> My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years.
I have heard this repeated from so many vegans / animal activists at this point, including my own sister. Where did you get it from? Who is the original author? I am seriously asking.
An argument involving only my individual health (I am into fitness stuff) plus effect on the environment - repeated enough times - would sway me.
To be completely honest: I do not appreciate being told that I am an immoral human being for X (X = eating meat).
Been told that too many times already during my lifetime. It is a cultural constant. That formula is just too tiresome to hear yet again at this point.
> I do not appreciate being told that I am an immoral human being for X (X = eating meat).
While I don’t think it’s useful to oversimplify this into a binary moral issue, I also think it’s necessary to be reminded about the realities of the choices we make.
Why do you not appreciate this sentiment? Inconvenient truths tend to not feel very good, but that doesn’t make them incorrect.
> Been told that too many times already during my lifetime. It is a cultural constant. That formula is just too tiresome to hear yet again at this point.
I mean this with all respect, but this really sounds like “well, the world hasn’t stopped abusing animals yet, so I really don’t have a choice but to participate, and it’s really tiresome when people point that out”.
Change starts from within. I’d argue that the reason these argument feel tiresome is because the current solutions are not easy ones. They require each of us to alter our habits and demand broader change.
This is legitimately hard. But neither is there some magic bullet that will solve this.
I fully appreciate that we’re all stuck in a system that we can’t do much individually to change. But the one thing we can change is ourselves, and this is an option that is always available.
I wouldn’t be so quick to call someone who eats meat immoral, and as a meat eater I’d be a hypocrite for doing so. I’ve also gone to lengths to acquire meat that is as ethical/humane as possible, and over time I’ve reduced consumption significantly.
There are historically plenty of culturally acceptable practices that are also deeply immoral upon further reflection. If you’re finding the arguments tiresome, that may be a good signal to listen more closely.
> Why do you not appreciate this sentiment? Inconvenient truths tend to not feel very good, but that doesn’t make them incorrect.
Is this a genuine question?
We're social animals and calling someone immoral is going to be perceived as a social attack by non-neurodivergent people.
> I mean this with all respect, but this really sounds like “well, the world hasn’t stopped abusing animals yet, so I really don’t have a choice but to participate, and it’s really tiresome when people point that out”.
If you think this is just about animals you're missing most of the picture. In the modern day people are told they are immoral for many many reasons: driving cars, not turning off lights when they leave the room, not going to that BLM protest, not signing the anti-abortion petition, not going to church, using shampoo, not donating to ukraine/save the children/deworm the world, etc etc
It's an extremely common tactic used by every activist on every topic.
I agree. We should be able to acknowledge that we do harmful things without turning it into judgement on our overall character. It's not hypocrisy to admit that you do bad things sometimes.
> Why do you not appreciate this sentiment? Inconvenient truths tend to not feel very good, but that doesn’t make them incorrect.
"You're immoral for X" is very often used by someone who wants to take a very grey issue and make it black and white, with their side obviously being the "right" one (and, just in case it's not clear, they label the other side as immoral). It's often a cheap rhetorical trick of someone who wants to win the argument by default, rather than having to go through the hard work of actually persuading people (which means having to deal with all the grey parts of the question). "I'm morally right, you're morally wrong, you should feel ashamed of your position, and therefore you should shut up" is almost never a good-faith argument.
That doesn't make them "inconvenient truths". That makes them rhetorical ammunition for someone who is interested in winning, not in truth or good-faith discussion.
Note well: This does not apply to all instances of the phrase "inconvenient truth". But it seems to me that it is used that way more often than it's used in good faith.
If one accepts they are an omnivore, and there is ample evidence to support this, then they do not feel it is immoral to kill animals for food. That would make one’s very existence immoral. You may disagree, but that doesn’t mean you’re right or that your point of view is the truth, convenient or otherwise and few people appreciate moral judgments from others.
I don't get it. In most circumstances, if one doesn't want to be called immoral for performing an objectively cruel act, the standard course of action would be to stop doing it.
Why would one who inflicts or remunerates mistreatment, slavery, and death upon animals expect to be shielded from criticism on the count of it potentially hurting their feelings?
There’s a huge difference between killing animals and eating their meat. Likewise there’s a world of difference between industrial scale livestock and smaller, organic, free-range farming - on many levels. Yes, animal slaughter is require for meat production, and by eating meat we contribute to said slaughter. But there’s a ton of nuance in between, and people know this.
It’s a really disingenuous argument to pretend these are exactly the same thing from an ethical standpoint. In Buddhist ethics, for example, intention is key: monks cannot kill an animal but they may eat meat if offered. People who cry about the moral or ethical basis of some decision often make uninformed arguments believing an issue is black and white. Ethics is gray all the way down.
Until technology advances thee is only one way to make meat: by killing a living creature. You do not get to just remove that step from the conversation because you don’t like it. There is no “huge difference” when the action is a required part of producing meat.
But… if the animal is treated well during its lifetime, and slaughtered humanely (as painlessly as possible), almost everybody isn’t going to have a problem with it. You are then getting into religious beliefs which most are not going to agree with.
Admittedly a lot of current practices are pretty horrible.
I agree that killing is inseparable from consumption.
