wanderingbort

Maybe it’s semantics but, this article fails to prove that it’s core argument isn’t a semantic one.

I get that you cannot label transit as a public good in economic terms.

Nobody who is presenting reasons it should be free or heavily subsidized is attempting to do so. They are presenting arguments about environment, equity, etc. They are not trying to prove that it is nonexcludable and nonrival.

The article even admits that advocates are arguing that it should be a public good by design.

But they are mislabeling it according to economic theory. Who cares (other than academic economists)? In a political environment, where you are talking to other politicians and the broader public, the commonly held version of “public good” seems to fit.

Nothing about this article substantiates it’s core claim: “Mistaken assumptions about public goods pose a growing risk to sound transit policy.”

I'm just going off the research, you can buy whatever you want.

"Health obesity" isn't about staying obese, it is about shifting social stigmas as they seem to contribute (paradoxically) to obesity[1]. Why is this something you feel the need to support publicly and vocally instead of letting people's health be between them and their doctors (who also need to work on stigmas[2])? The more society makes this a social issue, the worse off people will be when external stressors land [3].

[1] https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oby.23266 [3] https://academic.oup.com/abm/article/54/10/738/5901900

Simply put, it’s an enabling belief.

Being obese isn’t a root cause. It is a symptom of something else.

Particularly, when it is a symptom of depression, believing in “healthy obesity” can be enabling even if it’s not the truth. That person (not statistic) needs to see themselves as healthy and loved to have a chance at being healthy.

Telling them to eat better or exercise is thinking about yourself in a generic version of their circumstances rather than them in their actual circumstances.

A lot of answers for why the fed would want this but regarding your first question:

The interest rate can be thought of as the “cost of money”. The higher it is, the more expensive it is to get more money in the short term. This is why 0% was labeled “free”

When companies have access to cheap money it is less risky to invest short term in long term growth. Generally “growth” is expensive up front and pays out over time.

Also, hiring takes time so starting to grow happens on a lag.

Now, we had a long span of cheap money so, companies not only planned to grow but they planned to keep growing. This meant they were hiring today for tomorrows growth.

Money is no longer cheap.

All of the future growth is a lot riskier so any hires made for that purpose are cut. Also any in-progress growth became risky, so some of those hires are cut too. Lastly, there is no growth after the current crop of projects so, as they complete, some or all of those hires are let go.

Cheap money is risk free growth opportunities. Growth needed people. Expensive money is very risky belt-tightening opportunities. That leads to layoffs.

In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to.

Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations.

Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit.

Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature.

It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.

I agree it’s worse on any measure that can reduced to “distributed computation”.

But that’s not what it’s doing. Not really. The only distributed computation is the one establishing trust that there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus.

Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful and accurate processing.

It’s a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically designed against the single entity root of trust that underpins intels offering eg.

[edit: fixed some typos]

The interface to the globally available computation is a bit different and I think novel.

In order for my application and yours to interact we had to both chose the same ecosystem and invest in it to some minimal degree.

It’s easy to frame that negatively.

But there are some positive aspects to that mutual agreement to invest. Similar to how you may deploy an open standard of authentication inside your infrastructure, the expectation is that the community will improve tools and share innovations over time even if you aren’t directly interacting with any of them. It’s not required. It’s just an expectation.

Ethereum is like that. There is a community of developers extending the ecosystem and it’s exclusively people who invest in and use the platform.

We can mince words over the value prop of cryptocurrency and a decentralized ledger but, I don’t get the same belonging to a community on AWS or GCP.

FWIW most of the people I work with in the community dislike the same scammers that you do.

I will start to sound like a broken record soon but blockchain has provided a wealth of information about “fair” distribution games and their downfalls.

The NFT summer of 2021 saw first come first serve distros gamed by parties with superior network positioning.

Dutch auctions (from the article) strongly favored the wealthy buyers not fans or parties who “pay” with other things of value like their time.

