OrlandoHakim

but as v0idzer0 pointed out in a reply to your similar comment above

"it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best"

Happens more often than most are willing to admit, especially lately.

In Canada, protestors had their bank accounts frozen for saying mean things about Trudeau. It's not exactly the same as your example but it does rhyme.

To elaborate, Linear is probably the best business app I have used for software management ever. For engineers it is fast and fluid and simple with outstanding keyboard shortcuts. For managers it is strongly opinionated with an agile methodology that requires no setup and just works. For teams, Linear makes it fun to stay in sync and track progress towards goals.

One of the best features of Linear is that it inspires my team to build better software, not just tick feature boxes.

In other words, taking a board seat would have limited him to holding no more than 14.9% of Twitter shares. Now he can take control if he wants.

I think it’s more likely that Elon wants to keep his options open. As a board member he would have a fiduciary duty’s that would prevent him from doing certain things. Most notably, it would keep him from purchasing more shares and orchestrating a hostile takeover by way of taking a majority stake in Twitter.

I would like to advocate for Linear.app as an outstanding, fast, polished alternative to Jira for teams looking for an alternative.

War crimes committed by democratically elected officials are still war crimes. I don’t see a compelling argument in giving Bush and Blair total control to decide the economic fate of nations who didn’t elect them is justifiable. Crypto is partly about separating money from state so democratically elected governments such as Canada cannot unilaterally delete people from the banking system without due process.

My original argument stands. The author’s primary argument is that crypto is bad for authoritarians/statists as it allows the subverting of state power. He is not wrong on that point, but he is viewing the issue from a one-sided perspective and his arguments are tired.

This is a really bad article. It screams from the hilltops that crypto is bad because it doesn’t support the author’s statist/authoritarian worldview.

For example one of the article’s first points is that crypto is bad because it makes it harder for countries to enforce sanctions while ignoring that sanctions are acts of economic war and without recognizing that they have been horribly abused by governments in the past. (See Madeleine Albright defending her sanctions against Iraq which directly led to the deaths of 1.5 million women and children)

The author goes on to regurgitate every standard criticism against cryptocurrencies but in the shallowest of ways and without bringing anything new to the table.

I’ve seen many far better critiques of crypto. This article falls far short.

I am surprised no one has shared these two important documentary videos on money:

Money as Debt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN-MKefA

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

The Canadian truckers and their supporters would like to have a word with you.

As would the citizens of Cyprus and Sri Lanka who will have or have had funds from their Bank accounts taken because the powers that be decided that the customers money was better off in the banksters hands.

It is arguable whether or not Bitcoin counts as part of Web3. I would argue it is the original Web3 technology (blockchain) and so it is an essential component of web3. Also, I understand Bitcoin the best so can make a stronger case for it than NFTs or other Web3 concepts.

I would argue that one of the core reasons why Bitcoin was invented was to separate money from state and create a new form of quasi-money quasi-digital gold that could prevent powerful central actors from arbitrarily manipulating it’s supply based on their whims and desires. Bitcoin was born out of the ashes of the great financial crisis.

The Bitcoin genesis block famously contains a quote from the Times of London which reads as follows: “Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.”

You may not personally see that as a problem, but I do as do many others. Bitcoin does introduce it’s own problems but I would argue that it does an excellent job of fixing the problem of allowing for a money free from government control, with censorship resistant peer-to-peer payments (remember the Canadian truckers?), no counter-party risk, and predictable inflation policy for the next 100 years.

Yes it is slow and inefficient and it uses a lot of energy and it is also volatile, but it also allows for things that were never possible before it existed.

It is hard to advocate for the value of decentralized systems without sounding like a hand-waving conspiracy theorist.

The benefits of decentralization do come at a cost of efficiency and throughput and they are often harder to quantify or justify unless one takes a harder look at the fully loaded cost of centralization.

As an example, consider the fact that MacDonald’s is by far the most prolific restaurant in the world or that GMO crops undoubtedly yield more productivity per acre than heirloom crops. In both cases centralization and standardization of the process has led to huge productivity gains, but at what expense? What have we lost in the process?

I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.

Diversity of ideas, strategies, goals, ownership and agency all result in a society that, while productive, is less resilient.

Look at the various fungal plagues that have blighted banana production over the years. Monoculture brought huge yields but at the expense of resilience as a single fungus nearly wiped out the original Gros Michel variety and now a new fungus threatens the same for the Cavendish.

Similarly, Bitcoin is an inefficient network for transmitting fiat compared to Visa when measured against the criteria payment networks are usually measured on. Ethereum takes huge resources to run the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi as a global state machine.

Measuring decentralized systems vs centralized purely on efficiency and throughput kind of misses the forest for the trees. Decentralized systems have value that isn’t always obvious to a superficial analysis such as this one. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Often the largest paradigm shifts look like toys to start. (See Clayton Christianson and disruptive innovation.)

Paul Graham recently posted a bit of relevant Russian Propaganda on this controversial topic of supporting or fighting hatred and intolerance towards Russian people.

I’ll leave it here without comment: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1505857667545321473?s=21

I will admit that this action is less ugly than much of the anti-Russian hate I’ve seen lately. It still makes my stomach churn that they chose to ‘cancel’ the first human in space post-humously because the leader of a country that didn’t even exist when Gagarin was alive, chose to invade another country.

