This quote is eerily similar to net result of one of the Four Pests Campaigns during the Great Leap Forward, where sparrows were targeted for extinction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
“Researchers also found that common birds from just 12 families, such as blackbirds, sparrows and finches, account for over 90 percent—or over 2.5 billion birds—of total population decline. Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.”
The result was a calamitous famine, and it seems big Ag is on a similar path, but in a wildly different context.
How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care? Lots of jurisdiction's protocols will shut down day cares or in-person schooling for a week or more after a single case. In that environment, who are you going to get to take care of your child that may have been exposed?
This post gets to the core that the relevant axes for belief in Bitcoin and decentralized crypto in general lie in "knowledge" vs "trust in the system."
The main issue I have here is that the knowledge bit glosses over the "high trust in the system/high knowledge" quadrant quite a bit. One perspective from those folks that's missing is that Bitcoin's day of reckoning will inevitably be if and when it becomes a material threat to the system, that the system itself will react to (1) suppress Bitcoin and (2) replace its own currency with one that re-establishes trust.
The history for currencies around the world broadly follow the pattern we're seeing unfold today: a "hard" currency becomes devalued, typically due to some event like war, loses trust, and the system replaces it with a new currency that can re-establish trust. Some examples are the greenback-dollar relationship, the mark-rentenmark-reichmark, and the 1994 Brazilian real.
The other shoe here is that, as part of the playbook for establishing new currencies during a crisis, the governments always suppress alternative currencies, whether those were bank-issued notes in the 19th century US, FDR's massive gold confiscation, or re-valuing debts in terms of the newly established currency - all options are in play, and there is basically nothing that the government will stop at to run it's playbook to stabilize the currency in crisis.
In that context, maybe the smart/high trust people think "Crypto is a cool technology, but it can be used to create the next central bank currency so why do I care about this one when anyone can create a new coin" and also consciously or unconsciously know that the government is going to take massive action to suppress a $1MM bitcoin.
Some good references for how currencies (and contract denominated in the currency, like debt & assets) evolve in various crises throughout history: "Principals for Navigating Big Debt Crises" by Ray Dalio, "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber, Perry Mehrling's course "Economics of Money and Banking."
Ok, I think we just disagree on what is journalism and that’s fine. The Opinion page is not journalistic, it’s just other people’s op-eds selected by an editorial board and said board is not immune from either bias nor criticism.
The rest of the paper is generally outstanding, though they have some high profile screw ups. Can’t trust anything 100% ever, but I don’t think this incident reflects on the rest of the paper. Regular NYT subscribers (myself included) already know what they’re getting in Opinion, and I personally think it’s trash.
Precisely why it matters is that the debates you cite in the WSJ are in a completely different realm where you can have reasonable people disagree. I don’t think Cotton’s Op-Ed is novel territory for either the NYT or WSJ, but I think it’s a reasonable position that the NYT should not legitimize calls to violence as a resolution to an ongoing domestic issue.
The NYT operates on links, this is not cable news. Of course it will be shared on FB and elsewhere, so not getting your point at all.
As for the final point, I think there’s a reasonable debate to be had there! I don’t know exactly where I stand on it, I personally find the piece disturbing and it crosses the line in a functioning democracy. However, it certainly informed me beyond a doubt to Cotton’s and his colleagues’ opinions, so I just have to trust others felt similarly.
Yep I’m not defending the NYT Opinions page or editorial board, in my opinion it’s an embarrassment for an otherwise solid paper of record (not defending NYT in general, either - they have made some serious mistakes).
However, the poster is trying to put the Cotton op-Ed in the same league as fairly mild policy debates in the WSJ. I find that dangerously close to legimitizing it.
And that’s infinitely more on-point than some relatively mild policy debates in the WSJ! The difference in those cases would be the foreign policy concerns vs a domestic debate, so there’s still some context to discuss, but the comment I’m replying to is blowing this out of proportion and also legitimizing Cotton’s op-Ed by comparing it the prior ones.
This is stunning false equivalence. None of the opinions you offered are similar to Tom Cotton’s apologia for “sending in the tanks”. The NYT Opinions section is still, for better or worse, still quite diverse in its opinions. Ross Douthat and David Brooks are not leaving anytime soon.
That tweet was referring to shipments from China to Italy, many of which were paid for and orders. Some were donated, but the articles present it as a grand gesture instead of Italy attempting to provision their own supplies on the market.
It’s a sad mix of propaganda and temporary faith in a shaky globally supply chain.
Just saw the comment - I think it's easy to delineate between 3rd party and 1st party cookies, though I know that this would make is much harder to use a lot of SaaS products like Google Analytics etc.
Is it possible for us to create a tech ecosystem where those 3rd party cookies can be avoided in general?
Perhaps, but it’s really only worse looking at it from the APR. The business is still performing better nominally when they outperform so there’s no incentive to do worse on a nominal basis.
Fair enough! I was not familiar with his background, and found him more partisan than the innocent kid studying the effects of the climate on hurricanes after googling :)
Dr. Pielke’s credentials are a BS in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Political Science. Regardless of what you think of his points, he presents himself very much as a climate scientist in these slides, yet I don’t think that he really is one. There may be more to this than just some ties to Wikileaks, does any one else that studies the climate take him seriously?
Isn’t the suppression of the event in media the key difference, though? The Waco massacre was widely discussed and publicized, and you can find plenty of information on it if you’d like - including people that defend the Waco standoff.