random023987

So it's an honest Ponzi scheme?

If you're looking for the summary, it's about 1/4 the way in.

> Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.

> any examples of any games [...] that let you meaningfully impact the game world?

Dwarf Fortress

> and competing directly with well funded companies like Facebook, Google, Telegram, etc.

As opposed to competing with well funded companies like Sun, IBM, SGI, and Microsoft?

Sometimes producing a better, more open product is more important than funding numbers.

Life isn't a poker game.

You can't take the same rules from Vegas and apply them to health care and human rights.

I think most people would prefer to decide for themselves if that's worth the $40,000/yr that they would have had if wages kept up with productivity.

If you want an asymmetric persistence layer where all writes are documents placed in a Kafka topic, and all reads are via relational queries.

It's a distributed, eventually consistent, highly available ledger that can be queried with SQL.

> I would love is an event store

You know you can put a key with a null value onto a topic. If your backend object store gives you data by key, this should give you exactly what you want.

Later on, you can put a small subset of the data in value to assist with filtering or caching (if you want).

> This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least a partially targeted at aspiring company founders.

It's not inconsistent. Most founders are trying to create companies that provide economic value; one can believe that the creation of economic value is a good thing, while also believing that more of the economic surplus created should directly go to the common good.

Assuming a JWT implementation accepts only a fixed header (all header fields must be present and match, no additional fields can be present), are there any other issues with "just use jwt"?

> There is if the people in the DOJ suffer from identity theft and get their bank accounts cleaned out because some nefarious people exploited the backdoors

People in the DOJ have more options available to them if they choose to try to find or punish an identity thief than the general public.

Also, the direct fear of not being able to do your job because of strong encryption is more focused than a nebulous fear of possible identity theft.

I can't wait to see the flood of posts in 12 months about "why I'm leaving substack"

> Iron particles [...] Find another solution.

Technically, seeding the ocean with iron particles is a suspension, not a solution. Luckily, the common technique is to use Iron(II) sulfate, which mixed with water does create a solution!

While the War on (Americans who use (some)) Drugs is a decades-long tragedy whose human costs dwarf most natural disasters, it's pretty clear the goals of US drug policy aren't to reduce criminal activity, but instead explicitly criminalize what may consider a personal choice.

Given that minimizing criminal activity isn't a concern isn't a goal, what incentive is there to change the policy? Saying that the war on drugs causes more harm than drugs is obvious, but repeatedly pointing that out and expecting policy to change hasn't worked for a long time.

So you're saying that society as a whole would be better off simply using banks? Given that the external costs of banks have already been paid, and we can save a ton of energy by not flooding the etulip market with speculation.

I can detail a process through which bitcoin is used primarily for speculation and criminal activity.

Can you detail a feasible process whereby bitcoin gets rid of the aircraft carriers?

Or alternatively, can you detail a feasible process whereby bitcoin gets rid of income inequality?

> Do you think banks exist for free? What are the costs of maintaining a system of banks capable of acting as a trusted custodian in such a transaction, covering every jurisdiction the globe over? Have you amortized the cost of aircraft carriers, diplomats, social and class mobility, the set of externalities that ultimately end up reconciled through war and collapse?

Whew, thank god Bitcoin got rid of all the aircraft carriers. And class mobility, I was wondering how to solve income inequality, but who knew it was as simple as Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain!

> Real estate is a hard case, but by no means impossible, particularly if a custodian can hold the assets in the transaction. This approach is well understood.

So perhaps we could use an entity that is experienced in holding real estate assets that have outstanding obligations against them... like a bank? And then, instead of using cryptocurrencies that burn more electricity to service my "tokenized-crypto-mortgage" on my house than my actual house, I could get a "traditional mortgage"!

Hold my beer, I'm going to issue an ICO for this idea.

> "Again, the main function of a bitcoin exchange is to get its bitcoins stolen..."

> Really?

Really. Is there any other reason to open a bitcoin exchange other than to have fools give you eTuplips that you can abscond with at a whim?