I believe wars of aggression are always wrong and are always war crimes per the Geneva Conventions, whether it is by the US (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc.) or Russia (Ukraine) or the Soviet Union (Afghanistan also).

I don’t believe it is right to foment or tolerate hate against an entire people or culture simply because their totalitarian leader decided to invade.

For the record, I absolutely support the right of Ukrainians to defend themselves against a foreign invader and believe other countries should help, but I stop at supporting hate towards civilians of any nations.

If anything, we who live in western democracies have more to atone for than our neighbors living in totalitarian regimes.

I am still waiting for anyone to strip George Bush Jr. and Tony Blair among others of their awards and recognition since we all now know that WMDs and spreading democracy were lies used to justify the killing of 1 million Iraqi civilians.

Not sure I would support a fundraiser by an organization so willing to play fast and loose with the truth - especially when their motive is to support fashionable politics of the day.

It doesn't lend much credibility to the organization when they conveniently omit historical facts in order to match their desired narrative.

While Google has in the past been a formidable competitor, I no longer consider them a serious threat to a customer-obsessed tech company such as Shopify, Amazon or even Walmart.

Google can't even compete on search with it's own search engine of 15 years ago in terms of the quality of the product. The entire front page is made of ads for many common searches these days, and for most searches everything above the fold is a first-party or 3rd party ad.

As a long-time Googler and now X-Googler, I've seen the operation from the inside. Google is now a fat and arrogant monopoly that is unwilling to take risks with employees more interested in getting the next promotion than building the next big thing. They still hire amazing talent thanks to their brand and compensation, but the focus of this talent is on getting promoted or playing politics not on building products that people love.

As an example, a few years ago they tried to take on Amazon and Instacart in a similar market - home shopping delivery. After several failed iterations, they abandoned the market, fired everyone on the project and moved on as if nothing happened. I expect a similar outcome in this case.

Whatever your thoughts are about the Ukraine invasion - and I suspect most, including me are against wars of aggression - the idea that we should take this situation as an excuse to re-write history deeply saddens me.

Maybe we should re-define the term first person in space to mean, the first person in space who isn't from a country we don't like? I believe we still recognized Yuri Gagarin as the first person in space during the cold war. What changed now?

Fair point. Maybe we start by asking Germany and Western Europe to stop funding Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?

I realize that these decisions have consequences and it might be preferable to mine bitcoin with flared gas that we can then sell to Germany so they are not reliant on Russian gas.

I am not well-enough informed on the subject to claim to understand all the consequences of such a move.

How are you so confident that your suggestion is best for all stakeholders?

Google has a choice here. Just as they chose to not to do business in China.

I find it disingenuous to claim that one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world has no agency in this situation.

Remember how hard Google fought the Australian laws about search engines paying news organizations.

Not to say the Australian government is guilt-free here. There are no good guys here.

Patiently waiting for your proposal for a better solution. Actually the whole industry is and has been waiting for a less wasteful solution since well before Bitcoin existed.

In the future maybe we can just switch to nuclear fusion and everything will be better. In the real-world of the present, this is a good and practical solution for reducing greenhouse gas and finding a higher value purpose for otherwise waste energy.

What’s not to like at least until you or someone else invents something better?

In 2022 some may also care about a truly scarce digital store of value in a time of unprecedented inflation. Speaking about Bitcoin, not altcoins.

What is controversial about Brave? Seems like the best alternative at the moment IMHO

I switched to Brave - no regrets

Monetary policy is the elephant in the room that no one in charge dare mention.

A quick look at the numbers makes this obvious. Consider that 80% of all dollars that exist were created in the past three years.

Now ask why Janet Yellen, Jerome Powell, and the Biden administration conveniently forget to mention even the possibility that money printing may have been a contributing factor driving inflation.

It's an indirect measure at best and highly gameable [0]

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

Slightly off-topic, I wish we could have journalists as authentic, insightful and engaging as this former comedian turned advocate of the people. Jon Stewart is an absolute treasure of a human being who obviously cares deeply about the issues facing everyday folks. That his kind of investigative, inquisitive interview style is so rare, is telling about the sorry state of affairs of mainstream journalism today.

He explores all sides of issues, but with a focused lens on the negative impact on regular folks, without partisan hackery, left vs right divisiveness, or intellectual dishonesty.

Why can't we find and promote more journalism of this flavor? It would dramatically increase the level of discourse in this country.

It makes me sad that we have de-humanized everyday Russian and now Bellorussian citizens for the crimes of their totalitarian governments.

I could see an argument if these were functioning democracies but they are not. Imagine if everyday Americans had to face punitive sanctions or like in this case outright theft because their democratically elected governments chose to invade a country (like Iraq) on false pretenses and proceed to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (again, speaking of Iraq)

What Russia is doing in Ukraine is unconscionable, but in a totalitarian government, individual citizens have infinitely less agency than they do in the west. Even in the US, remember how little agency everyday Americans had to fight the governments decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11.

This ethical hacker did nothing wrong. The funds should have been frozen, not stolen without due process. It’s almost like HackerOne is begging for retribution. Let’s hope they don’t reap what they sow.

Cyberwar sounds pretty scary right now.

I suspect we are already way past that point no matter what.