So let's say I wanted to write a tech article and didn't care about monetization but wanted to have the broadest reach. Where do I post that article?
@mnswpr I still want the meme magic to make the organizations that simp for a group into the slur for that group.
I want the SPLC to declare the word "SPLC" to be hate speech. I want the ADL to declare saying "ADL" to be anti Semitic. Imagine that day. It would be glorious!
I want the SPLC to declare the word "SPLC" to be hate speech. I want the ADL to declare saying "ADL" to be anti Semitic. Imagine that day. It would be glorious!
@recusant I've often made the analogy to the late 1990s.
There was a dot com bubble in part because of Allan Greenspan's monetary policies, but also because people thought "the Internet is the Future". Most of the giants from that era are simply gone. Yahoo was considered a wonderkind, it's basically gone. AOL was considered titanic as it was merged into time-warner to become AOL Time Warner, but even that merger became a de-merger because AOL wasn't a player in the tech economy like they thought they'd be. Turbolinux was the fastest growing IPO in history, it's gone.
Facebook didn't exist yet. Amazon still sold books. Netflix sent out DVDs through the mail. Google didn't exist yet. Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy.
If you invested in most of the "sure bets" of the age, you would have lost your shirt, because the crossroads between technology and business hadn't been arrived at yet.
I could see a future where cryptocurrency or the like are actually used routinely, but either not with the current players, or not with one of the players we would ever expect. Just because it's priced high today doesn't mean it's going to be a good choice in the future.
I think there's going to have to be a few conditions before a really established cryptocurrency comes about.
1. A major currency shock. I think this is coming in the upcoming stagflationary depression, and possibly the US either defaulting on its debt or inflating away the value of its debt.
2. A user friendly interface. Most people can't use most cryptos right now.
3. A cryptocurrency with a relatively stable value and high throughput must exist and be recognized.
4. An agreement between major powers to accept that crypto instead of or in addition to their fiat currency.
The first one will have to happen before we see any real movement.
I have a feeling that a crypto that succeeds won't be just some thing some hackers threw together as well. There'll likely have to be some sort of central authority managing things because in the real world people forget their pins and lose their bank cards.
There was a dot com bubble in part because of Allan Greenspan's monetary policies, but also because people thought "the Internet is the Future". Most of the giants from that era are simply gone. Yahoo was considered a wonderkind, it's basically gone. AOL was considered titanic as it was merged into time-warner to become AOL Time Warner, but even that merger became a de-merger because AOL wasn't a player in the tech economy like they thought they'd be. Turbolinux was the fastest growing IPO in history, it's gone.
Facebook didn't exist yet. Amazon still sold books. Netflix sent out DVDs through the mail. Google didn't exist yet. Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy.
If you invested in most of the "sure bets" of the age, you would have lost your shirt, because the crossroads between technology and business hadn't been arrived at yet.
I could see a future where cryptocurrency or the like are actually used routinely, but either not with the current players, or not with one of the players we would ever expect. Just because it's priced high today doesn't mean it's going to be a good choice in the future.
I think there's going to have to be a few conditions before a really established cryptocurrency comes about.
1. A major currency shock. I think this is coming in the upcoming stagflationary depression, and possibly the US either defaulting on its debt or inflating away the value of its debt.
2. A user friendly interface. Most people can't use most cryptos right now.
3. A cryptocurrency with a relatively stable value and high throughput must exist and be recognized.
4. An agreement between major powers to accept that crypto instead of or in addition to their fiat currency.
The first one will have to happen before we see any real movement.
I have a feeling that a crypto that succeeds won't be just some thing some hackers threw together as well. There'll likely have to be some sort of central authority managing things because in the real world people forget their pins and lose their bank cards.
@lapin That birth certificate is interesting on its own, filled with little anachronisms.
@recusant
Money has a few attributes. It is a store of value, a unit of account, and a means of exchange.
At this moment, every crypto I'm aware of is terrible for any of these things, and #bitcoin is particularly bad.
As a store of value, you don't know what it's going to be valued at from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Is a Bitcoin going to cost $3000? $200,000? Depends on the whims of a fickle market. Could be $0 tomorrow, it isn't like Bitcoin is useful for anything, you can't even pay your taxes with it.
This precludes it as a unit of account. You'd be sending someone out to reprice all your goods hourly.
