throwdecro

Sounds unsustainable. If enough people do that maybe we'll see some affordable housing soon!

Watch out for HELOCs in what sense? Who would loan money to a homeowner with an underwater house, not matter how much they clamor?

Having billions of dollars and continuing to work doesn't necessarily mean that you're not driven by money. It can mean that the drive for more money is insatiable.

But I agree other factors are involved; if there are rivals left to be crushed, or any capacity for increased public attention remaining, many rich people will keep grinding.

It's not hidden. It's just not connected to an internet-style social network. Interest can still spread through word-of-mouth, even if the platform doesn't provide any tools for audience measurement and management. It's akin to a 'zine from the pre-internet days, except it doesn't cost as much money to distribute.

EDIT: A 'zine isn't a perfect analogy, since someone who published it would know how many they printed. A freely copyable newsletter would probably be a stronger analog.

> ...is tweeting into the void kinda sad?

No, I think it's brilliant. I think we'd see more interesting writing on the internet if it didn't always start with the goal of acquiring and maintaining an audience.

It sounds like you're basically using Twitter as something like email, which never occurred to me (my friends and I do "group comms" via actual email).

Do other people use Twitter in this way? Maybe you are the exception :)

> The wage clearly has to be somewhere between the minimum wage in the country and 100% of the value (okay, perceived value) that the worker generates for the employer.

As long as companies can keep finding investors to bankroll them, workers can be paid more than the value they generate.

Looking at the top 10 richest people [0], most of them weren't born into anything close to the level of wealth they have now. None of them were poor, so "essentially anyone can become successful" is almost certainly an overstatement, but the ability to go from "raised by dentists/lawyers/professors/engineers" to "among the richest in the world" is evidence of considerable mobility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...

I chose random blog post on Medium and tried to copy a sentence out of it. It offers to let me "create an account to highlight a passage", or tweet it out via Twitter, but I can't just copy it and paste it into my notes elsewhere.

Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's a very unpleasant experience.

EDIT: Dialing down my tone a bit here, I should have taken a minute between trying the frustrating thing and posting about it.

It's a city, not a mall. If you want to keep alcoholics away from your beverage, it would make sense to not have it out by the sidewalk when they stroll by. Otherwise, that's life in the (sorta) big city.

> I struggle to understand what's so interesting in X(AWS/Azure/GCP/Alibaba/SAP/Oracle...) Cloud...

We're still afraid of the cloud spending all of our money.

> 'leadership will have no limits on their authority... none whatsoever'

For some reason I envy whoever got to hear that sentence in real life. It makes it perfectly clear that you're dealing with assclowns.

As another commenter pointed out, it looks like it's against German law to insult anyone, not just politicians.

If only politicians were protected from insult, I don't think that would be compatible with democracy at all.

The greater system Bitcoin would represent, assuming wide future adoption, would be a plutocracy, which I stated in the earlier post. If early adopters maintain the anything close proportion of BTC they currently hold, they'd form a small wealthy overclass; and if the lending and spending necessary for society to function is controlled by them, they'd effectively control society. It wouldn't resemble Switzerland at all.

I wouldn't expect those plutocrats to get along in perpetuity, and if there's no way to expropriate their inheritances, they'd form a permanent class of (potential) warlords.

In a hard money/cryptocurrency environment, the BTC plutocrats would decide when to go to war, and with whom, since no lending or spending would be possible without their assent.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on the character of the small number of people "hodling" the majority of the BTC. I expect it would be a catastrophe after a generation or two of inherited BTC wealth, with BTC "nobles" raising private armies attack each other and lord it over the population.

I find that I'm happiest when there are things I need to do, but there is little to no cost to deferring them and doing something else. In a situation like that you're always occupied, doing the most enjoyable thing at the moment.

And yet here we are reading their best jokes, many centuries later.

> One woman, observing her son coming towards her, inquired, "How fares our country?" And when he said, "All have perished," she took up a tile and, hurling it at him, killed him, saying, "And so they sent you to bear the bad news to us!"

> I'd wager most people read it correctly.

That's unlikely. Before cryptocurrencies, "crypto" generally meant cryptography. The term "crypto" now refers to cryptocurrencies almost 100% of the time.

"Hustle culture" is about a social norm, not how any one person spends their time. The toxicity comes from people expecting a high level of dedication from each other instead of simply themselves.

If the author is happy with what they're doing, good for them, as long as they're not applying the same set of expectations to others.

> How is that able to relate to any kind of normal app?

There's too much competition involved in writing normal apps, which often attract significant investment that bootstrapped startups struggle to compete with.

It's interesting to see what kind of performance is possible for next to no money, when you throw out basic assumptions like using a database, and then start thinking about what you could build out of it.

I didn't mean one tourist buying everything (which would be problematic no matter what the currency was), I meant in the aggregate. I've added an edit to my comment to clarify.

I'm envisioning a lot of dirty looks from paper cash-preferring shopkeepers to crypto tourists when the tourists buy up all shop's inventory and leave the shopkeeper with just a few numbers in some app.

EDIT: To be clear, I mean tourists each individually buying a normal amount of things using BTC, which adds up to the store exchanging it's inventory for a number in the app.

> Note that even if the Rhinoceros votes went for the peoples party the same thing would have happened...

Which is probably for the best. If this type of trickery had made a meaningful difference, the people fooled by the trick would have had some legitimate complaints. Moreover it would have really undermined the credibility of the winner, even if it wasn't their doing.

> Why are managers paid more than us, when we clearly do the harder work?

If you're asking the question, you're not treating your manager badly enough.

How can it be settled when no one and nothing can show it's mental state to others?

NOTE: I am not a physicist.

> They did calculations showing it was impossible

Doesn't mean they couldn't have been surprised by something their calculations didn't take into account. The yield for the Castle Bravo test in the 1950s was 2.5 times what was predicted [0], because some things they didn't take into account turned out to be important (namely that some of the material in the construction of the device would serve as additional fuel to the explosion).

For the first nuclear explosion in 1945, they were initiating an incredibly powerful chain reaction for the first time on Earth. To some extent you just gotta cross your fingers and hope that the chain reaction stops according to your predictions, because you don't know what the "unknown unknowns" are until you try it. The combination of "chain reaction" and "unknown unknowns" is frightening.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

It's true that it's impossible for an outside observer to tell whether a claim to consciousness, by a faithful simulation of a human mind, is genuine. That may mean that the question cannot be settled. It doesn't actually settle the question though.

> Computers have mental activities too, simple ones

That's begging the question as to whether awareness arises out of the physical world. You're assuming mental activities arise out of computations occurring in the physical world, when whether or not this is the case is in fact the question.

> To be clear, if we accept the existence of a non-physical mental realm, we have the monstrous problem of explaining how these two interact, as there are numerous correlations between the two.

I suspect a lot of the most interesting investigations of the next few hundred years will be in sorting out whether this is the case, and if so, how it all works.

Why would the "Paypal Mafia" make you think it is risky to attack successful people and companies?

Ideally it wouldn't be risky at all; in some circumstances it can be risky; but I don't see anything about the "Paypal Mafia" that indicates more risk. If anything most of these people seem like they started off as relative nobodies, and could return to obscurity just as easily.

EDIT: This has ben downvoted :) I guess it's (very slightly) risky to say the Paypal Mafia isn't that scary.