ObscureMind

This is the Windows 7 version of MacOS

The expiration date should be 0 seconds after it's signed.

When reading an article from a politically biased outlet like The New York Times, consider asking yourself the following questions:

- Can you independently verify the accuracy of the data presented?

- If you find inaccuracies:

  - Are the errors due to the data itself being wrong, or are the underlying sources unreliable?

  - Do these errors appear to be the result of intentional bias, or are they reasonable mistakes?

  - Ultimately, do these issues undermine the credibility of DOGE as a trustworthy source?

Just look at this thread if you want to change your mind.

Correct, there's plenty of waste and corruption in the government.

This seems less like a genuine discussion and more like an emotional appeal bundled with a series of accusations. Laws are challenged in court all the time—that's part of the process, not proof of wrongdoing. As for government workers, respect should be earned, not demanded. And as for siding with someone, politics isn't a simple binary where supporting one action means endorsing everything a person has ever done. If we're going to have a meaningful conversation, it should be based on facts and principles, not just loaded questions.

If you're from Europe, much of global politics likely appears either moderate or far-right.

Hacker News leans heavily to the left, and I rarely come across viewpoints that could be considered right-leaning. By right-wing, I mean a focus on limited government, free markets, private property, self-ownership, self-defense, and personal responsibility without dependence on collectivism—along with traditional social values and a recognition of natural social hierarchies based on merit and value. These perspectives are rarely represented in discussions here.

You're walking down the street with a billionaire.

A thief approaches, but only robs you.

Would your complaint be that the billionaire should have been robbed too?

Taxation is coercion. Instead of resenting those who manage to keep more of what they earn, consider that billionaires are the ones taking risks, investing, and creating jobs. If anything, the real issue is government waste, not who’s being “robbed” the least. To that extent, what DOGE is doing, at least for the moment, is something positive, regardless of the political spin around it.

Your mom :)

On a more serious note, this forum isn’t the best place for political debate—especially given the strong left-leaning bias of the HN crowd, which tends to be intolerant of opposing views. That New York Times article isn’t just reporting; it’s crafted as a political narrative.

I’m not denying that there may be errors, whether potential or observable, in the DOGE work. However, I’d be cautious about using those errors to discredit the broader effort to scrutinize government budget allocations—something the article seems to be doing to support its narrative.

The New York Times is not the most reliable source for objective reporting on the Trump administration. I’m not taking sides, but understanding this topic requires a less biased perspective.

What's stopping you from directly sending money to those functions you love?

Why must everybody else also love paying taxes like you do?

I would acknowledge that the Tea Act itself did not introduce new taxes, but instead retained an existing tax from the Townshend Acts. The real concern for many colonists was the principle of being taxed at all by a distant government. The Tea Act gave the East India Company a monopoly on tea imports, effectively removing the ability of colonial merchants to participate in the trade, and forcing colonists to buy taxed tea. This move was seen as an attempt by Britain to assert greater control over colonial commerce through taxation by making the colonies dependent on the British-controlled East India Company.

For many colonists, the Tea Act was part of a broader frustration with what they viewed as excessive and unwarranted taxation on goods they needed, like tea. They objected not just to the specific tea tax, but to any form of taxation that they felt was imposed without their consent, and that undermined their economic freedom. This frustration eventually culminated in the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, which was a protest against both the specific tax on tea and the broader issue of unfair taxation—whether or not they had direct representation in Parliament.

While it's true that cryptocurrencies rely on electricity and infrastructure, this doesn’t inherently tie them to government control or the state in the same way as traditional fiat systems.

Cryptocurrencies, by design, function on decentralized networks that don't require the direct oversight or approval of any government. The electricity and hardware used for mining and transaction validation may come from existing infrastructure, but that infrastructure doesn’t need to be state-controlled in the same way that a national currency system is. Individuals and private enterprises can choose to power crypto networks using renewable energy sources, local power grids, or even off-grid systems, making them more flexible and adaptable to a variety of environments, independent of centralized authorities.

As for the legal and financial systems that facilitate exchange into fiat currency, these are not an intrinsic part of cryptocurrency's functionality. Cryptocurrencies are used as a medium of exchange and store of value in numerous jurisdictions without the need for state-backed systems. Peer-to-peer exchanges and decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms allow users to trade, lend, and borrow without relying on traditional financial institutions or government regulation. In fact, the very appeal of cryptocurrency is that it offers an alternative to centralized systems, providing financial autonomy outside the control of national governments or banks.