All that's left is use as a medium of exchange, but we know Bitcoin at least is horrid for that. When I use my bank card, the money comes out basically immediately. With my visa, basically the same thing. Both transactions are basically free both to me and to the merchant. By contrast, Bitcoin takes forever to use and costs a lot to use. During the last boom, investment alone locked up bitcoin transactions for a month so virtually no transactions even went through. If you used bitcoin in one or two major Walmarts, you'd completely destroy its ability to function.
Frankly, fiat money is imperfect, but valuable, relatively stable, and transferrable. It is the thing to beat. My money loses value, but not very quickly -- a couple percent per year, generally speaking (obviously we're in a weird moment in history). I know from day to day and even from year to year basically how much value money has and how much money my stuff is worth. If I'm saving for a house, or a car, or a shopping trip, I know how much money I'm going to need, and I can transfer the money cheaply and quickly. Every store takes my fiat money, and when it comes time to pay taxes, everyone needs to hold enough fiat money to pay the government so there's a built-in demand.
Finally, bitcoin is spoken of as a means to avoid regulation, but we know that's false. First, if you do something the government doesn't like with your bitcoin, they can easily trace the transactions. Second, we've seen the entire world regulate bitcoin transactions, including Turkey who banned it outright.
So it isn't a store of value, it isn't a unit of account, it isn't a means of exchange, it isn't a means to avoid regulation. Why would anyone buy bitcoin?
The only reason people buy bitcoin is that others are buying bitcoin. If people take profits from bitcoin, it is paid for solely by newer investors.
Meriam-Webster defines a Ponzi scheme as "an investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks"
This is in contrast to normal investment where you buy a share of something that has or produces value besides simply being an investment. One doesn't buy bonds to hold bonds, they buy bonds because they are promised that because they buy the bond, they will be paid interest. One doesn't buy stocks to hold stocks, they hold stocks because those businesses will either pay dividends to shareholders or they will use profits derived from running the business. Say what you will about the valuation of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, each of these companies has massive revenue sources other than investors, where Bitcoin really does not. Miners aren't making their profits on the huge number of transactions Bitcoin does on a b2c basis, they're making their profits on the massive new investment in bitcoin.
For those reasons it is by definition a ponzi scheme.
Money has a few attributes. It is a store of value, a unit of account, and a means of exchange.
At this moment, every crypto I'm aware of is terrible for any of these things, and #bitcoin is particularly bad.
As a store of value, you don't know what it's going to be valued at from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Is a Bitcoin going to cost $3000? $200,000? Depends on the whims of a fickle market. Could be $0 tomorrow, it isn't like Bitcoin is useful for anything, you can't even pay your taxes with it.
This precludes it as a unit of account. You'd be sending someone out to reprice all your goods hourly.
All that's left is use as a medium of exchange, but we know Bitcoin at least is horrid for that. When I use my bank card, the money comes out basically immediately. With my visa, basically the same thing. Both transactions are basically free both to me and to the merchant. By contrast, Bitcoin takes forever to use and costs a lot to use. During the last boom, investment alone locked up bitcoin transactions for a month so virtually no transactions even went through. If you used bitcoin in one or two major Walmarts, you'd completely destroy its ability to function.
Frankly, fiat money is imperfect, but valuable, relatively stable, and transferrable. It is the thing to beat. My money loses value, but not very quickly -- a couple percent per year, generally speaking (obviously we're in a weird moment in history). I know from day to day and even from year to year basically how much value money has and how much money my stuff is worth. If I'm saving for a house, or a car, or a shopping trip, I know how much money I'm going to need, and I can transfer the money cheaply and quickly. Every store takes my fiat money, and when it comes time to pay taxes, everyone needs to hold enough fiat money to pay the government so there's a built-in demand.
Finally, bitcoin is spoken of as a means to avoid regulation, but we know that's false. First, if you do something the government doesn't like with your bitcoin, they can easily trace the transactions. Second, we've seen the entire world regulate bitcoin transactions, including Turkey who banned it outright.
So it isn't a store of value, it isn't a unit of account, it isn't a means of exchange, it isn't a means to avoid regulation. Why would anyone buy bitcoin?
The only reason people buy bitcoin is that others are buying bitcoin. If people take profits from bitcoin, it is paid for solely by newer investors.
