205 karma · joined November 19, 2014
Contrast with your statement on stewardship, duty, and responsibility. What is behind this besides sentiment?
What I'm trying to point out is precisely this: you purchased shareholder rights independently from whatever shopping you've done at these places. In purchasing stock, you have given up the ability to purchase an equivalent amount of consumer or luxury goods. This is commendable! You own part of these companies and have some vested interest in their future. You should absolutely have a say in their governance, proportional to the fraction of the company you own.
These rights are yours because you own shares, not because you shop there.
> I know the best way to spend my money, I think other wealthy people do too. We could create a government that does the bare minimum and free up private money to be used as its owners see fit.
With governments, a rather poor distinction is made between people who are really and tangibly invested in the operating of the state and those who consume government services.
I would agree with you that a sanely-run government would focus only on things that it can do better than other firms and outsource or privatize ruthlessly.
> FWIW, I pay more in taxes than I spend on myself. My tax liability is about 50% higher than my yearly expenditures.
Commendable! I have not done the math but I would not be surprised if my own tax liability/discretionary spending ratios are similar. I would not yet say that I am a wealthy man, however, but I am a patient one. The children of those with low time-preference shall inherit the earth!
Do you actually believe that all people have an equal stake in the future of the country? To me it is blatantly obvious that a party animal of an adolescent, say, does not have the same stake in the future a country than a land-owning parent of three children. I would much, much prefer a system wherein those that have sacrificed real, tangible resources in order to secure voting rights have a voice in the governance of the institutions of state, and those that have not do not.
Thankfully, examples of institutions that function this way abound: It's simply how all modern corporations are structured.
No, you don't, and I would wager that any corporation operating that way would be run into the ground extraordinarily quickly.
Some people do get to make those decisions, however, but they are all people who are taking real risk with real, tangible resources in order to acquire equity in those firms.
Why should someone who is effectively a customer of a government (taxpayer) make the managerial decisions of that corporation?
I'm convinced that the first sovereign start-ups to take full advantage of modern corporate structures and capital markets will be able to deftly out-maneuver the lumbering beasts that governments have become both financially and militarily.
In modern corporations, there is a distinction between those who have stake in the future of the firm (shareholders), those who are trusted to act on their behalf (board, executives, and employees to a lesser extent), and those who receive services from the firm in exchange for revenues (clients and customers).
Customers do not make managerial and strategic decisions for the firm, and for good reasons. Indeed, does anyone really care exactly who is running walmart or amazon or apple so long as their products and services provide value? Why do people tend to see governments, essentially massive corporations, as inhabiting such a different realm, expecting them to follow entirely different laws of human behavior?
If by family you mean CNS stimulant with an amino group, then yes, I guess? They are very different structurally and pharmacologically.
A synthesis of methamphetamine would not look very much at all like an alkaloid extraction, except, possibly, for the final workup and isolation of the salt.
Fentanyl isn't popular _at all_ among opioid addicts. The duration of effect is short relative to morphine-like molecules and it absolutely wrecks one's opioid tolerance. Fentanyl is popular among unscrupulous heroin dealers that try to pass off a cheap synthetic opioid as $200/gram diacetylmorphine.
What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central roof to solve the proof-of-work.
There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.
Of course, in the absence of markets altogether, we have no exchanges, no finance, and no HFT.
But... Why do you see this as a problem to be fixed? Who does HFT harm besides those whose bottom lines they cut into: the big, fat, and slow dealers who wish they could drop a block anywhere and have it fill?
All that aside, I think I have some larger questions about your worldview: What does it mean to "create value?" By what standards is value assessed?
In the absence of any direct harm to another, under what circumstances should someone be deterred from engaging in profitable activity?
Is the assumption that profits accrue to those who provide value to others utterly false, or just false in this (and possibly other, isolated) case? If merely the latter, why in this case?
The question of how, that is by what process, can an act be considered intuitively vile when performed by an individual and yet good and indeed natural when performed by that particular corporation we call the government, nags incessantly at my mind.