But there is absolutely a huge degree of difference in how the killing occurs, and how the animal is treated during its life leading up to it.
These differences materialize as an array of options when deciding what to purchase, and are factors that can be weighed by an individual.
The difference is there and quite meaningful once you examine the spectrum of realities involved in modern meat production.
One might still believe that no form of animal killing is ever acceptable regardless of circumstances, but that places the argument in a different category.
The topic here is about animals who are fed excessive quantities of antibiotics while healthy, fattening them up to the point that their skeletons frequently fracture because they can't bear the weight. These are not well-treated "happy hens". They are chickens crammed by the tens of thousands into barns with about as much square footage as it has birds. Sometimes less. The unroofed "free range" they get access to may amortize out to a couple square inches per bird, in a portion of the facility they'll never reach due to bird traffic.
It is of no solace to any of the 40 billion individual chickens presently in factory farms that some others may be raised in a coup in a backyard of someone's hypothetical uncle's house. And the hypothetical existence of said uncle has no relevance to the act of paying others to abuse birds in farms, which is where every single person reading this is getting either the vast majority or all of their bird flesh.
To be clear, I find the conditions you're describing to be abhorrent and an unacceptable norm, and I've argued elsewhere in this thread to that end.
But real free-range farms actually exist, and are not someone's "hypothetical uncle's house". The products of these farms are available in stores, and purchasing them does not contribute to the abuse of animals in factory farms.
To claim otherwise cannot be justified by an examination of facts/reality, and is to claim that I didn't eat dinner last Thursday. This is not to say that sourcing food this way is easy, and it's certainly not cheap.
> the act of paying others to abuse birds in farms, which is where every single person reading this is getting either the vast majority or all of their bird flesh.
The point with all of this is that there is a nuanced conversation to be had. Oversimplified binary reductions do not represent reality nor are they a useful point from which to have a conversation about how to improve the status quo. Issuing blanket statements like the one quoted above can only create a wedge between your position and those who you'd arguably like to reach with it. I happen to agree with you re: the horrors of unhappy hens, but you're also directly contradicting my lived experience.
GP's point is that eating isn't killing, you can eat meat without (personally) killing any animals, and that can be (and for very many is) emotionally different for people.
And the general counterpoint to this is that the emotional distance gained by not doing the killing has zero relevance to the moral acceptability of mass abuse in factory farms.
Furthermore, that emotional distance leads to even more grotesque behavior because people are so far removed from the process that they can remain completely unaware.
Over time, more people have become aware of child labor and otherwise horrible working conditions in the production of clothing and shoes. Not being directly exposed to those conditions does not in any way excuse those conditions or make them acceptable.
I think it's important, as people who eat meat, to fully acknowledge the deep and societal harms that meat causes. It is well-studied that slaughterhouses are uniquely bad for a community and uniquely bad for the people who work there. Meat as a food can sometimes be bad for people, but meat as an industry is definitely bad for people. Knowing this can allow us to make more responsible choices even if we still end up eating meat, such as selecting for small, ethical farmers that also limit the trauma of themselves/those who do the slaughtering of their stock.
if you read the comment you're replying to carefully, you'll see they never said you or anyone else was immoral for eating meat, yet that's your takeaway.
I think it is a valid point. We can only indulge in such a guilt free way because we don't see how the sausage is made.
My friend will eat burgers and chicken nuggets all day, but a chicken drumstick with it's tendons and cartilage he is unable to eat, it is a necessary disconnect for him.
My tolerance is way higher but if part of ordering dinner was choosing a living animal for them to kill and prepare I would definitely just get tofu.
IDK, I don't see any food-guilt issues from any of the countryside people I know who see "how the sausage is made" because they have done it, and have slaughtered some of the animals they have grown themselves.
And IMHO the discussions about "kill your own dinner" are quite impractical because that simply doesn't work in most conditions from the perspective of hygiene and food safety, and slaughtering is a job that does require quite some skill to do it properly, having it done by amateurs can easily be needless cruelty if you do it wrong. Like, I can butcher a chicken or a rabbit, but I would not be qualified to handle a pig or a cow properly.
"We can only indulge in such a guilt free way because we don't see how the sausage is made."
That might be for some people. There are many that would have no guilt. As you point out, some people know what is in a chicken nugget (chicken) but eat it anyways. This path might slightly reduce the number of omnivores, but I doubt it would have a serious impact overall. Like any reduction in consumption from them would just lead to a lower price and increased demand either domestically or internationally.
Legally there is no penalty for being against the war or against the government. Actually it is the opposite - calling for war or helping to start it might be illegal.
The law punishes for spreading falseful information or discrediting use of armed forces in interests of Russia. For example, for falsefully claiming that special military operation against West-supported neo-nazis preparing an attack against Russia is actually a war or that army allegedly attacks civilian buildings and infrastructure. For this you can get to jail. For the same reason, posting messages like 'no to war' online will get you in legal trouble (and replacing 'war' with asterisks won't help; there was someone who got a fine for holding a poster with asterisks only). Holding Ukranian flag obviously will get you in trouble too although I don't know how exactly this discredits armed forces.