Meriam-Webster defines a Ponzi scheme as "an investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks"
This is in contrast to normal investment where you buy a share of something that has or produces value besides simply being an investment. One doesn't buy bonds to hold bonds, they buy bonds because they are promised that because they buy the bond, they will be paid interest. One doesn't buy stocks to hold stocks, they hold stocks because those businesses will either pay dividends to shareholders or they will use profits derived from running the business. Say what you will about the valuation of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, each of these companies has massive revenue sources other than investors, where Bitcoin really does not. Miners aren't making their profits on the huge number of transactions Bitcoin does on a b2c basis, they're making their profits on the massive new investment in bitcoin.
For those reasons it is by definition a ponzi scheme.
@drgo @Laconicif @mystik @smartbrain @recusant @mishari The saddest thing is the people who go "I'd never go on the fediverse, I'll have to see all these gross ideas I disagree with!"
I was on voat, and I got to see an echo chamber that was different, I don't care to see an alternative echo chamber, I'd like to see a space with a bunch of different ideas available. I do think that the federverse has hit a critical mass where it has that.
Some crazy ideas are just crazy, but others are crazy until they stop being crazy. Quantum mechanics has a large number of concepts that are totally counter to Newtonian physics, but the evidence is there to prove one step at a time that they're true until the body of knowledge can't be denied regardless of what you'd like to think about it.
I was on voat, and I got to see an echo chamber that was different, I don't care to see an alternative echo chamber, I'd like to see a space with a bunch of different ideas available. I do think that the federverse has hit a critical mass where it has that.
Some crazy ideas are just crazy, but others are crazy until they stop being crazy. Quantum mechanics has a large number of concepts that are totally counter to Newtonian physics, but the evidence is there to prove one step at a time that they're true until the body of knowledge can't be denied regardless of what you'd like to think about it.
@ThreeOneThreeChris Nobody could have seen this coming.... Except for anyone with the most basic understanding of economics!
Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the idea basically that society needs to be both progressive and conservative to function. The lessons of the past are often important and useful, but not all of them. We need to strike out and find new ways of being while retaining the best ideas of the past.
Under the most accepted theories, the planet Earth started of with a carbon dioxide atmosphere at a very high pressure. At that moment, life that metabolized oxygen as we know it today would immediately die, but anerobic life that metabolized carbon dioxide would do very well. At some point a few hundred million years down the line, with all kinds of microbial life metablolising carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen, the world absorbed that oxygen for a while. Iron became rust, oceans de-acidified, and overall that oxygen was used up. Eventually there was nowhere else for the oxygen to go and the atmosphere started becoming less CO2 and more oxygen. To the organisms that required CO2, this was a catastrophe. In fact, some scientists call this tipping point the "Oxygen catastrophe". It killed 95% of microbial life on the planet.
The fact is, you had 3 options: Become an oxygen metaboliser, become tolerant of oxygen and continue to metabolise carbon dioxide, or go extinct.
Imagine if there was an anthromorphic council of microbes at that point in time. There would no doubt be microbes yelling "We've always consumed CO2 and we never had to worry about O2 before, stop worrying we'll be here forever!" and there would be microbes yelling "We must all stop consuming CO2 forever or we're going to all die!", but the reality was somewhere in between. The oxygen metabolising microbes would come about, but without the CO2 metaolising microbes there would be no oxygen after a while and everyone would die out. There needed to be changes, but there also needed to be a balance between progress and conservatism or everything would fall apart.
This would not be the only time things had to change. There have been a number of mass extinction events throughout history, and each time the status quo was thrown out and new rules meant that some of the old ways of being needed to be re-examined.
Under the most accepted theories, the planet Earth started of with a carbon dioxide atmosphere at a very high pressure. At that moment, life that metabolized oxygen as we know it today would immediately die, but anerobic life that metabolized carbon dioxide would do very well. At some point a few hundred million years down the line, with all kinds of microbial life metablolising carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen, the world absorbed that oxygen for a while. Iron became rust, oceans de-acidified, and overall that oxygen was used up. Eventually there was nowhere else for the oxygen to go and the atmosphere started becoming less CO2 and more oxygen. To the organisms that required CO2, this was a catastrophe. In fact, some scientists call this tipping point the "Oxygen catastrophe". It killed 95% of microbial life on the planet.
The fact is, you had 3 options: Become an oxygen metaboliser, become tolerant of oxygen and continue to metabolise carbon dioxide, or go extinct.