Is it a function of group size? Where does the phase transition occur? Or is it a discontinuous process and possible only when we've sublimated from mere mortals into the holy categories of "sovereignty" and "legitimacy?" Oh sure, the replies to your comment are full of the old "argumentum ad pragmaticum" (excuse the poor latin), but their emotional volatility reveals it is anything but pragmatism driving their convictions. There's some deep, primal, psycho-spiritual shit going on here!
So yes, while I would not count myself amongst their ranks, I really do sympathize with the anarchists, but I've got to ask you: What did you hope to achieve with this comment? Do you really think you are going to change anyone's mind here?
P.S.
More questions for you!
Given the putative measures the government would levy against coinbase should they refuse to cooperate, do you _really_ think that they are acting immorally? Why should _they_ have the moral obligation to put themselves and their business at risk because of something being done to them against their wishes?
I was just starting to look into this since people were claiming it was pretty severe and yet I hadn't seen any POC's. Have you made any more progress?
For whatever my opinion is worth (i.e. not much), I would agree with you that remote exploitation of this particular bug would be really difficult.
While this is reminiscent of something Matt Dillon's "shameless dopefiend" character from Drugstore Cowboy said, I'm not sure if this is true.
There is another thread of addiction research that establishes the notion of "addiction as self-medication," in which users seek the drugs that work to alleviate their symptoms, be they physical or psychological. Anecdotally, I've experimented with a lot of substances, and opioids are the only class of compounds that I have sampled that work for me.
In addition, while it's certainly true that, if you attach two acetyl groups to morphine you end up with something 2-3 times more potent by weight, I wonder if people's conception of the "hardness" of drugs is somewhat artificial.
Isn't that precisely why they pay other people to manage it?
> It's as if the purpose for which they were created has become an afterthought.
I sometimes wonder what that purpose is. What do you think?
While I can imagine having such great amounts of capital deployed and resources available that maintaining an unbelievably high standard of living for the average person could become vanishingly small, I find myself also believing that, with such material available, even grander plans requiring still even more resources would be concocted, plans that could only be achievable at the limits of what would then be available. Plans of that magnitude would be operating under conditions of what we might call scarcity, that is, they would require in those undertaking them the ability to economize.
What do you think?
But why wait for our professional policy makers to bring basic income into reality? We can make it happen right here, right now. We'll free all the wage slaves from the bondage of their forced labor, one at time, and starting with me.
Here's an opportunity to act upon your principles and bring the world you want into being.
Send your donations to the following bitcoin address:
1NPgtWa3bR9iKzWdSm9HsTuXhLLDLvTesa
When I consider subparagraph A of the Federal Analog Act, I sometimes wonder if what is actually desired by drug-control advocates is to make certain states of mind illegal. That there could be legislation defining legal and illegal patterns of brain activity is quite a trip in itself. I thought cyberpunk was dead.
If that is the case, one must also consider all of the costs involved in making the drugs illegal, from paying people to enforce their illegality (DEA, border agents, customs inspections), increased burdens on the legal system, and the funding more prisons, the increase in thefts committed by addicts due to the rise in prices, increased burden on medical services (impure drugs are more hazardous to health)...
If your goal is "decrease drug use at all costs," then I question the rationality of the goal.
Do you not think that use of financial instruments is vital for allocating resources in a world of imperfect information?
For me, their utility and necessity is obvious. If you think about it, making stuff that people want is actually rather complicated. The world is rife with hazards and risk; the intricate supply lines upon which production depends are all vulnerable to disasters both natural and human.
Naturally, those whose business it is to produce things and not to speculate on future events would like to be free of such risks. This is true the source of fundamental demand for financial instruments. All the derivatives markets, and zero-sum game apparatuses exist in order to transfer -- and in so doing compute a consensual value of -- these risks to those who believe they are better informed about reality.
While I understand not wanting to personally engage in this process, I claim that that the world is better that these contracts and exchange machinery exist!
"Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the "invisible yet formidable boundaries" that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn't even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child play."
There are probably many people making their living attempting to estimate the relative likelihoods of student loan defaults, distilling this paper into tranches and repackaging them into bundles to be resold to investors.