Recently I read that a protester with a poster "arrest me if you are agaisnt the war" was arrested. Better not joke with police.
I assume many countries also have laws against spreading falseful information. And holding Russian flag in many countries might get you arrested as well.
Can provide a link to relevant legislation if needed.
> For example, for falsefully claiming that special military operation against West-supported neo-nazis preparing an attack against Russia is actually a war or that army allegedly attacks civilian buildings and infrastructure.
Spotted: A true patriot repeating all the talking points from his lying government.
You can read the Moscow Times, an English language newspaper.
They relocated to Amsterdam iirc and is owned by Derk Sauer who was booted out of Russia. He also writes interesting opinion pieces in het Parool about the re Stalinisation of Russia. Fascinating stuff.
Ofcourse I have no idea if the majority of Russians really care- Stalin was very popular.
Hi collin1! Can you reach out to my email? I am registered as "tobias" on your website. I want to ask you about HTML/CSS and possibly discuss a project for you to freelance on? Thx
The US exports military vehicles all over the world, and often is fighting against forces using them, in actual wars (as opposed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is between Russia and Ukraine). We gave $18 billion in military equipment to the Taliban last year. That Ukraine has US military equipment means very little.
The US is providing security assistance to Ukraine, and condemns Russia's advance, but the US is not fighting a war in Ukraine
Naive at best! US has been actively pushing Ukraine against any kind of negotiations. It is not about security here it is about geopolitical power dynamic in EU.
Almost every war everywhere is fighting with AK's somewhere in the mix, often on both sides. Arms is a very dirty industry and many governments play it, often with proxy dealers to allow them to be arms (da-dish) length and offer plausible deniability. Very often, a superpower or country ends up being shot at with the weapons it provided years or decades earlier.
I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position.
With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life.
Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".
With every indirection the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added which just fuels my sense of a system driven by amoral technocrats.
Maybe at the beginning. Right now they're all just trying to replicate the current system with less regulations and with them at the top, nothing punk about it.
I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste the "æ", I learned that "alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether", which was enough news to me that I felt it worth commenting. Fair play!
> Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".
Your way of "making yourself heard" is to trade your real dollars for digital dollars?
The thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed. Sure, you could argue that maybe at some future point the governments could possibly all band together and shut down every on-ramp to cryptocurrency, but that's extremely unlikely to happen universally across the globe. As long as some country, somewhere, allows cryptocurrency purchases then there will be a way to use them.
The narrative that you have to invest in cryptocurrency to stick it to the government is really just consumerism being applied liberally by people who want the price of their crypto to go up.
> you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed
"As needed" is an interesting phrase. I'd argue that what we need from cryptocurrency is for it to move past the current phase where the only consensus it bothers with is account balances.
We need consensus about things that will help us collectively act to keep powerful entities like governments in check. As it stands, they're very good at dividing us against one another.
If you end up making some fiat along the way, that's fine, but the return on an investment in crypto is a world where the powerful are well-behaved because they're scared that the rest of us will turn our backs on the abstractions that give them power.
As it stands, that's not a credible threat, so it's reasonable to make investments that'll take things in the direction (which is, sadly, not the effect of most crypto investing).
If you re-frame money as essentially a form of speech then 'making yourself heard' makes sense. The medium becomes the message. DeFi as the ideal, not top-down government to control the money supply with sketchy all-seeing-eye masonic symbols on the banknotes.
DeFI cannot coexist with either OFAC or AML in the picture.
Those are the fundamental roots of money as a top-down control mechanism. Those functions alone are responsible for making the finance sector a de-facto extension of the United States Government and an effective extension of Law Enforcement.
HN is weirdly inconsistent about digital currencies. Generally pro encryption, net neutrality, open-source software, VPNs, etc. But mention "Bitcoin," and suddenly half the commenters lose their shit about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.
Then they go back to commiserating with another Ask HN startup founder whose PayPal account was frozen.
> I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life.
That, and I'd also like everyone to know that money, markets, and everything are a joke. The value of USD is just what people collectively agree on it to be, not some inherent fundamental value. The same is true for TSLA stock, GME stock, ethereum, or the shitcoin-of-the-week.
Pretending that there aren't fundamentals behind the USD is ridiculous.
How do those people collectively agree on the value of the USD? By looking at the fundamentals - the economy of the US, the stability of its government, the likelihood that it will make good on its bonds.
None of those factors establish a fundamental market price for the dollar - you're simply listing the price of admission for any state-backed currency.
The dollar has declined in value by over 90% since 1933. By your metrics that must mean that the US is in catastrophic meltdown, but of course it isn't.
Theoretically, a stock's fair value is the sum of their current and (discounted) future earnings.
> Many times stocks perform well at earnings and shareholders still put on a fit and downvote its price.
Price fluctuations at earnings calls are due to relative earnings expectations, not the absolute value of the earnings itself. Such stock revaluation is due to investors suddenly having more accurate earnings figures to price into their valuation.
> Conversely, they often upvote its price based on some PR hype instead of actual earnings.
"PR hype" pumps represent increased market expectations of actual future earnings, however tenuous those expectations may be.
Right - it should be the logical pivot for anyone previously operating in the cryptocurrency space (assuming they weren't just in it for perceived profit potential...)
