Or tags!

Thanks. I have made many feature requests and you always consider them seriously (but usually reject them).

I should do one of those things.

Although there are many flaws, and we do complain, Lemmy is still the best (or least dysfunctional) forum in existence. So yous must be doing something right.

That might not matter. Language is not always a barrier.

And anyway, there is a kit you can learn from people you don’t understand.

I’ve spent too much time explaining currency theory to purple who aren’t really interested. So if you have a specific question I can answer it. But not many questions and not a debate.

Show me the right parts!

IMO it’s an american thing. The society there is obsessed with race.

No matter what the issue is, somehow somebody will make a connection with race. It’s really striking once you listen to enough conversation from there.

The word master has a lot of meanings, but one of them has racial connotations, in a context unrelated to git branches.

Bitcoin should have led to global currency reform, for a start. That failed. It could still lead to energy reform and other important societal progress. But regulation and other factors are killing it.

In general we are open for constructive feedback

My one big fear right now is that a mod could delete my words, and they would be lost forever.

Sometimes I write long essays here. They are ideas that I think are important and original. I write them so people will be able to read them many years into the future.

It’s important that anything deleted by a mod or an admin can be saved by the creator afterwards.

I’d argue it’s necessary that nothing can ever be fully deleted, if you want people to ever write anything important here.

That’s why historically most of the most important world-change essays were written to newspapers. Once a newspaper is published, it is available forever. It can never be expunged.

good bot

Google, Facebook or Microsoft can buy it if this is likely. If can’t buy it they can get it banned.

I’m not here to answer your question (though TBF most of the other commenters didn’t answer it either) but I’d like to ask you about burnout.

I find that in times where there is a lot going on, both at work and at home, I am multi-tasking all day, juggling many so many different urgent jobs that I can’t think about any of them, think about what I am doing now or doing next, or think at all.

When go to bed I have fought many fires, but have accomplished nothing, and still have just and many frustrating jobs waiting for the next day. After several days of this I am continuously anxious and irritable. My mind is a fog.

Is this burnout?

What helps? Writing down all the jobs in a list and going through them sequentially. Just refuse to do anything not urgent or that someone else can do. But any job that takes less than 5 minutes just do immediately without even writing it down.

Taking a 20 minute nap. Sometimes that doesn’t help, so sit alone in a dark room for as long as it takes for the mind to clear.

Prolonged intense exercise helps. So does spending time in a new place. Talking socially with other people. Maybe drugs, but for me neither beer nor spirits help at all.

But these solutions all consume time. So you need to get through all the jobs first. When you reach the end, you have enough free time to do those things. To heal your mind after the burnout.

Is that happening already? I hadn’t heard about it yet.

It all sounds believable. It’s just a new way of thinking about it. Which part do you find strange?

Well the most common and effective way of destroying local cultures, is to force the people to speak the common language.

For example in France, the UK, and many other places, there used to be many local regions, with their own languages and strong local cultures and loyalties. The rulers wanted to kill the local cultures, so that the people would have no local identity. This stops disloyalty or independent thinking or independence movements.

They did this by forcing their subjects to speak a common language.

This policy was perfectly effective.

A province speaking its own language can easily maintain its own identity and push for independence. Without its own language this is more difficult, even if it keeps its own customs.

I think I’ve been too vague. So I can elaborate about these policies in the UK or France, if you like. For other territories (Spain, Italy, etc) I believe the same thing happened but I’m not the expert.

I’m not sure they’re really the same question. Be careful of making a false equivalence.

Your questions are very loaded. Most people would answer “there shouldn’t be ANY racism at all!”

In that case, if the questions are really equivalent, everyone’s answer to the original question should be “there shouldn’t be any censorship at all” or maybe “there should be complete censorship for everyone”.

But I don’t think that’s the right conclusion. Therefore the questions are not equivalent. This is too simplistic.

Because you’re taking a very technical rhetorical stance, I’ll try to answer the same way.

Racism is a damaging thing. There’s no good side to it.

Censorship is also a damaging thing. But it can sometimes be a necessary evil to prevent worse evils. There is a sweet spot where it prevents more damage than it causes.

Racism is a natural feature that arises in groups of people, but censorship is a political measure. So if there is a damaging amount of racism in lemmy, censorship can be used to reduce it. While there is no underlying racism problem, then censorship causes its harm while producing no benefit.

These things are hard to measure, so censorship is normally a matter of very careful consideration.

The second one is zoomed in, to make it look worse. Being able to see that there is solid ground on the left is important.

The example I know is where you take a random healthy man. Then you find five people who are waiting for different organ donations. Is it right to kill that man and harvest his organs, to save the five.