Imagine if there was an anthromorphic council of microbes at that point in time. There would no doubt be microbes yelling "We've always consumed CO2 and we never had to worry about O2 before, stop worrying we'll be here forever!" and there would be microbes yelling "We must all stop consuming CO2 forever or we're going to all die!", but the reality was somewhere in between. The oxygen metabolising microbes would come about, but without the CO2 metaolising microbes there would be no oxygen after a while and everyone would die out. There needed to be changes, but there also needed to be a balance between progress and conservatism or everything would fall apart.
This would not be the only time things had to change. There have been a number of mass extinction events throughout history, and each time the status quo was thrown out and new rules meant that some of the old ways of being needed to be re-examined.
Mobian is at this point my clear favorite. It's janky, but it lets me run what I want to run. The button to show or hide the keyboard is key, and it's marginally more stable.
There we go, https://lotide.fbxl.net/
My #lotide (LoTide) instance! It's a federated link aggregator.
Took a bit for a layman to get running, and one odd thing is that if you want to change the skin you have to recompile, but once it was running it was ok. CPU utilization when it's just sitting there serving pages is essentially nothing.
I'm really tempted to put together something on how to set it up, because it's tricky because of how it was written, but it's super straightforward once you know how it's done. The other thing is that I hate the default theme, but it's reasonably easy to set it up how you want using css.
One really neat thing about it is it spits out pure HTML. If you make it available as an http server, I think you could visit this on the Mosaic web browser and all you'd lose is formatting.
My #lotide (LoTide) instance! It's a federated link aggregator.
Took a bit for a layman to get running, and one odd thing is that if you want to change the skin you have to recompile, but once it was running it was ok. CPU utilization when it's just sitting there serving pages is essentially nothing.
I'm really tempted to put together something on how to set it up, because it's tricky because of how it was written, but it's super straightforward once you know how it's done. The other thing is that I hate the default theme, but it's reasonably easy to set it up how you want using css.
One really neat thing about it is it spits out pure HTML. If you make it available as an http server, I think you could visit this on the Mosaic web browser and all you'd lose is formatting.
Growing up, my parents were divorced and there was always a bit of a cold war going on. Say the wrong thing to one parent and the other will have to hear about it.
Part of becoming an adult for me was taking off all those screens in front of the real me I had to put up. Until I did, I couldn't meet friends or really love my life.
These people want everyone walking on eggshells forever. That's hell on earth, their life's work is enacting hell on earth, and it's no wonder they're so miserable if they think that's a goal worth fighting for.
Part of becoming an adult for me was taking off all those screens in front of the real me I had to put up. Until I did, I couldn't meet friends or really love my life.
These people want everyone walking on eggshells forever. That's hell on earth, their life's work is enacting hell on earth, and it's no wonder they're so miserable if they think that's a goal worth fighting for.
@borzoi @Fellow_Groyper to be fair, you can be wrong and not be an NPC. There are even times when NPCs are right about something.
The key difference isn't what you believe, it's how you believe it.
The key difference isn't what you believe, it's how you believe it.
@selea @redstarfish @swashberry your. You're fully locked down device doesn't know basic word selection.if you're using speech recognition
@selea @swashberry @redstarfish
Considering that the most popular Linux product by far is likely Android which relies substantially less on the GNU ecosystem, it's a distinction that maybe becoming more important as time goes on. Actually, Android is a perfect example of why Linux by itself doesn't necessarily fix anything. Congratulations, you're fully locked down device has an open source kernel.
Considering that the most popular Linux product by far is likely Android which relies substantially less on the GNU ecosystem, it's a distinction that maybe becoming more important as time goes on. Actually, Android is a perfect example of why Linux by itself doesn't necessarily fix anything. Congratulations, you're fully locked down device has an open source kernel.
@MrNobody
>whole discussion about it seems to revolve around how it could be used for harassment
"That was the point." -Barack Obama
>whole discussion about it seems to revolve around how it could be used for harassment
"That was the point." -Barack Obama
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6004451
Hitler didn't invade Poland in 1938 or sign off on the concentration camps. It was Bell Canada, Hitler just took the blame because he was a bro.
Hitler didn't invade Poland in 1938 or sign off on the concentration camps. It was Bell Canada, Hitler just took the blame because he was a bro.
Ok, I've almost got a #lotide instance up and running! I've been hoping to get a federated link aggregator going for a while!
One thing I'm excited about: Hitide's default theme hurts my eyes, so I'll be trying to make it look a bit better for my own instance.
One thing I'm excited about: Hitide's default theme hurts my eyes, so I'll be trying to make it look a bit better for my own instance.