While I worked on cryptocurrencies and have changed to primarily focus on secure, private, anonymous network protocols (because the potential for speculative abuse is less, giving credit to your suggestion), I still would like to say that this is an example of whataboutism.
Money is power in a distinct way that freedom of information, in general, is not:
You don't need to believe in a (digital crypto) currency for it to hold value:
As long as someone else believes it, you can make them do things for that currency.
I believe this potency is what makes the scum of the Earth flock to cryptocurrencies.
It is not clear to me that there is any reasonable way to implement a truly permissionless and secure decentralized anonymous protocol without using programmatic money as you need some way to fairly allocate resources. Hell: if you stare into the soul of Bittorrent long enough trying to figure out how to make it worth your while to seed unpopular files you realize that it is essentially just digital barter screaming for a way to store and transfer your good will, letting all the seeding you did on prior files help you download this new one... and, well: welcome to capitalism.
I was working on decentralized systems back as early as 2001--notably, well before Bitcoin existed--and it frankly seemed just as true back then and we didn't even know how or if it was going to be possible for anyone to make the money part work. In 2009, when Bitcoin came out, I was too busy working on my federated iOS app store alternative for it to sink in what had happened as I remember barely taking note of Bitcoin and later not taking enough note when people tried to show it to me that something important had been figured out. I am sad that I saw people I even knew working on Ethereum and still didn't join the efforts until 2017.
But like, with permissionless systems, and when all the participants are anonymous, you have a really serious problem of how to deal with freeriders and spam. To the extent to which prior attempts at such protocols have worked they either are run by centralized cabals (Tor and its ~10 directory servers managed by Roger Dingledine and his friends), is based on barter and has severe / obvious limits on its applicability (Bittorrent), or--and this is the biggest category by far--only works because it is so niche and/or new that no one has so far decided to attack it (or, worse: someone did attack it, the attack worked, but the protocol is so niche that the people who built the protocol don't actually give a shit as the attacks aren't happening in practice... this is the situation with I2P). Hell: email has even become more and more centralized and less possible to remain anonymous, in no small part due to spam.
At best, you see people try to build a kind of reputation management system based on your IPv4 address, under the assumption that those are scarce. In fact, despite Tor being largely centralized (on the aforementioned directory services run by Roger Dingledine and his friends) it also relies heavily on IPv4 address scarcity as they don't know all of the server administrators (though Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them, which I find more terrifying than relieving). This, though, only really works if you use a slow accumulation whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes) as otherwise your protocol kind of becomes irrelevant in a world of IPv6 (which Tor has in fact struggled with, though they have better options here due to the design of the directory server cabal).
Regardless, if you are building up reputation surrounding IP addresses, you know what you aren't? Anonymous (because an IP address is a location tied to a user; and, if you are able to borrow someone else's IP address, its reputation is going to be poor, almost by definition). And, sure... that's sort of OK for some kinds of protocols: in the case of Tor, you want the users to be anonymous while the servers don't at all have to be (and, in a very real sense, can't) and so they can use this largely-centralized design for the list of servers to slowly build trust in new operators whose reputation they manage by their indirect identity, and then hopefully the users can be anonymous, right? (...Right?)
But like, the users being anonymous only sort of works on Tor because the users are by-and-large actively choosing to not be brats: the servers are donating resources and they are donating it to a cause, not because they are bored; and so, if you sit around using their bandwidth and good will to do nothing more interesting than stream YouTube videos all day--as a user in the United States who is not blocked from accessing YouTube or anything--you are considered to be abusing a scarce resource and people who find out try to make you feel bad. Maybe it works? But the result undermines the premise: everyone who uses Tor is supposedly someone who needs to use Tor, which means the FBI can and in fact did (as part of XKeyScore) just flag people who go to Tor's website for extra diligence.
If you wanted the worlds' Internet traffic to flow through it, with every user using much more bandwidth from the system than it costs them to send (as their bandwidth gets amplified as it goes through multiple other nodes) you need a way to dole out this resource in a fair way, building some kind of market for the resource; and, I totally do appreciate this answer kind of sucks, but the decentralized way to build a market is... capitalism, using some kind of money to compensate people for their efforts. You will find a similar need in any decentralized system to prevent bad actors from just monopolizing all of the resources (well, unless you decide to use an IP-based reputation management scheme... which would again undermine the point).
(Note: I work on a system designed to make this eventually work in the specific case of an actually-fully decentralized market-based Tor-like mechanism. No: it isn't something I am sufficiently proud of right now to want to sit around arguing whether the thing that we deployed fully solved the problem: I am just going to say we made a lot of impact and progress and leave it at that for today... however, I am still working on this problem space, I already know how to make this stuff better, but I have been distracted with personal issues... maybe you'll see something dramatic from me in the near future. But like, I frankly see no way of making anything even similar work without money in the design; and, if you do, then I beg of you to drop everything you are doing and either build it or tell others how to build it as the world needs to have decentralized protocols and the reason almost all of the decentralized protocol design has moved into crypto is not merely because it is lucrative: it is because, for the first time, it actually feels possible there.)