I find it a much more insightful example.

Will there be a “debate vegans” type sub? I still have so many questions, but don’t know where to ask.

“That’s a nice shirt” is generally taken as a sincere and high complement. Anything else at all will get funny looks.

and for good reason.

in a democracy the EU would not be able to do this.

Well I obviously know that.

As I explained above, it’s an example of how "they’ve executed much more sophisticated plots than this.”

Yes exactly. They can probably only know where you shopped, not what you bought, if they even do this. But they’ve executed much more sophisticated plots than this. Look at the eurion constellation.

Is cash so anonymous? Does the cash machine record the serial numbers of the notes you took? When a shop takes its cash to the bank at the end of the day, does the bank again record the serial numbers? If so, a cynical regime could figure out how much you spend in each shop, but not what you bought.

I don’t know if they do this yet, but it’s an easy, obvious, concealable scam.

Somehow problems they point out with the financial sector are supposed to apply to the whole sector, but problems with cryptocurrencies are only ever relevant to one very specific coin and in no way should reflect on the whole scene.

That’s what you were doing though. Cherry-picking faults from many different currencies.

Your original point was that crypto-currencies have no value and are ponzi schemes. Have you been convinced to change your mind about those two things? They are concrete statements, strong arguments. So they are easy to prove/disprove.

I’m afraid the discussion has gotten too broad now. You would need to start a new thread for each point. Otherwise it becomes circular. For example several or your points here I’ve already answered in another part of the thread.

It’s not a Ponzi exactly, it’s called a pump-and-dump. But yes it’s very common and very bad.

I agree that crypto currencies seem to be used much more for cynical investment profiteering, and much less for commerce, that fiat currencies. Probably because they are new. Investors are much faster at exploiting any new thing.

Bitcoin has not failed yet. It might become like company shares, an ostensibly useful thing that in practice is just a money-making game for professional gamblers. Or it might find a real large-scale use in the economy. It depends on so many factors.

The environmental issue really deserves its own discussion. There are several valid ways of looking at it. For example:

• Bitcoin’s model was simple and robust and successful. But bitcoin’s value increased too much, too fast, making mining very profitable. It’s a victim of its own success.

• It’s easily fixed, for example by borrowing Monero’s proof-of-work algorithm. But the bitcoin devs need to be given an incentive to change it.

• This is capitalism - everything gets exploited for profit until it is devastated. It’s not a bitcoin issue it’s sick-society issue.

• I personally believe that the GPU and electricity crises are being driven by datacentres (collecting human behaviour data) and AI (finding ways to exploit that data for profit and power) but bitcoin is being used as a scapegoat.

And anyway the solution is not just “ban the bad things”. There are effective ways to disincentivise people from exploiting electricity.

Lots of interesting links there. But the pieces of your arguments are so diverse, there is no single coherent answer. In the technological field so diverse, you can always find bad things, if you are looking for them.

I’ll just answer the first and the last point.

In other words, it’s designed to provide pay-off to those who jump-in early, as long as they convince more people to jump in, and assuming they get out early enough.

Here you really are describing a Ponzi scheme. By this logic, every currency (with the possible exceptions of gold and bitcoin) are ponzi schemes. Central banks print banknotes (or X tokens) which are worthless. They only have value because people start to believe they have value. And the central banks use this confidence trick to make money. They more tokens/banknotes they print, the more money they make.

Financial Times might actually have a reasonably good understanding what a Ponzi scheme is

This does not describe a Ponzi scheme. It describes a fiat currency. “Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors”. He created an investment fund, not a currency. There is no way you could confuse those two things. And a pyramid scheme is also an unrelated thing. But you’re just as capable of looking this up as I am.

That’s a good way of looking at it.

I guess part of the idea way taking the power away from the greedy people, which fixes one small part of the problem.

Part of it was fixing the implementation details, which solves another part of the problem. But yes a purely technical solution is not enough on its own. Bitcoin is not a magic bullet to solve greed. My answer below talks a bit about that.

like what happened with Ethereum

It happened to bitcoin too.

Well, fuck you

In this sense cryptocurrency is just like cash. It can be a blessing or a curse depending on your situation.

It’s possible to build a banking system, with chargebacks and insurance and all the rest, on top of any currency. It doesn’t exist AFAIK for bitcoin yet. But there’s nothing stopping governments or businesses from introducing it.

You could also argue that bitcoin doesn’t need any of that because it’s inherently more secure than the banking system. But that’s maybe another day’s argument.

it is influenced by the amount of investment put into it

All currencies have this problem. Bigger ones suffer less from it, so you might not notice it. In fact it’s even worse than you say.

