Innuendo? It's public knowledge that the author has competing interests. A Bayesian approach to the situation demands consideration of the possibility that the author is corrupt.
Bayesianism can't decide relevance (relevance isnt a statistical concept).
Indeed, "fallacies" are just discrete constraints on a problem like this.
Ie., that the author's relationship to facebook makes no difference to the truth of their claims shows that we need evidence relevant to their truth first.
In otherwords, you're effectively conditioning on the claims being false when you include this relationship.
>To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not. [0]
We don't understand the long-term effects because we haven't gotten there in time, yet. Pretending to know these things is dangerous for children.
I think your point ignores the fact that none of this is up to the children, regardless of risk, and they are also an infection vector which allows the virus to continue spreading and evolving. The virus is less dangerous for children, so it makes sense to let them get it and spread it? Is this the point you're trying to make?
The virus is less dangerous for children, so it's not fair to say that schools were opened just so parents could work. Schools were opened, in part, because policy makers know that in person contact poses unequal danger to children and adults.
Oh. Ok. Noted. Fairness achieved and that changes nothing about my points.
The decisions are economically driven, instead of wellbeing/needs based. This is the point. Even if I noted all things weighed and considered, the issue would be that we effectively went back to the same ways of life. Policy makers are carrying on with persisting adultist systems and making decisions without deep consideration of human needs or direct input from the youngest among us.
>This sentence shows the cultural and religious focus of the author, to the point it hides a richer history.
Referencing the best selling book of all time doesn't reveal any cultural or religious focus. Especially considering that the previous paragraph was about Jews and Muslims.
> Referencing the best selling book of all time doesn't reveal any cultural or religious focus
“Best selling book of all time” is a classic trope of Christians in the USA. It’s possible you can’t see that factor (along the lines of the “a fish doesn’t know it’s wet” metaphor).
Honestly, I can't believe that book sold so many copies. The first one starts off well, with some really great subplots, but then it starts going on about all these weird rules that feel sorta dated, all about seafood and chlamydia. Just when it was getting good, too. And it makes it really hard to convert for TV - I can't imagine Netflix will pick it up. Anyway, then the sequel, it starts a generation later. That God chap doesn't show up so much, and instead it's all about his kid Jesus, who's a bit of a social justice warrior, banging on about capitalism and doing weird stuff with food. The only real plot tension comes when the book finally kills him off, but then it uses this lazy deux ex machina contrivance to bring him back. And the sequel had so much potential too, it could have rescued the series. It could have really explored Jesus's complex relationship with his dad. It might be worth it if you're on a long flight and really desperate, but really I'd just go for something like Harry Potter if I were you. 0/5 stars.
The general plot seems popular so there have been many remakes as well as de novo versions (just as Shakespeare wrote new stories from plot elements of old ones). In fact parts of that book use the same technique.
That 100% payout will be in crypto, whose value in USD terms is going to tank if Tether implodes. And that's assuming the lending platform in question survives the carnage.
That's nonsense. When something as big as Tether falls the entire sector is going to fall apart. Everyone will run for the exits, USDC holders as well. I would not coount on Coinbase having enough real money to cover USDC redemptions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-11/coinbase-...
Would you gamble your entire investment on that? If Tether collapses, there will be major outflows from all stablecoins, and we'll find out which ones have been swimming naked.
Circle [0] and Coinbase [1] have recently reported that they are shifting their USDC reserves fully into short-term liquid assets. Given that both Circle and Coinbase are US-regulated, and given the attention being paid to stablecoins specifically by US regulators right now, USDC is probably the safest on-chain asset that currently exists (assuming that you consider USD itself to be a safe asset to hold).
Domiciled is probably a better term than "regulated" for USDC. To quote their homepage disclosures box:
> Digital asset markets and exchanges are not regulated with the same controls or customer protections available with other forms of financial products and are subject to an evolving regulatory environment. Digital assets do not typically have legal tender status and are not covered by deposit protection insurance.
They're regulated as money transmitters like Venmo, and depending on the state, that can mean as little as "pay us a few thousand dollars and we'll ignore you." This regulatory framework was created as a way of side-stepping the more onerous regulations that apply to real depository institutions. Thats why they were able to invest the backing in ... whatever before the SEC came knocking.
> that can mean as little as "pay us a few thousand dollars and we'll ignore you."
This is simply not the case. Most, if not all, state money transfer regulations mandate financial reporting to the state, and place limitations on the permissible investments that a licensed entity may hold as backing for customer obligations held in trust. Any failure to comply will result in fines and/or loss of the license (which effectively results in the closure of the money transmission business).
A number of states (California and New York among them) also conduct on-site examinations of licensees' businesses (paid for by the licensed entity). As someone who was has served as a senior executive at a company that undergoes these examinations regularly, I can assure you that they tend to be rigorous and all-encompassing.
> This regulatory framework was created as a way of side-stepping the more onerous regulations that apply to real depository institutions.
This regulatory framework was not created as a way of sidestepping anything. It was created as a way to proactively regulate money transmission.
Money transmitters are not depository institutions; they serve a different, more narrow economic function, and existing regulations are properly tailored to that economic function. In practice that means that money transmitters are required to maintain 100% reserves backing any and all customer obligations, they must hold their reserves only in certain permissible investments (i.e. government debt and bank deposits), and they are required to obtain surety bonds to further insure those obligations.