But so like, I essentially dare you to show me any decentralized protocol that allows anonymous users to permissionlessly participate even if they are actively trying to gobble up resources and even if they simply hate the protocol and chose to implement it incorrectly. That Bitcoin worked was a watershed moment in this space, and it did it by starting with the idea of using capitalism to solve a kind of lazy version of the consensus problem. It isn't the be-all-and-end-all of designs and it has a lot of holes, and yet it is still working despite a ridiculous number of people trying to use it at the same time and a number of people actively wishing it didn't exist. Did it get expensive at times? Yes. But did it just turn into a bunch of worthless spam? No. Have people managed to shut it down? Not yet! And later designs have been attempting to iterate on the mechanism by adding more functionality (such as Ethereum, upon which my team was able to deploy a probabilistic nanopayments mechanism similar to the centralized Internet startup PepperCoin) or increasing the performance (I had been particularly enamored with Avalanche). There are parallel tracks designed to improve the privacy and anonymity (such as Zcash).
This is, in all honesty, the future of decentralized systems. And yes: the existence of money as one of the early essential primitives means that for every iota of progress there are people who just try to cash in on the whole thing... but I watched this space take a full decade before anyone even figured out how to build a decentralized currency, and the progress suddenly made since then has been dramatic, with people figuring out how to build any number of decentralized alternatives to centralized systems that previously would have been unheard of... even if you want to poo poo it all because it is "hard to use" or "costs more", the fact that it works is amazing and should be inspiring.
Tor relies on the IPv4 scarcity to make Sybil attacks more expensive but is slowly moving away from it e.g. the number of allowed relays per IP was recently doubled from 2 to 4 and it may get doubled in the near future again.
>Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them
Hey said that he knew 2/3 in the beginning so 10 years+ ago and that it's no longer the case but he would like to increase the number of relay operator he or others of the Tor Project knows again. There are in person relay operator meetups at conferences (e.g Chaos Communication Congress) and I assume that he met most of the people at such occasions. I'm not sure why this should be terrifying.
>whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes)
I'm not sure if this ever was the case but exit nodes aren't threatened specially than other relays and there is no whitelist model for them.
FWIW, he had told me that five years ago. I fully admit 5 is as close to 10 as it is to 0, though ;P. But like, even if he was stuck using an old stat the idea that he wants to know all of them isn't confidence inspiring from this angle. I asked him what he would do if someone came to him with a lead pipe and threatened him with a demand to poison his directory server and he seemed confident until I asked him the same question about his family and it frankly felt like he hadn't really considered it before, which was crazy to me.
The point being, though, that Tor isn't really a decentralized design as the cabal is too small and the community is too tight: I am just listing it as a thing that clearly isn't decentralized and anonymous / permissionless in one place (the servers) and just kind of throws up its hands at the issue of dealing with a bratty set of users; it works because, by and large, not many people want to use it and not enough people are unhappy enough that it exists to DoS it out of existence.
I think he said it sometimes after KAX17 so around 2022 but honestly I'm not exactly sure since when he doesn't know that much anymore maybe it has been till a few years ago and not 10.
Yeah you're right it's a small group with a lot power. I have no solution to make it decentralized but I'm pretty sure if the solution includes "money" it's not a solution I like.
That may be. But that was true of virtually everything punk rock opposed, too (that there were supposed upsides as well as obvious downsides). All I'm saying is that there's nothing punk about it. I happen also to think there's little redeeming about it as well, but I'm not prepared to lay out a case for that right now.
I think there's a good argument - made very well by Viv Albertine of The Slits in her autobiography Clothes, Music, Boys - that people outside the scene took punk too seriously. They weren't great crusaders for truth and justice, they were the court jesters who pointed out the emperor had no clothes but were mostly just having fun provoking people. Which includes John Lydon pissing people off by issuing NFTs and praising Trump. It's all the same.
The Sex Pistols were a boy band, Lydon had a brief window of authenticity with PIL but has, in the last decade or so, become a caricature of himself, to the point of endorsing Thatcherism. Lydon today overtly rejects what he ostensibly "stood for" in the era of the Lesser Free Trade Hall show. You couldn't come up with a better illustration of how un-punk crypto is than a Johnny Rotten NFT.
Only libertarians are so obsessed with central banking. It seems to me that crypto people willfully ignore previous history where money was not regulated by the state and people were frustrated by instability.
In my humble opinion, it's best to have both state-regulated money and non-state-regulated money compete. The market for money itself should be a capitalist free-market competition, survival of the fittest. This is the first time in history where that scenario may come to fruition in a big way.
People have always been stuck with one or the other. Now, state-backed monies are forced to compete and maybe it will finally breed some innovation (of note, CBDCs).
If non-state currencies fail, so be it. If state currencies fail, so be it. But the competition is important imo.
Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.
> the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added
This has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin, or some MLM scheme, or Ponzi's postal reply coupons have value or not. For over a century they've all promoted the scam as power to the little guy.
Also if you're tired of fiat money, there are alternatives - like commodities. Precious metals like gold have had use value for millennia.
> Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.
I remember fondly the very early years of bitcoins, when it was worth nothing. I was probably too naïve at the time and didn't see the libertarian agenda of a lot of people, but it really did seem like a lot of the community was made of cryptopunks, excited with this idea of a cryptographic distributed virtual currency. Something that felt like it came straight out of a sci-fi novel.