Lotteries were easily games by sock puppets.

Lotteries with “strong” identity verification created grey markets for identities. Think about mechanical Turk but peoples task is to get a lottery ticket and remit the winnings.

People tried social credit systems where participating in community activities like discords earned you the spot in line. Again, services arose to farm these spots.

Fascinating microcosm of human behavior.

I agree with commenters that suggest refundable non-transferable tickets however, for goods this scarce where a secondary market is valuable, I don’t think we have a simple good solution.

Not quite. It would be direct democracy if the “currency” was zeroed/refreshed for every ballot issue. As stated the inter-issue strategy makes this a different game.

One of the good things about crypto and blockchain is that I can say with great confidence that it is both easy and inexpensive.

For reference see one of the biggest NFT drops this year and the pleas they made to not buy KYC’d addresses: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...

Games are tricky things to balance.

When distribution is equal or in your favor, the obvious gambit here is to propose abhorrent legislation to the opposition. They will be forced to spend more votes to stop it. Leaving you with enough votes to strong arm any legislation you want.

Any minority of power no matter the margin would be effectively silenced.

Maybe it’s different with multiple parties in play but if we could stabilize a more than two party system then that changes the calculus of the status quo too.

The market isn’t the price of the vote, it’s the price to buy someone’s vote. That’s a race to the bottom.

Right now the cheapest option is a bot. A perfect anti-bot solution shifts this so that the cheapest option is the global poor.

Zoom out, is the problem is manipulation not bots. Bots are just the best weapon today. Does this new scheme present a sustainable solution to manipulation?

I don’t believe it does. over time, power and wealth will be more able to pay the per vote cost and raising it will disproportionately deny real peoples voice.

Looping back, this is why I asked if any of it was needed once we assume the presence of a working moderation scheme (which you credit as the protection today from vote buying).

If you could do that effectively then what is the point of spending money to upvote?

Also look into the current state of play to earn games [1] and some NFT auction methods where people are selling their participation quite openly [2]

It’s no longer a Sybil attack if it is real people who value their moral “vote” less than the market rate of that vote. It’s just an open market encouraging wealthy participants to on-board buyable users.

[1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/ [2] https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...

I think you are coming at this the wrong direction.

As a buyer I have to have some compulsion to buy. If that is not “I want to buy an authentic piece tied to an artist” NFTs probably aren’t for you.

With NFTs I can start at either the artist or the piece and trivially connect to the other.

NFTs don’t solve for discovery.

Nor do they provide a root of trust for artist identity. At best they can provide information to some sort of identity system but NFTs by themselves are not a complete solution for that.

As an artist who wants to sell an NFT, the onus is on you to broadcast your presence/address so that your buyers can check provenance. Post it on your Instagram maybe. It doesn’t have to be magical.

If you (the artist) have no presence in NFTs, it’s fake.

If you do, then I can trivially verify that you are the minter.

Crucially, the person that has the incentive to mint (the artist) also has all they need to establish the provenance of the photo.

No 3rd parties, no specialized tools/skills.

I can only speak for myself but I built software in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space for about 5 years before I held any as an investment.

For me, the incentive was to learn about the tech for the sake of the tech. I actually wasn’t a believer in cryptocurrency as a long term useful concept. I was building into spaces that would benefit from immutability and transparency where accountability was low (high risk businesses and government transparency)

Really, it is something independent of the tech that allowed me to turn a corner on cryptocurrency. I accepted that large groups of believers can “create” value based on nothing but their shared willingness to continue to believe.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have such a critical mass of believers IMO. I wasn’t sure that the tech stack would live up to the hype but I was no longer worried that the price would drop to zero.

You are correct. NFTs do not prevent counterfeiting. One could argue that it makes counterfeiting easier due to their open nature.

However, it also makes detecting counterfeits trivial. So trivial that the consumer can detect it using their own devices and freely available wallet software. No need for special skills or trust anchors like appraisers (other than the public blockchain and public standards).