1. Whales actively manipulate the price for profit. It’s not a ponzi scheme. You’re confusing two different things. If you want a buzzword it’s a pump and dump.
2. This doesn’t affect only currencies but any commodity. Look at oil or food or land or gold. All have exactly the same problem you cite for bitcoin. In fact gold is a very good analogy for bitcoin. You can understand it better by thinking of it as “digital gold”.

We don’t need to get into the environmental aspects

Thanks. That’s a tired auld one.

your biggest stake holders now are the incredibly wealthy

I’ve thought about this a bit. Right now, I don’t think the currency itself can or should solve this. The only working solution is redistributing wealth through the tax system. It works very well when done properly. So profits from bitcoin should be taxed like any currency trade. Income in bitcoin should be normally. Inheritance tax, and all the rest, should all be agnostic to which currency you use. This is the only proven way.

If there’s a crypto out there that isn’t available for fiat investment

That’s a very good idea. How would it work? Have you seen been anything written about this already?

None at all?!

• Has intrinsic value due to scarcity, like a gold-standard currency (as opposed to today’s fiat currencies). So it can’t be devalued or manipulated by a central bank.
• You don’t need to hold physical coins, or ask a 3rd party (like a bank) to store your money for you
• Can be send instantly anywhere in the world, without going through expensive money-transfer agents
• Money cannot be created out of nothing. If you want to loan somebody money, it has to really exist.

There are multiple important benefits. They may not all be important for you right now, but saying it doesn’t solve any problems at all is just ridiculous.

The people who say it’s a ponzi scheme are people who don’t know what ponzi schemes are.

It’s mostly fair.

A currency is just a currency. An NFT is something unrelated. A currency being crypto doesn’t stop it from being mostly used for evil. Cryptocurrencies are an important advance for mankind, but they does not solve all of the world’s problems.

Bitcoin specifically even has a few of its own new problems, which newer currencies have solved.

You should read about the welfare trap too. It’s an important special case.

Do all QR code phone apps do that, or just the one? Maybe it’s a setting in the app that you can turn off. You’d think the app would be clever enough to recognise whether the message is a URL or not, and treat it appropriately.

QR codes can often be ticket numbers or lists of information. It’s literally just text, but in a machine-readable form, instead of human-readable.

If it doesn’t exist, then you can invent it.

QR codes are perfect for encoding text, even though most people just use them to send URLs. It should be a very good tool for flyers.

If you want rich text, colours and fonts and sizes, I’m sure that’s easy too. But you might need to invent a type of markup to compress the style information better. Or it might already exist.

I think an alias could do that. Another good one is cd then ls.

These bad laws happen with elected representatives too, but worse. At least with direct democracy, laws will not be made which are against the majority’s best interest, and laws have a legitimate mandate.

For example it’s hard to imagine a direct democracy starting a war of convenience, like representative democracies frequently do and are doing right now. All the most egregious crimes of government would stop.

But the quality of all the little laws is debatable. I would argue it’s higher under DD but I can see why some people disagree.

But it’s hard to discuss very specific examples, because they are always cherry-picked.

Finally, there are several forms of DD and the Californian style is probably the least beneficial.

Yes. And a steam mop.

Most of the worlds’s society is collapsing. Much of the world is becoming uninhabitable. But only a small corner of the earth needs to remain prosperous, for the rich to keep living rich lives.

Since we’re talking politics now, the solution is direct democracy, where the electorate can compel the government to make a certain law, or take certain measures. Major changes become possible which are impossible now.

Nothing which harms the powerful vested interests will ever happen without direct democracy. Today, governments can simply decline to do things which don’t suit them, even if the electorate demands them.

Anyone who believes in any issue at all, your first priority is direct democracy. It is your new goal. Without it your protests are ignored. With it, you can directly change the world without even having to protest.

efficiency calculations are done with assumptions based on current load, usage patterns, and supergrid as prerequisites.

Could be. At least for rural areas, small scale could be more efficent.

aluminum not steel

IIRC aluminium is never used for rotating parts because of the way it fatigues. After a certain number of strain cycles it will snap.

not to keep generating more and more energy

Yes but now this is a political issue. How are you going to stand between big business’s and its thirst for AI? The usage is growing exponentially and IMO will soon be dominant and the rest of the economy becomes more efficient.

Thanks. The reason for big turbines is because they are more efficient. You use less materials for more power. So you’ll never convince an engineer of all this.

I wonder if there is a maximum size of turbine that can be built with steel, given how heavy it is. Wind might become a lot more expensive.

Which would not be a bad thing because the world needs to start converting to sea-swell power asap.