crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
2yr ago
Censorship is bad, I think everyone understands that. What's not so clear is if it is a problem that bitcoin can solve. It doesn't matter if you accept payment in BTC if your hosting service doesn't, if your payment processor doesn't, if any of the points of failure on the modern web refuse to take your payments. Could Bitcoin have saved Kiwi Farms?
At some point crypto has to onramp onto the fiat economy, and whatever benefits its proponents says it has collapses.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
Huh, interesting.
I think it makes sense, the theory, but I would caution against imagining that the establishment always had plans to centralize the internet. Lawmakers have chronically been incompetent at creating legislation concerning computers. What I suspect is that lobbyists for giants like Microsoft were allowed to write their competition out of business because no one else understood the subject at all - and those who knew better were, frankly, toe-jam eating weirdos.
Nowadays the government is all for it, but my 'politicians are stupid and easily manipulated' principle as well as 'boomers know nothing about technology' axiom are sufficient to explain how centralization took hold before the technological gains from singularity were realized.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I've made my position clear in other posts quite recently, but the problem is that centralization is orders of magnitude more efficient than decentralized solutions, and technology increasingly pushes in favor of it. I've written some speculative science fiction on the matter. The larger the system, the more data it pushes, the more it can feed its machine learning algorithms. Giving up on the holy grail of machine learning just means that someone else will make a leaner and meaner finance transaction-bot, that will reduce fees to infinitesimal slivers and process a year's worth of financial transactions in an afternoon.
Given crypto's abysmally slow transaction speed (and the dubiousness of the solutions proposed to fix that) it's not competitive now, much less with whatever fintech comes from the next generation of money robots.
So long as crypto interacts with the conventional finance system, it will always be at a disadvantage. It is playing a game that it will always lose because the US dollar is backed by the world's hegemonic superpower and crypto is not. The fact that the majority of its current user base sees their hopes and fears rise and fall on its USD value will always make it less than it could potentially be.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
As a newly minted social conservative, bullshit.
Having a house and a family was within reach of the working and middle classes decades ago. Social media is a cope. People just have to compare themselves to their own parents to know that something's wrong. Seeing insta snaps of someone's conspicious consumption might annoy the superficially narcissist but if you rent a tiny apartment and you're single in your thirties you know that someone has fucked you.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
People feel poorer because they can't own homes and they can't start families. That's a qualitative reality that no amount of quantitative statistics can capture. Something that, I note, that our much poorer ancestors accomplished (albeit, with effort, but not an impossible amount of it.)
crushedoranges
2yr ago
History belongs to those that show up. In other words, when your population will be half seniors by 2080, you're not a competitive Great Power, no matter how much automation you have.
To put a blunt point on it: no matter how many Chinese boomers have a boner for aggressive foreign policy, they can write checks that their youth can't cash.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
The fundamental bargain of neoliberal capitalism is that you'll forgo radicalism, tribalism, and religiosity in exchange for bourgeoise prosperity. It worked, until the gains of industrializing the world ran out.
The internet didn't cause the problem, it just makes it obvious that A) everyone is getting poorer and B) your elites still expect deference for riches they no longer provide.
So why care for a system that no longer works for you? Why care for global prosperity when you're getting none of it? When you bear the burden of upholding the order?
Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.
Gack, my memory is hazy. You are correct.
I'll leave the mistake as it is, as a mea culpa, but I believe the rest is essentially true.
Oh, boy, it's time for the annual political spin and deflection season!
I'm going to dispense with any poll-tracking or statistic-tealeaf-reading and go with my gut here. I think the Republicans will gain the senate while Dems squeak by in the house, making no one happy and reverting the system back to the 2nd-term Obama status quo. This is good for dramacoin. Nothing makes Americans more politically engaged when their legislature starts throwing DNS errors. The imperial presidency grinds on...
'22 is only significant, in my mind, as the pre-season for Trump Strikes Back '24. Fetterman and Oz is a preview of a greater contest, between a mental invalid and a scruple-less grifter. As much as my little accelerationist heart quivers at the idea of the VP debating Trump, it's most likely that we are witnessing the Last of the Boomer Civic Nationalists fight it out. The last of the people who value a liberal rules-based international order will croak in the next eight years.
God help us all.