This isn’t a complete solution for scams because most people don’t realize how trivial it is to check before they buy. I believe the remaining problems are in usability and education problem. The tech does lower the barrier to achieving a safer ecosystem.

We could have a healthy debate over whether the tech solved the hard side or the easy side of the problem.

Sure, look at the last sale for this piece https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac...

The artist got 0.21 ETH in the transaction despite not actually having a direct role in the sale.

Here is that sale transaction https://etherscan.io/tx/0xcd157ff73439e20903a8573ef2a280571a...

Here is the artist’s wallet https://etherscan.io/address/0x4de5ae339b406a8cd5037e9138a62...

I just picked a random entry, I don’t know this piece or artist. There are a lot of examples easily found on the major markets (opensea is one such market)

To all the opinions already posted I will add just one more: none of it was given by people who know you and your kids.

They are unique and will have a set of natural and nurtured skills that are critically important when dealing with the social and psychological cornucopia that is the Internet.

This isn’t something where we have a lot good replicated research from which to draw conclusions.

We can all provide our own experience in an honest attempt to help but it will be your family that has to figure this out regardless.

Give yourself and your children the grace to make some mistakes on this journey. That you care enough to be concerned is a sign that you are a good parent.

Not a lawyer or accountant here but I think it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event.

Until then, you have deposited some value in a number of lightening network nodes and have been negotiating a set of pairwise IOUs with them for later.

DeFi/staking has a similar problem and I believe waiting until gains and losses are realized will be the way it goes down.

For now, make a good faith effort to pay taxes or expect some friction later.

nft42 | Multiple Roles | Remote (US time zone overlap preferred) | Full-time | https://nft42.com

nft42 is a group of serial tech entrepreneurs and long time degens in the NFT space with a vision of enabling the "metaverse": a vision of the future where digital assets and experiences become an essential part of the human experience.

Today we are focused on delivering https://www.nameless.io/ the premier NFT minting and initial-sale platform that powered GaryV's recent launch of https://veefriends.com

We will happily talk to anyone who is as passionate about the future of NFTs as we are. We have specific openings for:

- Smart Contract Developers : https://angel.co/company/nft42/jobs/1405021-smart-contract-d...

- Front-end Web Developers : https://angel.co/company/nft42/jobs/1401254-front-end-web-de...

- UI/UX Designers : https://angel.co/company/nft42/jobs/1395570-ui-ux-designer

- Graphic Designers : https://angel.co/company/nft42/jobs/1401185-graphic-designer

- Project Managers : https://angel.co/company/nft42/jobs/1405178-project-manager-...

If you don't see your role in that list, it was our mistake. Introduce yourself to hi@nft42.com with a resume/CV and we will see what we can do!

You are moving the goal posts. I put my estimate in the same context you put your estimate in (no over subscription, 100% continuous usage etc).

The ISP doesn't pay both sides, but someone pays somewhere. So, if we are talking about the "cost of peering" it doesn't serve to talk about it from only one side.

You can get more than 16 ports in the 5u unit, so rent is probably under-amortized but not by the two order of magnitudes that would make up the difference between my estimate and your original.

Peering is not a major cost for ISPs because ISPs don't have a lot of peers. As more services want direct peering relationships, there are some overhead costs which go up to manage the explosion of peering relationships.

My initial objection was that you over-simplified. I feel pretty fine resting on my argument as is. You may have the last word. I cede all my remaining time to whomever wants it.

> Do the actual math.

You first. You made a claim which was woefully inaccurate, I called you out in an admittedly childish way and now the burden of proving you wrong is on me?

