then Ding would.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
Search for "Public Radio Station Revenues (FY20)" and you can plainly see a graph that states that 8% of their money comes from "Federal appropriation via CPB" and then another 5% comes from a combination of Federal, state, and local government sources.
The minute they get slapped with a state funded label they pretend that they only get 1% of their money from the government, in contrast to their reported finances for the past several decades. It is weasel word behavior to pretend that 8% of entirely federally sourced funds is irrelevant because it is passed through the CPB first (which is itself a state media agency, created by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967)
Financial institutions should not be allowed to discriminate against law abiding citizens. If a transaction is legal it should be their job to move the money from party A to party B.
As Ajit Pai's FCC Ruling stated:
>This consensus is among the reasons that there is scant evidence that end users, under different legal frameworks, have been prevented by blocking or throttling from accessing the content of their choosing. It also is among the reasons why providers have voluntarily abided by no-blocking practices even during periods where they were not legally required to do so. As to free expression in particular, we note that none of the actual incidents discussed in the Title II Order squarely implicated free speech. If anything, recent evidence suggests that hosting services, social media platforms, edge providers, and other providers of virtual Internet infrastructure are more likely to block content on viewpoint grounds.
This statement included a footnote specifically noting the unilateral suspension of The Daily Stormer.
Of course, "net neutrality" was struck down, YouTube was made to pay their bandwidth bills, and absolutely nothing changed at all. The corporate censors went on with their work of suspending everything that was bigoted, and then most Trump supporters, and then prominent Bernie supporters during the primaries, and then people who talked about the risks of experimental vaccines. They continue this regime of censorship up to this very day, but they have to pay for transit in places that it is limited.
It was an absolutely absurd fraud that went on for years, but the game is over. Why would anyone pretend that Net Neutrality means anything other than a cheaper bandwidth bill for Google at this point?
LN is definitely good for something where there's an in-person exchange of goods so at least potential abuse would leave someone at a physical location with surveillance footage, or where there is a subscription service that can be turned off if the payment turns out to be fraudulent. LN has a higher likelihood of assurance of funds delivery in a timely manner than a credit card -- but that there are entities developed that will insure traditional credit transactions.
You obviously sympathize with the mob destroying people's lives to trivialize the effects like this.
Which, to me, takes this outside the realm of "conspiracy theory" and into the realm of what the DOJ prosecutor is lying about.
> and an agreement would therefore be the best way to put an end to Epstein's exploitation of underage girls.
If this were actually the motivation instead of sweeping it under the rug, he could have still been sentenced to prison (plea agreements are just paper making recommendations to a judge -- the judge can sentence however they wish) and also heavily publicizing that he at least has been convicted of child sexual exploitation instead of quietly resolving it with no punishment in shadows and secrecy. We know that Epstein was certainly engaging in pimping after -- even hosting Bill Gates at a mansion known to be a site of thinly veiled prostitution labeled as massage therapy.
> Acosta informed the Trump presidential transition team that he offered a lenient plea deal because he was told that Epstein "belonged to intelligence", was "above his pay grade," and to "leave it alone".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Acosta
It is possible that he didn't belong to intelligence -- but still got people within the DOJ to assert falsely that he was so that he could be exempt from the consequences of his crimes. It just goes to show the core of my post's assertions, that Epstein was exempt from the normal criminal process for decades due to his position as a prominent child sex trafficker.
If it hadn't been politically expedient for a billionaire to attack him for political points, it never would have been an issue of public concern, and Epstein would still be trafficking children for sexual abuse. Everyone knew about Epstein for years and he was personally exempted from the consequences of his actions. While Epstein is now gone, there are going to be dozens of other well connected child sex traffickers similarly generating blackmail on politicians just like Epstein and Maxwell did, and they will continue to evade the criminal justice system.
Most importantly, the feds seized all of Epstein's files and CDs and that was the last thing we heard of any of it. Zero people have been punished for raping children. The only person to get materially punished for it is Richard Stallman, who only spoke in defense of one of the alleged rapists who visited the island. Nobody else has seen an ounce of heat. No lost jobs. No criminal charges.
https://nitter.net/jakeshieldsajj/status/1597051525830152192...
I'm willing to accept that people's actions from when they're 19 shouldn't color their lives years later. But maybe people's actions when they were 19 are good to examine to put context into a project they began when they were 20.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/
A more cogent explanation is that Vitalik finally found the right way to pull a con.
> Crypto payments take much longer time than traditional credit card ones
Everyone in India can process an American credit card? Indians are magically immune from political censorship on the basis of the payment card associations?