In any realistic economy, real or virtual, there is a demand for at least one good which is used as a “store of value,” that is, not used or intended to be used by the owner, but owned simply to transfer purchasing power across time. Nonetheless, the owner holds this good and participates in the market for it. If many owners standardize on the same good, they affect the market for this good. We can think of their collective purchasing power as a sort of “energy” that flows into this market.
It turns out that the correct collective strategy in this game is for everyone to standardize on the same asset as a store of value, and for this asset to be one of intrinsically limited quantity. If the quantity is not limited, as for example in a manufactured good, a stable pool of savers will not increase its price. If the quantity is limited, as with gold, Bitcoin, etc, the price will increase as savings energy flows in - and, of course, decrease as it flows back out.
There is no way to eradicate this effect from anything like a realistic economy. There is always at least one bubble. Ideally, this bubble is stable, and we call it “money.”
I know, the idea of people getting paid for nothing gives me the heebie jeebies as well, I’d want to shrug, too. But the point here is not whether poor people deserve living wages, the point, again, is that since this is precisely what they are getting, already and irrevocably, can we do it more efficiently, cheaply? Why do we have to go through all this bureaucracy that massively inflates the costs— for example, Medicaid (the poor have to first become “patients” and get meds to get disabled, after all)? Why not more efficiently deliver the “assistance”? Cut out the middlemen— send them directly to an ATM?
I see how that might lead to an “entitlement culture”, but isn’t “disability culture” actually worse AND more expensive? But no one would stand for it. You, we, I, everyone, will gladly pay more in taxes or plunge deeper into galactic sized debt to not see the reality that some will get money just because, so that we can lie to ourselves that the “disability system” isn’t supposed to be used this way, they are gaming it. The problem is not economics, the problem is psychology. You’re paying extra for the deniability. Is it worth it?
…the default narrative of anti-corporate, pro-common sense This American Life, whose typical maneuver for depicting a complicated social process is to find an N of 1 living somewhere in Appalachia and imply that this nice but toothless baptist woman doesn’t know what’s good for her. “This week on This American Life, snark by Reductio Ad Absurdum, in four acts.
Another possible motive [for the DEA to leak this memo] is to spread the very false impression that the article creates: That iMessages are somehow more difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement to intercept. Criminals might then switch to using the iMessage service, which is no more immune to interception in reality, and actually provides police with far more useful data than traditional text messages can.
So there you have it: The government is the people, and to oppose mega-banks is to oppose democracy itself. Pretty sure I read that in the Federalist Papers.
Calling the overall human experience “poignant,” “thought-provoking,” and a “complete tour de force,” film critic Roger Ebert praised existence Thursday as “an audacious and thrilling triumph.” “While not without its flaws, life, from birth to death, is a masterwork, and an uplifting journey that both touches the heart and challenges the mind,” said Ebert, adding that while the totality of all humankind is sometimes “a mess in places,” it strives to be a magnum opus and, according to Ebert, largely succeeds at this goal. “At times brutally sad, yet surprisingly funny, and always completely honest, I wholeheartedly recommend existence. If you haven’t experienced it yet, then what are you waiting for? It is not to be missed.
The two had been released that day from the SeaTac Federal Detention Center (FDC) after five months, including two months of solitary confinement, for refusing to answer arguably McCarthyesque questions about other people’s politics in front of a grand jury. The federal prosecutor was ostensibly interested in some political vandalism in Seattle on May Day—but neither Duran nor Olejnik were in Seattle during the demonstration. (Olejnik had been working a shift at the Reef.) Duran and Olejnik say they were shown photographs and asked to talk about who knew whom, who lived with whom, and whether those people were anarchists. When Duran and Olejnik refused to answer, they were sent to prison for civil contempt. At the time, Olejnik’s attorney, Jenn Kaplan, said, “I’d hate for the public to think of her as an obstacle to a prosecution rather than as a principled person.
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Freedom Is Frustrating - Brendan Kileyr
This article is about two citizens our government tortured for refusing to speak to prosecutors.
Prison reform ought to be a major political issue, but mostly nobody cares.
Bitcoin, in that sense, is anti democratic. It’s based on mistrust rather than trust, it refuses to take any responsibility onto itself – indeed, it doesn’t even have a self to take responsibility onto. It’s nihilistic, and an attractive alternative only to things which are downright bad.
Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.
The last 24 hours have been some of the ugliest on the internet.
A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours.
The idea that propaganda consists of lies (which makes it harmless and even a little ridiculous in the eyes of the public) is still maintained by some specialists; for example, Frederick C. Irion gives it as the basic trait in his definition of propaganda. But it is certainly not so. For a long time propagandists have recognized that lying must be avoided. “In propaganda, truth pays off” — this formula has been increasingly accepted. Lenin proclaimed it. And alongside Hitler’s statement on lying one must place Goebbels’ insistence that facts to be disseminated must be accurate.
How can we explain this contradiction? It seems that in propaganda we must make a radical distinction between a fact on the one hand and intentions or interpretations on the other; in brief, between the material and moral elements. The truth that pays off is in the realm of facts. The necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of intentions and interpretations.