Here is my ballpark, Both sides will want redundant fiber connections between two edge routers at 10gbps. SFP+ 10g from cisco is ~60 bucks. We need at least 4 (2 on each side), plus a reserve of 4 for faster recovery from failure. In addition, lets assume that we amortize some cost of the _edge router_ for this service. A refurb 16 port SFP+ module for 10g fiber is around $6000 and we will need 2 of them in 2 separate chassis on EACH SIDE and lease Colo space for it but we will amortize it. So, $6k + $1k for the chassis + $800 for the supervisor card. to lease space for this: $1000k/month per chassis(5u at 200/u in a major market carrier hotel) / 16. We need cabling too but lets assume thats commodity.

up front costs so far:

$60 (sfp modules) * 8 = 480

$7800 edge router * 4 / 16 = 1950

so $2430 for equipement (amortized)

1k/month/chasis = 4k/month / 16 = 250/month recurring

100 customers over 2 years = 1950 + 6000 / 100 / 24 = $3.31/month/customer before we even talk about monitoring/maintenance/legal/etc

I have not even begun to dig into the practical costs, and I'm at 3x your target. Your move.

you are over-simplifying. If we want to be pedantic,

and assume that the two edge routers are just switches

and we would use a consumer level 10gbps port

and that the switchers are already in the same rack in the same facility

and that that rack in that facility has direct access to our distribution PoP

and that there are no firewall rules that need to be in place on that port (they can be in the DMZ sure)

and that we don't need to monitor that connection

and that we don't need that connection to be redundant at all

and that we aren't going to use a routing protocol like BGP on that port (we will just hard code routes)

and that we don't want any guarantee that you and I will operate that link at any SLA

and that we don't want to guarantee that both parties will give notice in a timely manner before termination

and... and... and...

So, which textbook are you copying from? You put out something that is technically true without considering any of the practical realities.

(edited for readability)

> If ISPs can go faster, and they choose not to unless you pay more, that is a form of degradation.

You've missed my point. There are some ways an ISP can go faster that are not neutral AND not malicious/extortive. If google puts a GGC on your ISPs network, youtube now has an advantage over hulu. There is no equivalent internal-deployment that can give a truly neutral increase in capacity.

To conflate this with active degradation (throttling or blocking) means that you would have an ISP be unable to host any service until they can guarantee _all services_ equivalent access (presumably at the ISPs expense otherwise they would price out everyone but the big players).

Before you immediately chose "neutral hosting" realize that it is untenable for every random small website to be able to legally demand any ISPs host their services for free in order to guarantee a level playing field with Google and Netflix. The only tenable solution is to make it illegal to collocate services which will be a far worse hit to the experience you have on the web than any throttling or blocking has ever been.

This is not as simple as you would like it to be.

> If ISPs can go faster, and they choose not to unless you pay more, that is a form of degradation

This is assuming intent and over-simplifying. Is a small regional ISP without the capital or credit necessary to expand now anti-NN by default? Are they extorting their customers by default? Not all ISPs are Comcast and Verizon. If you cannot escape your circumstance and see the bigger picture of how and what the internet is and who "ISPs" are then you are just being selfish.

whats interesting is that nothing about the current net-neutrality discussions addresses concerns like these. They may or may not be substantiated concerns. The graphs don't show intent so, that much is assumed.

That is objectively false. Degrading the "slow" lanes is only one way to produce a fast lane. Direct peering arrangements and co-location of services are two ways to create "fast" lanes without having to degrade anything. They are also not free, so it makes sense that business-to-business deals would be made to establish them (aka paid fast lanes).

The effective bandwidth of the internet looks like an hour glass. As things fan out to individual users you may have capacity for 100+mbps but no way to consume it because upstream there is a bottleneck. In many cases that bottleneck exists at the edge of an ISP or farther upstream of it. Direct peering increases the capacity of the ISP's "edge" but only for the services available on the peer. Co-location puts those services on the internal side of the bottleneck, again increasing effective capacity, but only for the services that are co-located in the ISPs datacenters. Almost all major providers (google, akamai, netflix, facebook) offer some form of co-locatable server however, those cost money to deploy and maintain.

