rjstreur

My heart bleeds. Oh the humanity.

I think his point is that the market value of Bitcoin is driven by speculation on its future value rather than by productive activity, and that that would make the gains much less guaranteed than gains in investments associated with something that provides value to people.

To be clear my own position is less extreme, though similar. I'm more in the "Some people may like it as a currency but if it's a currency, it's a lousy one (high volatility), and if it's an asset class it's pure unregulated speculation" camp.

I do have the persistent suspicion that there's something I'm missing, because how could so many people like something I think is pretty silly if there weren't some kind of substance to it, but it seems like the operative question is "what is the value of Bitcoin?" not "Would Buffet really turn it down?"

I kind of agree, but it seems crypto is only a hedge against incompetent/corrupt government insofar as

1. It can act as an actual alternative currency and 2. Those governments do not adopt it their citizens' alternative currencies themselves or choose to tax it

It seems like in this story the actual alternative currency the Lebanese are "foreign currencies", and crypto is seen as a potentially profitable speculation in the midst of an economic downturn.

The extent to which cryptocurrencies actually server as currencies, and therefore actually hedge against national currencies, is inversely proportional to the extent to which they are used as a speculative asset class. People have a really low tolerance for price volatility, and if the value of currency swings up and down it can make it really stressful to participate in an economy.

I would be motivated to do it. If you were a happy wordle player and also have a marginalized identity, it might suck to finally get the word right and see a slur against that identity bouncing across the screen in happy green letters. Seems to me like this makes Wordle a more welcoming game.

Gotta say, Google's pioneering and Facebook's shamelessness in the personal information harvesting space has been, for me, the single most valuable feature of any website on the internet. If they had been even slightly less brazen, I may never have been convinced to opt out as hard as I have. Removing the most addictive and exploitative sites from my life has cut my time online and improved my quality of life dramatically. Could not recommend more.

So whether workers should be allowed to unionize should depend on which changes they are fighting for? Where's the line of powerlessness a union's beneficiaries need to be under in order for the union to be valid in your perspective?

It seems like the main actions taken by the Google employees' union so far have been to push the company to behave more ethically, not to enhance their already-significant (indeed, outrageous) privilege. I see that as using their privileged positions as leverage for positive change, and I hope they succeed.

There's a long history here. The American labor movement secured a lot of those protections in the early and mid-20th century, and they were strong for several decades. It was a hard, violent fight. People died at strikes for those protections.

As we entered the 80's and 90's with the rise of Reaganism and then neoliberalism, however, US businesses as well as the federal and state governments started chipping away at them. Now, between insufficient oversight, "right-to-work (spare me)" laws, lack of NLRB enforcement, and a robust cottage industry of private-sector union-busters, labor has less power in America than it's had in a long time.

It's good to see it start to change.

The idea that you shouldn't play music because psychologists say it won't make you smarter by some quantitative metric is so on-brand for this site.