At the time, I think a lot of people (including me) thought that it could maybe help people in authoritarian country, make international transfer cheaper and faster, and digitize banks which felt so behind (I remember having to still call my bank on the phone to be able to do a lot of operations).
This sadly very promptly disappeared. It should have been obvious that a lot of rule surrounding banking where there for a reason. Cryptocurrencies became widely used (and recognized) for its criminal usage, facilitating ransomware, scams, money laundering, financing terrorism and other criminal network. Sure it was fun, and innocent enough, to be able to buy a bag of weed "anonymously" from the dark web, but sadly a lot of usage was darker than that.
Authoritarian country, and again it should have been obvious, didn't have much trouble regulating their usage to a point that it couldn't be safely used in a amount that was not insignifiant. But most just didn't care because it didn't actually changed anything for them.
And then years and years of development, but no significant progress seemed to be made. Transaction where impossible to scale and became massively expensive and the fundamental flaw of the technology seems to be insurmontable.
Ethereum came with a nice promise also, the idea of a global decentralized machine. Program that could be run "on-the-chain" and enforced contract, promising to get rid of the need of a third party. But it also became obvious that it had all the disadvantage of having no third party and none of the advantage.
The crypto community also manage to prove to a massive extent the usefulness of regulation. There was a time where every day there were multiple new cryptocurrency with a nice shiny website, a white paper full of buzzword and not much else, promising a ICO in a few days. Then once the whole pump and dump was done, it vanished from existence. Over and over again. At some point ICO where replaced by NFT. Different name, same result. After the hype (a.k.a the marketing period), you were left with a useless and worthless digital token, and the only way to get rid of it was trying hard to convince other that it was worth anything.
Although I have to say, "fake it until you make it really" seems to be a core value of any crypto-enthusiate. Despite still having no actual usefulness, outside of being a vehicule for financial speculation, so much money was dumped into the whole ecosystem that it still look like a legitimate business. Crypto.com is (was?) a prime sponsor of F1, BtcTurk had advertisement plastered all over the newly built Atatürk Airport, NFT were "brought" by very famous people, ... And in many way it was successful enough to keep attracting investment, from very serious business-suit wearing people. Will they learn from FTX ? Why would they ? They didn't learn from Mt. Gox, Theter, Ripple, the many fraudulent ICO, the obvious pump and dump. If anything, everyone turns a blind eye because at this point, you either avoid crypto like the plague, you are part of the scam, or you are the one getting scammed.
I really miss those days where it seems like a sci-fi tech. In many ways, I still want to believe, but cryptocurrencies where born on a flawed premise. They are dead, they were always dead and they will remained dead.
I'm not a crypto fan, but I think the argument would be that Bitcoin in particular wasn't created as a means of wealth accumulation, but rather as a means of avoiding government interference in "money." That may have been misguided, but I think that's the argument.
"Punk as fuck" is a good way to describe it, given the punk aesthetic and ethos have both been thoroughly absorbed and internalized by capitalism to become just another pay-to-play subculture controlled by the most powerful.
I think a big part of my personal development is not attaching my identity or self-worth to existing or established hierarchies. That's just status-seeking.
Like, if you studied math or CS, or studied to become a MD... Maybe you're prone to take yourself to seriously because of it. There is and will always be a feedback loop in society because we are all humans and always seeking attachment (in the psychological sense) to other humans.
I have self-worth because I do not try to justify it relative to something I do not control, like a Ivy Leage graduating class, FAANG, or whatever, but instead of accepting myself as I am.
Same and so it is with most of my favourite people to work with: those who are very technically competent, collaborative and with amazing personalities.
Unfortunately, this is a losing strategy in corporate environments and you will be outcompeted and replaced by relatively average and territorial status seekers.
No I still don’t play the game, yes I wish I could turn off the “ick” and just do it.
> most of my favourite people to work with: those who are very technically competent […]
I’m similar but I would say that being curious is the fundamental trait, and competence usually falls out as a side effect. It’s always fun to be around curious people, sometimes especially if they’re not experienced.
> Unfortunately, this is a losing strategy in corporate environments and you will be outcompeted and replaced by relatively average and territorial status seekers.
This is not universally true. I would agree that overall things trend in this direction over time, but as long as a company is still growing and has the opportunity to win in the market, then collaborative doers can still beat talkers. Of course, politics are still the inevitable consequence of trying to coordinate thousands of people to figure out and execute on the right priorities without any individuals having anything close a full picture. If you're more of a heads-down thinker and builder then it's true you will be at a disadvantage against the social climbers—in the short run. But over time, provided the right feedback channels, the doers reputation tends to increase, while the talkers reputation decreases. Bullshit detection is 90% of the job of upper management in large corporations, it's a tough job and rare skillset, but when done right it results in an environment where good work and honest collaboration is possible and celebrated.
Some of the greatest achievers in human history like great scientists or artists were very modest. Some were the opposite and liked to brag.
It does not matter much if you brag or not, if you have titles or not. What matters is if you achieved something important.