Who will gain control of America's imperial hegemonic power? The right-populists, or the left-populists? Will the civil war be averted for another generation, or will it happen in my lifetime? The fate of the nation may very well be decided on which geriatric old man has a fatal stroke first. What you see today in politics - the insanity, the terror - this is not the nadir of the republic's fortunes: it is merely the threshold unto the abyss.
In time, we will look upon the misfortunes of our day as a golden age lost to time and tragedy.
But perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps electing corpses is the future of American politics. We have the technology to continue the life of brain-dead patients indefinitely. In the Oval Office, there is a mighty chair beneath the Resolute Desk, a Golden Throne, that will sustain the president's life for as long as it needs to be. A thousand infants are sacrificed each year to feed the device's need for adenochrome, perpetuating the beacon of boomer power from Washington, DC forever.
Anything to avoid electing someone from Gen X.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
At the simplest level of understanding, inflation is the consequence of too much money chasing too few goods.
Since none of us are Scrooge McDuck, we don't have a need for money: we want the goods that money represents.
An NrX solution would be to appoint Jeff Bezos as a Czar of logistics with the intent of increasing supply. I would nationalize all food banks and related charities, and import German managers from Aldi to coordinate them. I would create biblical-scale, Josephian government granaries that are needlessly large - seven years worth? - enough to convince even the most ardent hoarder that there is a lot of goods to be had.
I would also enlarge the strategic fossil fuel reserve and convince oil companies to invest in extraction with a fixed, contracted price. Housing is more difficult, but the creation of a state-based stockpile of common building materials - ensuring a stable price for construction - would also work, too.
The best thing about all of these agencies is that their mission is very defined: and can be phased out when the need passes.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
How many smart actors are in political betting, anyway. I think it's mostly wishcasting by feverent partisans. It's best used as a gauge for enthusiasm of the core base. Ceremonially igniting your cash on a bonfire to signal faith in your tribe is worth something (and if you actually win, bonus!)
I bet in antiquity, people would watch the smoke rising from the temples to gauge which Babylonian cult was on the ascendency. It's much the same here.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
But my viewpoint is that cryptocurrency is a first order terrible thing, it is a banal evil like slash and burn agriculture, payday loans, etc. All the good it could possible do is corrupted by its incredible inefficiency and callous indifference to its own toxicity.
It is technology that is completely worthless, obsolete as it was theorized and definitely as it was implemented. Its only use I see is to extort the tears and sweat of the gullible and enrich the intelligent and evil. That some South Americans occasionally use it to buy USD is, in my mind, completely inconsequential.
Technology is not agnostic. It can be built to be vile. No amount of clever evasions and definitional wordplay can hide smug, self-satisfied, all-consuming avarice behind it all.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I disagree: and I think it's a fundamental difference in values that can't be overcome by argument. I think that the world would be a better place if people thought through the consequences of their actions. If you pour chemical waste into the water table, you recruit people into a cult, or you don't push a shopping cart back to the corral, it's not guiltlessness - it's malicious indifference. There's no legal liability, but morally it is abhorrent all the same.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
But that's not true, not in the least. If you are scammed in real life, you have several avenues of recourse, through the financial and legal systems. The very virtues crypto advocates praise (untrackability, anonymity, trustless systems) are exactly the qualities that make it possible for scams to be pulled off with incredible ease.
There are certainly those Don Quixotes who tilt at the windmill of the USD being a hegemonic currency, but that doesn't make alternatives to it better. If you create abusable tools, advocate for them, and don't tell naive newcomers of the dangers and only the benefits - you're more awful than you think. You don't get to walk away from the moral implications of your actions. You can't hide in the theoretical wonderlands and ignore how the implications of the technology come about in real life.
The devil isn't the inchoate maw that devours sinners at the bottom: he's the man who pushes a wavering soul at the edge.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I am of the opinion that stupid people, trusting people, and old people should be allowed to keep their money. It is not reasonable to transfer the burden of 'educating oneself' onto the general public when it comes to investments and finance. When a state turns the deposits in their national banks into worthless nothing, it is of course a wrong thing. It is also a wrong thing when sleazy cryptoscammers run off with all the investor's money.
