It is an amusing and potentially even good concept, but with one caveat - you only consider close enough exchanges with similar peers. To translate that into English - a fully libertarian self-sufficient settlement where people are exchanging home-made stuff between one another. Because everyone was the same and no one could abuse the system, it may even worked. We even seen it in the early criminal communities, when BTCs briefly were a medium of exchange for drugs. And then tokenbros made a leap of faith and magically scaled that to the whole world. Which obviously didn't work in practice. Their famous Lightening L2 is an abomination of hacks and centralization and it still doesn't scale.
The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.
In practice all tokens including BTC are massively used for law evasion. Criminal don't need any fancy Monero for that, they only need to break the chain once, or maybe a few times an that is enough. That usually happens at the entry points, a criminal backe exchanges of any size will happily take your cash or digital money and exchange then for any tokens you like and vice versa. A politician then declares that his several BTC worth a few millions were "fairly mined" and nothing to see there. Or a corrupt government pays with tokens for some sanctioned wares. The whole Axis of Losers trade is propped up by mafia's USDT, which are used to trade between Axis countries and willing collaborators like India, to buy oil/rockets/chips/soldiers/anything, with central exchange in Dubai and other petrocratias.
And other countries have freedom to scoff at that or even sanction trade with it (gasp, the horror!). Freedom works both ways, you know.
A fitting quote for the moment:
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell
Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But they are still a key link a in trade chain, that' why I mentioned Dubai and its neighbors. They act as a laundromat and a tumbler, obscuring financial flows. And one part of the Russia-India trade or Russia-Iran trade or even Russia-China trade involves tethers (USDT), without which exchanging rubles to rupee or to yuan directly would be highly problematic and risky. Tokens mitigate some of the risk by hiding financial flows through multiple jurisdictions.
>> "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell
America and Europe invaded other counties for no valid reasons which means they are the fascist nations.
Is not America buying Russian Uranium and fertilizers is not helping Russian economy?.
Is not Europe buying Russian gas and oil is not helping Russian economy?
btw India never ever traded with crypto. bought oil under price cap which was set by the west.
By the grace of first past the post, winner takes all. This ancient system prevents people from picking shades of grey parties, since they simply don't exist in any significance. And from the other end it doesn't allow parties to split, since it will mean than the smaller block is immediately equal to zero (zero votes, zero seats). In when parties aren't allowed to split, they trend towards reactionism and radicalism, when radicals can hold the whole party "hostage". Applies to both sides btw.
The standard complaint is the opposite. In a generic first past the post two party system you should end up with two barely distinguishable centrist parties.
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
That if carries a lot of meaning here. In reality it is and was impossible to pay for all the stolen data. Also LLM corpos not only didn't pay for the data, but they never even asked. I know it may be a surprise, but some people would refuse to sell their data to a mechanical parrot.
Well, it's not like it's a simple black and white situation, universally applicable to every debate in human history. Sometimes it is relatively better to be open-minded and able to change own opinion. Sometimes it is relatively better to keep pushing a point if it is rational and/or morally correct.
The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or individual against a faceless corporation, making it even harder. Of course we should respect people standing against corporation.
PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of course.
Consider the plight of a policy-maker who changes their stance on some issue. They may have changed their mind in light of new information, or evolved their position as a result of deeper reflection, personal experience, or maturation. Opponents will accuse them of "waffling" or "flip-flopping", indicating a lack of reliability or principles (if not straight-up bribery). Elected officials are responsible for expressing the will of the people they represent, so if they're elected largely by proponents of issue X, it is arguably a betrayal of sorts for them to be as dynamic as private citizens.
This is tangential to the original topic of insider trading, where the corruption is structural / systemic -- akin to how "conflict of interest" objectively describes a scenario, not an individual's behavior.
The demonization of "flip-flopping" is so stupid. Bro, I want my politicians to change their minds when new facts arise or when public sentiment changes. The last thing we need is more dogmatic my-way-or-the-highway politicians that refuse to change their minds about anything.
Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's roast of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner:
> The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.
1) People don't really vote based on logic and sound reasoning. They vote based on what sounds right to them. If they're unhappy with something, they vote for somebody who also claims to be unhappy about it, regardless if he has any actual solutions.
2) Even for the minority who wants to vote based on sound principles, it's very hard to push information back to them. If the politician changes his mind, he has to explain it to his voters. Are there really platforms which allow in-depth conversations in political debates?
Every university classroom has a whiteboard and a projector. Because you need to draw graphs, diagrams, etc. You need to explain the general structure and then focus on the details without losing track of the whole.
Is there a single country where politicians use either when talking to each other or voters?
While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against the view that politicians are elected for the views they held during their campaign. They may change their mind after being elected, but their constituents that voted for them will not all change their mind simultaneously. To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation out of pure self-interest.
I would be much more inclined to continue voting for a politician who could explain their policy position as it changes in an open and sensible way. Politicians putting on a speech that sounds truthful and honest and like a discussion is happening between adults is so rare - it seems that very few people want that. I do though.
There is ZERO evidence for such a civilization. Especially because there are no resilient megalithic traces in the first place. Megaliths we see are only 5-6 thousand years old and have a lot of matching real evidence about people who built them and how they did it.
There is no way to detect our civilization bio signatures and technology signatures from more than a few closest stars range at most. None at all. Not even with magic.
There is likely hundreds or thousands of isolated alien worlds in the galaxy, the is no point in getting to them just because they they are alive, because of the next problem - it is absolutely mind boggling what amount of energy and technological advances are mandatory to even short interstellar travel. If you can solve them all, your civilization are practically gods. Why would they concern themselves with some early stage civilization, to which they must travel for millennia in an iron box? This would also mean they have solve immortality btw, or they would all die in transit.
This is objectively incorrect (with the exception of maybe corrupt courts). No court will indict you on any charge based only on "Testimonies/memories/personal experience". Not only that, a more scientifically literate judges know that even if combined real evidence plus testimony, the testimony part is extremely unreliable at >1 year old, practically useless for any factual corroboration. It's just how human mind works, basic biology. Given a few year of time any person can convince themselves of a past event which never actually happened. But a person can imagine that with a lot of details and interactions, so vivid that he/she will truly believe it. It is normal for humans.
There is zero evidence for anything alien in the Solar system. Not a single good photo or video or item. Not a single verified experiment showing paranormal things work.
So it's not a question of belief, there is nothing to believe in. But r/ufos is genuinely funny place I have to admit, it's like a live study into human psyche. :)
The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.
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