For the people rushing in to call this the beginning another great financial crisis: remember that back then the tower of cards that collapsed wasn’t the mortgage backed securities themselves but the spiderweb of derivatives and secondary securitizations built on them.
Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.
Libertarianism is a two-part ideology that holds that first, despite all the clear signs around us, the world is simple. In a simple world, what is the point of regulation, policy, or any other collective action, for that matter? Why not abolish everything?
On its face, this isn't an insane point of view. It's natural to look at the scope and complexity of government and as yourself "is all this really necessary?" While it'll never achieve mainstream status, some tinges of libertarianism contribute meaningfully as a counterweight to the tendency of government to grow beyond the point of diminishing returns to society.
The problem is, the ideology has a second, usually unspoken tenet: anyone who suffers brought it upon themselves. Hacker stole your bitcoins? Should have used a hardware wallet. Hospital bills driving you to bankruptcy? This is what you get for not saving for a rainy day. Poisoned by shoddily produced medicine? Hey, you get what you pay for.
It's an ideology of arrogance. Both intellectual arrogance, as its dunning-kruger afflicted adherents look over the vast and complex world and say "how hard could it possibly be?" to every challenge they perceive, and also of moral arrogance, as those same people cast their eyes over the depth of human suffering and inexplicably think "I've got mine, you all are on your own."
The reason why libertarians always lose is because anyone who isn't a billionaire would spend their entire existence looking over their shoulder in terror at the infinite ways life can screw you. And even then they would probably fail. Any reasonable person would gladly hand over the right to sell medicine they mixed in their own basement in exchange for knowing they won't be poisoned when they need help themselves.
And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.
And that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.
If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.
Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?
The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.
Looks like most of the layoffs are in marketing and sales, and that they're still hiring on engineering and product. Honestly, I'm surprised they had marketing and sales people to begin with. Those sorts of efforts pay off most with big-name, high-end artists who probably don't need monthly patrons to be successful. Focusing in improving the product seems like a smarter move, especially given how janky their product was until quite recently.
I’m about as far from a crypto defender as you can get, but I think this page misses the point. If El Salvador is planning to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which by all accounts they are, their being “up” or “down” must be measured by the size of the economic activity that Bitcoin allowed them to facilitate. That figure is harder to get at.
Viewed this way, the additional purchases which seem foolish and laughable might even be signs of success: perhaps Bitcoin business is booming so hard they need to expand their reserves?
To be clear, I highly doubt that’s the case here, but if we’re going to assess success we should at least try to steelman their position. There’s plenty to mock about this change without taking cheap shots.
I find that something magical happens when you write things out by hand. Thinking slows down, you subconsciously explore the problem, and your expression becomes much more deliberate.
Also, you activate more of your capabilities as a thinking creature that way. Why just approach a problem with your fingertips on a keyboard when you can activate your visual, spatial, and temporal processing capabilities?
Personally, I’ve recently fallen in love with Leuchtturm notebooks. I bought the great big 83+ one, a nice Japanese mechanical pencil, and I’ve been going to town on problems ever since.
> America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.
So if we're going to tax them in years when their wealth increases, I presume we're also going to issue tax refunds when their wealth decreases?
I recently read a very detailed and very compelling argument for why COVID-19 did not originate in a laboratory from a specialist in high risk biocontainment viruses. Compare the hand-wavey and fluffy arguments presented here with hard and scientific ones presented here:
This is the relevant response. What the commenter is trying to imply is that the authors of this study are so staggeringly stupid that they overlooked the possibility of false positives when designing this experiment.
In reality, this test would need a false positive rate of over eighty percent to explain this kind of asymptomatic infection rate.
Also, prisons are useful because due to the close quarters it can be taken as a given that a substantial proportion of the population is infected, further minimizing the danger of these sorts of errors. The choice of population suggests a sophisticated experiment design, and the commenter is implying that the study authors made a statistics 101-level error.
Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.