It's not a young man's game anymore. A careless idiot degenerate gambler who loses his inheritance by blowing it on a shitcoin is highly unsympathetic. But you read the bankruptcy documents of these shams of companies, and you see the pure despair of the investors. They are men and women in their fifties and sixties, who were sold hopes and dreams of financial independence. They are ruined now, and it is unlikely they will find good employment: they will be working now until the day they die. You read about marriages falling apart, people losing their houses. These desperate, foolish letters begging the judge to be pushed to the front of the creditor line, when the truth is that there is no money at all. All they have are the worthless tokens on a server they can't even withdraw from. So much for the promise of a decentralized currency!
There is no protection against this, in the technology, in the services that have sprung up around it. It is as safe as a screaming buzz saw for the unwary. It is not their fault: they were deceived, by advocates who were full of themselves, who gladly pumped them up - but dumped them, and called them witless fools and rubes when they lost it all.
So I find it hard to argue on the 'merits' and 'technicalities' of cryptocurrency when it has created so much human suffering. You may be able to ignore it, but I can't.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
Is cryptocurrency a significant contributor to capital flight? It's hard to believe, when it can be legislated out of existence by the whim of the legislature. Is Russia using the technology to bypass western sanctions? Surely, if there is any use case for crypto, we would have seen it boom if it was an effective way to bypass Western capital controls.
In my view, it's a solution in search of a problem: nearly everything its advocates say it can do is already done and on a far more economical scale.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
Just because the Argentinian state is a known bad actor does not make any proposed alternative inherently better. I can point to any amount of rugpulls, from the original MT.Gox to the very recent Polaris to demonstrate that crypto is not safe.
I would ask you to assume good faith, that I am informed and I have good reason to believe in what I do. Then make an argument, if you believe I am wrong. For the same reason, I assume you have no position in cryptocurrency and are arguing purely on its technical and utilitarian merits.
To do otherwise would be a great conflict of interest.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I know this is a tangent to what you're really talking about, but I have to say something about crypto. In short, there is a very short list of people less trustworthy than the Argentine government: the people who advocate for cryptocurrency are amongst them. The sort of people who hold a morbid fascination with the misery and suffering of others to further the adoption of their internet funcoins in the off chance they can offload their bags onto desperate people is profoundly evil.
Crypto is not a good store of value, or a currency. And anyone who says that it is you should be very wary of.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
They're writing political screeds on obscure political forums out of the sight of the eye of Sauron.
Do you have something to tell the class?
crushedoranges
2yr ago
I've noticed that terminally online (and dishonest) leftists can jump into the bailey of 'your valid and rigorous critique of x does not apply to y' because Marxism describes socialism as a stage of communism, or socialism is the end state of communism, or to be left is to be socialist, or the only true leftists are communist...
What you see that is an error of impreciseness is more of an general fly-swatter to those arguments. You don't have to be an orthodox Marxist-Leninist to know what exactly we're talking about here.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
But you didn't use your childhood games - which are arguably about as legitimate as a base of identity as any of these frauds - for financial benefit, for a political soapbox, to lambast the why-tie on their various political and social sins. It is on a grand scale the same crime as forum sock-puppeting, but with actual stakes. They are using the trappings of another ethnic group that others sympathize with for clout and platform.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.
If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
The term 'newhalf' is workable. Although it refers to pre-op or non-transitioning ftms, it's suitably gender-neutral to be flipped about to 'reverse newhalf' to gain the same meaning.
Honestly, Japan's fetish porn community comes up with perfectly functional technical terms that aren't dripping with ideology, so perhaps we should outsource this to them in general.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
Japan comes to the rescue: just call them futanari and be done with it. :P
A very well done write up.
I only say that judging by what I've heard, the Finns and Sami have had historically amicable relations and the imposition of brain-rot anti-colonialist narratives has created a granularity of identity which previously did not exist. (How many Finns went off into the wilderness over the centuries? How many Sami settled and became identical to their neighbors over the generations?)
Isn't this a fairer, more egalitarian way of things? Bothering with blood quantums, with ancient lists? Why impose a progressive view on race where the historical arrangement was of no controversy whatsover? Are we supposed to enforce a strict separation of ethnicities, that people cannot pass from one group to another by marriage and blood? Is that not racist?
They are neighbors of linguistically similar language isolates: they have literally been kissing cousins for thousands - if not tens of thousands - of years. The Sami are not Amerindians! It's stupid. It's very stupid.
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