Venmo, PayPal, Western Union, Money Gram and dozens of other companies are all subject to these requirements, and there has never been any instance that I am aware of where this regulatory arrangement has resulted in consumer funds being lost, in the twenty years since this regulatory regime began to be fully implemented after passage of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Furthermore, I am not seeing what the material difference is between the outstanding obligation represented by USDC and the outstanding obligation represented by a PayPal or a Venmo account. The fact that the law treats them the same is entirely appropriate.
Tether is a problem precisely because it is unlicensed and has thus far illegally evaded these regulations. The fact that Tether is operating illegally in the US should not impugn its competitors that are in fact operating legally.
I would. I'd wager Tether's collapse would cause inflows to other stablecoins. It's also worth noting that smart contract based stablecoins, such as DAI, are incapable of being under-collateralized.
Knowing pretty much zero about DAI (and honestly, not too interested to spend any time to learn), this still sounds incredible. Does that incapability hold even if prices of whatever underlying assets are not continuous? Like, at one point of time the asset is trading at 100 dollars, and at the very next moment it trades at 1, with no possibility for anyone to trade at 50 at any point in between?
I very much assume not. If you think that is laughably stupid to assume that prices would not be continuous, well, you are in good company, even some Economics Nobelists have fallen on that trap. And lost billions. In that case you may want to spend some time researching what comes up when you search for LTCM.
From where? USDT will be worth exactly $0 so some 80% of all trading volume in crypto will evaporate instantly, and so will probably 80% of its dollar equivalents.
Did you look at the Contribution License Agreement? It appears that the issue at hand was in fact "spelled out". Repo owners aren't unreasonable to interpret this action as bad faith. I would agree that their message would be better communicated with a more amicable tone.
I don't see why you think people should respond in an amicable tone to an employee of a corporation blatantly attempting to seize ownership of assets which currently do not belong to them.
In the US, "human resources" is a misnomer for a corporate department that ensures regime compliance. Thankfully, most policies exist for the sake of worker's and minority's rights.
>If Urbit were reimagined in 2021, it would be running on Sia or Ethereum: your data is stored on the blockchain, your applications are running as perpetual smart contracts, and you can access it from anywhere in the world with just your private key.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what smart contracts do. Every miner runs every smart contract every time something is executed. It would be disastrously expensive to run a server on top of Ethereum.
Urbit's network infrastructure was "reimagined" to use Ethereum for identification.
>Hosting on my own hardware is annoying, hosting in the centralized cloud defeats the whole point.
Is there actually a third option? I'm wondering of the author simply misunderstands Ethereum.
>Is there actually a third option? I'm wondering of the author simply misunderstands Ethereum.
The issue is Urbit bills itself as 'decentralized' but isn't. If you buy Ethereum and disconnect from the Ethereum network your Ethereum doesn't go away but with Urbit you're just running your own server. Urbit should just call it what it is, a software stack. It's not 'decentralized' or an 'OS'. It's a software stack that requires a conventional OS and server.
"Just running your own server" is the proper meaning of "decentralized" [0].
Urbit has a literal operating system named Arvo built on top of a virtual machine named Nock. The terms are used technically; it's not trying to compete with Windows.
That article goes straight into peer-to-peer and file sharing so it is hardly surprising that most people expect a decentralized platform to exist primarily to eliminate SPOFs, i.e. provide redundant access to data of down peers.
I’m curious as to your definition of decentralized here. It seems you’re using the term to mean “global commons”, when I generally would use the term to mean something more akin to “permissionless” or “exhibiting a resistance to control via a singular entity or small group of entities”. Urbit is certainly decentralized by either of the two latter definitions, though a particular Urbit server surely wouldn’t constitute a global commons, which seems closest to your definition.
Maybe Sia/Filecoin/etc is a better example; every node does not store a copy of every piece of data but the blockchain is used to coordinate storing a reasonable number of copies. You could imagine using a blockchain to coordinate computation in some kind of decentralized attack-resistant way although I've never seen this done and maybe it's not feasible.
A server could use either service for storage (and sharing). You can't run Urbit's operating system on top of either, the part that executes code is missing.
Not on Solana. In fact, people are already writing software (metamask) that uses on chain computation, file storage with ipfs and even could support an blockchain controlled CDN for distribution (https://media.network/).
All with gas prices that literally fractions of a penny and 50k+ transactions per second.
If you perceive some pattern in stock prices, you can bet on the continuation of the pattern. If there were commonly discernible patterns to prices, everyone with cursory knowledge of finance would become magically rich.
This can't happen because prices rise as a consequence of buying and fall as a consequence of selling. People who bet on a pattern destroy it.
The consequent randomness is easily verifiable. Try running some stock market data through a machine learning library, you won't get any interesting results.
But there is a thriving industry of spotting patterns which other people haven't yet thought of. And IIRC there is some evidence that even after these patterns are discovered in the academic literature, they persist for a while, just with lowered returns. The logic of what you're saying is true in principle, but in practice markets are not quite so perfect.
It wasn't my intention to give the impression that markets are totally efficient, just that the forces at play tilt the system toward increasingly random behavior. I was responding to the proposition that markets are considered random because "TradFi economics has decided it must be".
