alexmat

That's misleading. If you factor in mining rewards, Bitcoin has much higher fees per transaction. A total of $18,000,000 more per day spent on validating Bitcoin transactions than what that website claims.

From the FAQ, it seems like this is not as invasive as fingerprints:

"We selected palm recognition for a few important reasons. One reason was that palm recognition is considered more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm."

"Aug. 30, 2015 8:54 am ET - The recent market rout caught some star Wall Street traders by surprise. But not a hedge-fund firm affiliated with “The Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which gained more than $1 billion on a strategy that seeks to profit from extreme events in financial markets."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nassim-talebs-black-swan-fund-m...

"April 8, 2020, 11:28 AM EDT - Nassim Taleb-Advised Universa Tail Fund Returned 3,600% in March"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-adv...

Since the dawn of time.

Social class divisions. Vaping is seen as lower class. Coffee has always been a white collar stimulant. Weed is becoming more upscale and thus more accepted. Meth and crack are for poor white and black people. Cocaine is for bankers and trendsetters so it tends to have lighter sentences and lenient enforcement. Alcohol depends on the form it takes, wine vs four loko.

Recent interviews with Japanese activists on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmrDAXjcUXY

I love peanut butter.

Best part of dropping Gmail is how snappy roundcube feels. I'm way more productive. The only thing I miss is being able to snooze emails.

Example: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/

One is unavoidable if you want to fly, the other is security theatre. It's reasonable to complain about policies which are ineffective even if the harm is small relative to other sources of radiation.

It may not be obvious from the context and the limited excerpt, but in the book Sapiens, the author is careful to make the point that this is not an invitation to revert to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, in fact, we're past the point where that's a possibility. Rather we have to innovate our way out of the predicament we find ourselves in (the irony of fighting fire with fire is not lost on me). But in my mind, it makes this a perfect quote to consider on a techie site.

Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain!

"The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1]

[1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html

As a spammer, wouldn't it be trivial to just run a regex on email lists looking for that pattern and then harvesting the results? Or is this like the old joke where you don't have to outrun the bear, just your friend?

I can only speak for myself, but I find joy in living vicariously through others who don't contemplate existential issues. Sometimes I can spend a day just hanging out with my cat watching him do random things with sincerity. Sometimes I envy him.

As far as medium term motivation, guilt, fear and debt seems to work for most people regardless of philosophical disposition.

Post-solopsism? Fck me dude, I mean say want you will about nihilism, at least it doesn't attempt to invalidate the experience of qualia.

I think that's a fair point. I usually phrase it that way to avoid coming off too strong to people whose beliefs are unknown to me.

So to sum up, we agree that the concept of free will exists and is experienced, but it is just a mechanism that the brain uses to navigate and make decisions about a dynamic environment and not free will in the classical sense of having control over the decisions we make.

Honestly, after writing that out, I agree even more strongly with you! I think we should relegate the term "free will" to the classic definition and adopt Metzinger's vocabulary for the new metaphysical concepts. Then it's very simple, there is no free will, but there is a Phenomenal Self Model that the brain relies on which can be conflated with classical free will.

I will endeavor to be more clear in the future. Thanks!

The quotes are there to indicate that the free will is there but only as a convenient abstraction.

"The idea of the self over time [...] is the property of phenomenal selfhood that plays the most important role in creating the fictional self and the first person perspective. Metzinger defines the first person perspective as the “existence of single coherent and temporally stable model of reality which is representationally centered around or on a single coherent and temporally stable phenomenal subject”."

Free will in this sense is used to model reality in the form of subjective experience, part of which includes ownership of self. In other words we experience free will as a property of our model of reality, but it does not exist outside this abstraction. Objectively we are causally determined, subjectively we experience free will as part of the modeling process by the brain to create predictions about how it should respond to external stimuli.

Self is an abstraction inside a simulation, it does not map onto reality directly. But since our subjective reality is the simulation, we will always experience ourselves as having free will barring a brain disorder, such as the ones mentioned in the wiki link: "Disorders of the self model are implicated in several disorders including schizophrenia, autism, and depersonalization."

You can still experience "free will" without invalidating the materialist point of view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model

Maybe they have a speech impediment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziH9St7ajuw

Transferring large amounts of money overseas for large purchases is cheaper, faster and safer than using the current banking system. So that's at least one legal use case Bitcoin has improved for me. Even after exchange fees and miners fees, I paid less in fees then I would have using a bank and the transaction confirmed in under an hour vs several days or more through banks.

How many slices can you get from one pie?

What about future generations, how much should be allocated to them?

This reminds me of that famous Ford quote: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.”

You're correct, Austrian school is based on subjective value theory, this is gwern's phrasing not mine. I was in a rush and didn't cite properly, here is the link: http://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin-is-Worse-is-Better

Although to be fair a lot of non-scholarly "Austrians" cite the intrinsic value of gold as what makes it superior to Bitcoin. So he's right in the parlance of common rhetoric.

I also think he is right in that liberals tend to favor keynesianism because it makes it easier for the government to grow.