> They wouldn't know what was IPFS and what was regular encrypted TCP

The extreme conclusion of state-sponsored censorship is not a black list or DPI. It is a white list. It is easy to restrict traffic to a small set of addresses that are rigorously monitored for any ability to proxy non-conforming traffic. Everything else would get dropped on the floor.

IPFS and the like sit too high in the OSI layers to combat state sponsored censorship in the long-run.

It makes me wonder what the target market is. If this ever got big, it would just trigger the next step in the arms race it is incapable of sustaining

So, to fix this analogy we say all vehicles on the road travel at the exact speed because a single frame on fiber should move point to point at the same speed. To make this easier we will assume that corrupt/dropped cars ("frames") cancel out and we will just not mention them again. Because the speed is now constant, this becomes a pipeline and we can completely not worry about latency.

So, now we have an autobahn whose "bandwidth" is 40000 cars per second.

The way haulage works is by the car with no real guarantee about a steady rate of delivery. I don't care, just get 10000 cars from point a to point b. This is no-deadline data transfer like downloading a file.

The way streaming works is that it needs exactly 10 cars per second with no mention of total cars. I don't care, I just need a steady 10 cars per second.

For reference, I can service 10,368,000 of those haulage requests in a 30 day month (ideally) but I can only have 4,000 simultaneous streaming users, ever.

The internet, before streaming, was almost all haulage. Most of the infrastructure was built on the idea of haulage being the dominant use case. People needed to get information from point A to point B as fast as possible. Even torrenting, was haulage. "Congestion" at peak times was not as important because delivery deadlines were looser. As long as you were averaging more cars delivered over a time period (24hrs) than requested the congestion would eventually clear.

Then streaming hit. Now most of the traffic on the internet is on a tight deadline. That infrastructure built for haulage was completely incapable of handling it. We have 40000 cars per second but this is now "Rush Hour" and we have 20k users wanting to get 200k cars in THIS EXACT SECOND otherwise their experience suffers. It doesn't matter if we unused bandwidth at 3am, it doesn't matter if we have unused bandwidth ever. What matters is that we can cover the peak cars per second requested on our network. If we cannot, we have oversold the autobahn and are now "guilty of fraud".

The Internet was like an autobahn but these days consumers only care about what happens during rush hour. Imagine how different an autobahn would be if you had to guarantee a lane for every driver that wanted it on-demand. It is an autobahn that is huge and mostly empty most of the time (your lane is your lane and if you are not driving its empty), it was also far far more expensive to build.

> Netflix gives away free servers to cache popular content near the users so the ISP doesn’t need to pay for the bandwidth to stream multiple copies of the same thing

You have to be a decently large ISP to qualify. So, this is helpful to big players BUT big players can also afford a PoP in a major hub where they can likely directly peer with Netflix.

This is also a "black-box" system on your network, likely behind your edge firewalls and DMZs. So, you will have to deploy extra network infrastructure and monitoring protect the rest of your network from Netflix. If it was outside your edge routing/firewalling it may as well be on a peer network.

So, this isn't exactly a "free pass" for anyone to have superior Netflix service. And it would only serve Netflix. The ISP I worked with had a few racks devoted to this type of machinery (Google Global Caches, Akamai CDN edge nodes etc). We were not large enough to qualify to host an OpenConnect Box.

Even with one you have the additional issue that most last-mile providers don't exactly have a 40gigabit back-haul to all of their DSLAM or CMTS PoPs. So, some part of "congestion" happens down stream of the data centers. This is why companies like Comcast will put one of their On-Demand video storage boxes in that giant green box that is at the end of your street. You are literally talking with a server next door. OpenConnect style boxes cannot compete with that proximity and that deployment strategy is partially responsible for one of the "smoking guns" in this debate where people claim proof that Comcast slows Netflix in favor of their services.