I mean you might think that running an exchange helps further dreams of a bankless future, but in the real world, most cryptocurrency exchanges went poof, either to steal bitcoins or because they couldn't convince fools to part with enough bitcoins to steal.

But the heady days of an exchange being hacked or closed by fraud every weeks are over. If you want your bitcoins stolen, I recommend investing in ICOs.

Counterpoint, as technical people, we can agree that there is probably a better solution to an impending accident rather than sit still like a deer in the headlights.

In fact, this article could start a discussion on if the risks of active accident avoidance measures (e.g. running a stop light at a clear intersection if you're about to be rear-ended) might cause more problems than they solve.

> Why do futures exist for something that can be settled in 30 minutes?

Because money.

Or more specifically, someone is willing to sell these futures to someone who is willing to buy them.

> Anything that can be traded on such a scale will undoubtedly be manipulated.

Conversely, the efficient markets hypothesis implies that in time, the prices of eTulips will converge on the values of the underlying security. But you're right in that it will likely be preceded by an influx of new greater fools.

Yes they are. And depending on your political beliefs, taxes are slavery, theft, or violence, and if you're ideological enough, you can see taxes as the moral equivalent of Lenin promising a share of the aristocrat's land.

This is why we should reject public education, public libraries, public safety, public unemployment funds, public retirement funds, and public medicine for the elderly.

Because you, know, it just doesn't work. And all of the positive experiences with socializing certain public goods in liberal western democracies are just a magic trick.

> Usually what happens in these stories is that a kid makes something that is a pale imitation of current standards, and the parents use their industry connections to get a PR blast about their awesome kid, that gets the kid a leg up in college or getting a job, and the 'invention' is forgotten.

That's almost what happened with Theranos, but we forgot to forget the "invention".

> We can't pay Medicare rates because Medicare rates are not high enough to be self-sufficient in the absence of other payers

This is incorrect, and you're going to need a better citation than industry self reporting on how they simply want more money.

Assuming medicare prices are fixed, and assuming that insurance companies negotiate deals on par with medicare, and assuming that most uninsured people don't pay their bills... where are these magic "other payers" that are keeping hospitals open?

In fact the opposite is true. If hospitals could get 100% of their patients to pay their bills at medicare rates, they would save money on defaults, billing overhead, and the people who spend hours on the phone fighting with insurance companies.

This is why so many health care professionals advocate for single-payer; having 100% of bills paid according to a fixed price list means greater efficiency and less waste. (and I mean individuals, as an industry the corporations involved prefer the status quo, as it entrenches insurance companies,creates barriers to entry, and drives consolidation)

== EDIT ==

Just to clarify. I'm talking about a situation where 100% of all services provided by a hospital are covered at medicare rates. If 50% are covered by medicare, and 50% are written off, obviously hospitals would have a problem. But medicare is currently reimbursing at break-even rates, kill the collections and billing and insurance departments, and hospitals make a profit at medicare rates.

> Awkwardly, it's the other way around. Providers and private insurers would actually love a transparent pricing system.

Incorrect. back room deals and discounts is how providers and insurers jockey for advantage.

> The entity that benefits the most from the lack of transparency is Medicare,

Again, incorrect. Medicare ENFORCES a transparent pricing scheme, see https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Paymen... for details.

Unfortunately for most of us, we can't simply pay the medicare rates out of pocket, because... f-you, pay more.

> There was nothing in the ACA that tackled healthcare costs, it was only concerned with spreading healthcare costs.

That's because it was a political solution. If it tackled healthcare costs, it would have been swiftly killed by the health care industry.

I think you meant:

> It will never be necessary to levy taxes to pay for asteroid defense, because I have perfect certainty that no asteroid will ever head toward the earth, so I don't need a moral philosophy that weights taxation against unprotected asteroid strikes.

You can't generalize to an argument against all public spending.

> super awesome.

This is not super-awesome. Humans have made incredible progress by specializing and optimizing, and this process improves productivity, efficiently, and (most importantly when it comes to medicine) safety.

The idea that we will have people taking the risk of getting sick or dying because they are not able to manufacture drugs with the same purity and potency as pharmaceutical companies shows there is a huge problem with the status quo.