There's a great half mad Russian mathematician who didn't take much part in society, lived with his mother and worked in complete secrecy. When the results of his works transpired somehow, he was awarded the Fields medal, the highest distinction a mathematician can get. That distinction came with a large amount of money. He rejected both the medal and the money even if he was poor. He achieved results and that is what matters.
Depicting yourself something you are not is grave. It means that you are either insane or you want to deceive others.
Yeah, I think identifying into roles is unwise in the long term. In addition to the benefits author cites, it also tends to distort one's thinking in bad ways: if you identify into something, threats to your status in that thing matter. It's obvious in political identities, but more subtly true in other ways.
I agree with this, but I also don't believe that it's an exclusive alternative to what the blog is suggesting.
Part of the path of acceptance is also accepting what your roles are in your life. These roles aren't about what is projected onto you, which is where a lot of the internal strife stems from, but instead how you are trying to see yourself.
The blog mentions titles like "writer", and it's a great example of a role. You should absolutely refer to yourself as a writer if that's what you're doing. If you're in marine biology you should absolutely call yourself a marine biologist. You aren't status seeking here, you are recognizing part of your identity.
The important bit of that is "part of your identity". You aren't "just" a writer or a marine biologist, so what other roles are core to your identity? Maybe you're a caretaker too. Again these are all parts of your identity and recognizing them isn't a bad thing, actually the bad part stems from the miscommunication.
Often when people are meeting each other, they will single out the larger part of their identity, for simplicity sake. We misinterpret this and believe that they are just that one role and project all past ideas of their role onto them. Jake is no longer Jake the writer and other mysterious roles I don't know about yet - he just becomes Jake the writer. Remedying this miscommunication involves recognizing how all identities are formed of parts, not a lack of identity, so we can then start viewing others as the complex beings they are.
I generally agree, but personally I don't think I have that much control over what is the source of my self worth.
I mean, it was enough for me to spend a few months in 2020 on a contract where I had easily 4x my previous rate to forever shift my self-percepction.
I've become a temporarily embarrassed high-rate contractor and I can't help it. Kinda shallow, but it's interesting that this feeling persists after three years.
It wasn't even a high rate by SV standards - just really high for my corner of the world.
I think there’s a tendency to self-describe as an X and start throwing around the lingo of X, to stave off concerns that we don’t really know what’s going on under the hood. Fake it ‘till you make it.
Personally I have an aggressively bad brain for lingo, so I try to get people to describe what they want in little words. If actually describing what they want in easily understood terms just happens to clarify things, well that’s a nice side effect!
I don’t know, I think knowing what algorithmic complexity is is really important, the problem is that all too many people just memorized that bubble sort is O(n^2) without understanding.
Also, the reason why profiling is imo not good enough is that you really shouldn’t even try to write an implementation with a known-to-be “slow” algorithm at the designed input size. For that, understanding O-notation is essential.
Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside.
When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- unique as dicated by your problem at hand plus your own idiosyncratic experiences.
"How to take smart notes" by Sönke Ahrens is a great book on this topic, admittedly more oriented towards a Zettelkasten/Obsidian workflow.
This kind of static information retention is good for me. I’m an electrician so it’s nice to know off the top of my head that there’s a 10’ spacing on supports for EMT without going to the code book every time. Some of that knowledge gets beaten in through repetition, but there are enough fringe cases and things I don’t touch for years that are nice to have memorized.
I had a major concussion shortly before my GCSE exams that I'm still very slowly recovering from. I was completely unable to think, let alone study. I never did an IQ test, but I couldn't even listen to a book or stay awake for more than a few hours without a headache. And for a while I couldn't look at a screen or read.
I was able to get the second highest grades in the school, with lower than expected grades in only two subjects (and dropping one, further maths), because of Anki. Because Anki does not require understanding, only sufficient repetition, and I had a lot of time on my hands, I was able to continuously do flashcards for hours on end while maths work would have me struggling to stay awake within 5 minutes. I could remember facts without understanding them.
The exams were ~3 months after it happened, which gave me time to improve, plus during the actual exam a combination of painkillers, extra time, rest breaks, exam technique, and adrenaline allowed me to put together a plausible answer with the disconnected facts I had learnt in the months preceeding that I just about got the mark. As a sidenote - it's quite incredible how adrenaline can temporarily improve brain injuries, with the downside that the moment it went I was completely exhausted.
Every subject bar maths I got the grades I wanted or just below, because Anki allowed me to memorise without learning.
(These subjects were: Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English Lit, English Lang, History, Computer Science, Digital something, Creative Media Production (didn't do exam), Further Maths (dropped).)
Now, I would prefer not to revise using solely Anki, and I think the fact a braindead student with memorised facts (and good exam technique) was able to get good grades says a lot about the British education system. It also says a lot about Anki, and just how effective it is.
Side note, because I'm tired of hearing drivel on HN:
My life being (permanently?) ruined was entirely preventable, all it would have taken is a little less empathy, a little less second chances, for violent barbarians who damage everyone around them. When people preach empathy they forget about the human cost of allowing inherently violent, destructive people to continue their actions.