The idea that cryptocurrencies “need” government structures is a misunderstanding of their decentralized nature. While state-backed systems provide a safety net or a point of conversion, they are not essential to the existence of cryptocurrencies themselves. In fact, governments’ involvement often comes with regulation, restrictions, and sometimes outright hostility — yet cryptocurrencies continue to thrive in regions with little or no government support.

Yes, we live in a society, but part of the reason cryptocurrencies have gained traction is because they challenge the monopoly that governments and traditional financial systems have on money, banking, and trade. In essence, cryptocurrencies operate as a parallel system that doesn’t depend on state authority to function.

If every government worldwide were to forget about or ban cryptocurrencies entirely, they would still persist.

Governments, in this case, offer nothing essential to the functioning of cryptocurrencies. Cryptos are essentially just digital numbers transferred across the internet, their existence sustained purely by individuals investing their time, resources, and trust. Their value and continued operation are independent of government control, investment, infrastructure, or approval.

The American Revolution was partly sparked by the "Tea Act" of 1773, which imposed taxes on tea without colonial representation. The colonists saw this as unjust. Fast forward to today, and many people seem to accept high taxes on goods and services as necessary, while viewing tax exemptions as undeserved or privileged.

Perhaps everything deserves a tax exemption, especially cryptocurrency, which operates independently of government control and doesn’t rely on state structures to function.

cd /Applications && xattr -d com.apple.provenance "Zen Browser.app"/ && xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "Zen Browser.app"/

I stopped trusting Amazon a long time ago. They've been canceling plenty of hardware devices, and on the top of it Prime is not even worth it anymore.

protip: if you use freemium spotify in the browser with an adblock you won't be bugged with ads

Along the lines of building a full computer out of discrete logic parts, slu4 created the Minimal 64, described in his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@slu467

Think for a second and you'll reach the conclusion that currency monopolies (meaning: you can only use a given currency in a "country"), taxation and populism (a side-effect of democracy) are interlinked.

As for the "what's needed" for social justice, that's your opinion. It might even be the "majority's" opinion. But what if I don't agree? Will you still impose taxation through force on me to fund your ideas?

Anyway, my best advice for you is to not hold crappy bitcoin (and/or gold/silver), and keep your wealth in US dollars (or whichever other fiat currency). I guarantee you won't regret that strategy in 2-5 years.

Is the state's army economically funded by a contract established voluntarily?

Can you start a private army to compete (not meaning fight it, but to provide the same services) with the state's army ?

If you have to pay for it (you actually pay for the army to force you to pay for it...), and you can't compete with it for the services it provides, it's not only a monopoly, it's also a tyranny.

> That said, we have zero chance of fixing our corrupt political system

We do have a chance. It's not going to be long until a critical mass of individuals understand that democracy is a system that legitimizes coercion, and that taxation is theft and generates poverty. We just need one more generation until that happens.

When people reach that conclusion, they will move their money away from fiat currencies and they will move their information into distributed systems (eg. blockchains).

By consequence they will make states and coercion not viable. Without the ability to control currencies, states go bankrupt and can't even pay for people to steal your money.

Welcome to anarcho-capitalism, while I wait for the downvotes.

... Wealth redistribution is essentially theft, no matter how much you like it

Start Blaming America's Poverty for the size of its government.

Just to make sure we understand something here:

Taxation is robbery.

If you want companies and individuals to pay taxes, you're defending a state that is unethical (as taxation forces people to give away their private property through coercion), and authoritarian ("democracy" is no justification for the use of force).

If you have any supposed justification for a centralized state that enforces taxation through the use of force on its citizens, you're only denying the fact you agree with crime.

Please stop talking about companies and individuals paying more taxes. We should all be paying no taxes through coercion.

How is that having journalists reviewing the work of other journalists won't lead to corporatism?

The article talks about morals, which by themselves are based on values and beliefs, therefore not defensible ethically and logically.

Meritocracy is not ethically defensible under argumentative logic -- Hans Herman Hoppe has provided the framework for that.

HackRF one can be purchased for $100 nowadays: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/HackRF-One-1MHz-to-6GHz-SDR-...

Is it worth paying $380 more to have a better ADC and a few more bells and whistles in the BladeRF micro?

The authors also provide a reimplementation of dplyr in Python that integrates well with plotnine: https://github.com/has2k1/plydata