If you're one of those people who thinks grammar schools are bad, restorative "justice" is the future, and we should prioritise those who hurt and destroy over those who want to learn and build: Your actions and your ideology have ugly consequences beyond your selfish delusion of making the world better through being nice and kind and the power of love - that belongs in novels, not policy.
I've never had a concussion, but I wanted to recount my similar experience in school, too. Like you, 5 minutes of math lectures had me dozing off. Really, a lecture in any subject would bore me to sleep. Only when we got practical tasks to work on, like math or physics problems, did my brain wake up and engage with and understand the material. As a result, I excelled in the natural sciences and math, where working on problems took up most of the time, while I did poorly in the more memorization-oriented social sciences and language subjects. Memorization is a skill like any other, and I'm happy I get to work in a field where understanding is more important than memorization.
I sympathise: my wife was a teacher and the schools that were hardest to teach anything were the schools that were all about giving chances and "love" to bullies and disruptive elements. Mostly this comes direct from narcicists in upper management. They were very bad places to teach at, and she burned out quickly at them.
The best schools were ones that back up and support their teachers in disciplinary action (usually detention, buddy-class systems and behavior contracts which are all pretty effective if applied consistently and supported by management).
It's like exercise. As a software engineer, I'm very unlikely to need to lift heavy things or run long distances. But my body is (probably) healthier long-term if I'm able to do those things.
Disclaimer: going through my Anki decks is one of the 50 things on my 10-item to-do list. I don't get to it often enough. But it does work, and I now know how to memorize things I want to remember.
Hmm sure but I feel like my brain gets too much intellectual stimulation if anything from my job and relationships and reading. If I try to do a leetcode at 8pm my brain is just extremely fatigued and tells me to stop. My body on the other hand just sits in a chair for a very large amount of the day so I need to supplement there
There's an old book called The Richest Man In Babylon that has to do with personal finance. One of the key points is to pay yourself first. You have your rent, utility bills, maybe credit-card debt, etc., and even tonight you want to order in, even though it's expensive, because you're way too tired to cook. That's all fine, as long as you first set aside 10% of your paycheck for savings. Although that leaves only 90% left for all the other needs clawing at you, somehow you make it all work.
All too often people tend to their financial needs first, and find there's nothing left for themselves. No surprise most people die broke. Isn't it strange how their lifetime income just happened to almost exactly equal their lifetime expenses? Hmmm....
You might see where I'm going. Why are you giving the best of your time (rather than money) to everyone else, leaving nothing for yourself at the end of the day? Maybe start with just five minutes at the start of the day to pay yourself intellectually. If that works out, make it a habit!
I find a good way to link together ideas is to have them easily at hand i.e. memorized. Having a motivating problem is probably a better way to do this, but I've found that motivating problems which require concepts I would like to learn are not as readily available as I'd want.
you could integrate a Zettelkasten workflow with Anki. Just send over certain ZK notes into Anki. I'm working on this -- a vim based ZK tool with ability to send over notes to Anki.
What is psychosis defined as, and how is it any worse than the effects of excess alcohol consumption?
On 30+ years, I have never seen someone get violent from cannabis, but with alcohol, it is a regular occurrence.
Worked at a hotel when I was younger too, and you can bring me a hotel full of people high on cannabis, and the worst they ever did was buy a ton of snacks.
Alcohol, on the other hand, was responsible for noise complaints, broken televisions, furniture, sexual assault, violent assault, cops being called all the time, etc.
Look. Maybe I'm crazy, but being unable to control one's emotions is a much less severe condition than not being able to know what is real and what is not for the individual in question.
As an aside, my father was an alcoholic and a pathetic loser indulging in as much alcohol as self-pity. I am not defending excessive alcohol consumption.
My point is: Even if you think weed is relatively better than alcohol from a big picture societal POV (we can agree to disagree here), don't underestimate the bad effects of weed. Don't be a weed-smoking loser just because it's legal.
> I know that psychosis on alcohol happens, but I have never personally seen a person get psychotic from alcohol.
I was a bartender for a while in college and off-and-on afterwards. I've seen dozens of barfights, several with people ending up in hospitals. No shootings, thankfully, but that absolutely happens outside of bars and clubs.
There were at least 3 fatal DUIs that were traced back to coming from bars that I worked at; it led to the closure of one of them.
Alcohol correlates directly to levels of domestic abuse, rape, assault, and murder. Most traffic accidents after 9pm are alcohol related.
Been to Oktoberfest. All of the Brit, Irish, Canadian and Australian members of the crew could not believe that much alcohol in one place without any barfights/disputes/blah.
I've been to Oktoberfest, too. My brother lived in Bavaria for a while.
There were several fights, some blatant abuse of cocaine, and one of my female friends had someone get a hand down her pants and squeeze her butt without permission.
No one got shot or stabbed, but it certainly wasn't a peaceful hangout.
I have heard this repeated from so many vegans / animal activists at this point, including my own sister. Where did you get it from? Who is the original author? I am seriously asking.
An argument involving only my individual health (I am into fitness stuff) plus effect on the environment - repeated enough times - would sway me.
To be completely honest: I do not appreciate being told that I am an immoral human being for X (X = eating meat).
Been told that too many times already during my lifetime. It is a cultural constant. That formula is just too tiresome to hear yet again at this point.