No way in fuckall would I ever vote Republican. Initially I was against the switchup, because I was concerned that - through legal means - they would block her becoming the DNC candidate but I’m cautiously optimistic right now.
I loved the concept at first, the idea of a decentralized currency all handled by encryption, and transactions permamently stored in a public ledger for all to see.
Then the cryptobros and the scammers caught wind of it and it’s all downhill from there.
Scammers use the technology because it actually works and does what it says it does. And criminals and scammers and such are generally the first ones to adopt a new technology. Such as bank robbers adopting the automobile in order to get away faster.
If you want the name of a payment techology that isn’t snake oil, isn’t blockchain-based, isn’t a cult, doesn’t claim to be a currency, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but actually does provide certain privacy guarantees for your basic purchasing needs, is cryptographically secure, and can be used with only FOSS, I recommend looking into GNU Taler.
The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.
It will never be ready. It doesn’t even make sense. To transact with real fiat like the US dollar, you’ll have to go through an official on-ramp and an off-ramp of the respective government. And to do an international transaction you’ll have to use one of the widely accepted systems like SWIFT. GNU Taler doesn’t appear to address anything like that. Anyhow, my comment was made with the premise of this whole thread in mind, i.e. “Bitcoin is stupid” or “snake oil”. Yet there’s no alternatives to what crypto provides. So is it that stupid after all?
Anyhow, today I’m going to resume using a currency backed by oil and nukes, which encourages consumption on purpose. I will then either exploit workers by investing in a for-profit business, or get poorer.
But someday, in the future, economics will work the way I expect them to. That’s when I’ll switch to something better!
Yea, that is interesting! I don’t really understand a lot of it though. Wonder how censorship-resistant it can be, and whether the receiver would be able to cash it out anonymously.
I’m not an expert on it, but I’ve done a certain amount of study on it.
I’m pretty sure there are no privacy guarantees for money receivers. Merchants/sellers would still be identifiable by banks and governments and such. So Taler isn’t what anyone selling heroin or doing murder for hire would want to be using as an accepted payment method. (At least not any more so than credit/debit card transactions will help the seller with keeping their doings secret.)
But Taler can keep the buyers’ identity secret. Unless you’re doing things in ways that reveal information about yourself, your bank and your government wouldn’t know you were buying fursuits even if they knew the merchant was selling fursuits.
So all that to say that no, the merchant couldn’t cash out anonymously.
What I don’t understand is whether it is like “Taler is obtained and cashed out only in a bank, but the link between two events is unknown” or if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
If the former - I really hope it gets implemented as a card replacement, but it would need to coexist with something like Monero (which is what I use now) that is more akin to cash. But I really hope that somehow non-blockchain full-on “digital cash” could one day be invented, so wonder if this could be it :)
You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.
I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.
Now, as for this bit:
if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.
So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.
GNU Taller is pretty fragile, though. One bank issues unbacked tokens and the credibility of the whole system goes down the drain. It’s the current financial system, just rebranded. Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam.
Exactly like Tether. USDT was never backed 1:1 by USD. They don’t even try to deny it anymore. They admit it’s backed by “various assets, including BTC”, which smells like a market manipulation.
How does Taler promote taxation?
“Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.”
I liked the idea for awhile as well. But for me, learning about the “proof of work” underpinning is what changed my mind. That - and the fact that cryptocurrency does not actually have any of the strengths that it claims to have. It’s definitely and interesting idea… but in practice it’s all just scams and incentivised waste.
Check out Christian Welzel’s work on how values have changed over time. The world is becoming more secular and more democratic. Secular in this context means that religion plays less and less of a role in every day life. Democratic in this context means that they believe everyone should be able to pursue their interests and we should have a system that increases all of our capabilities to pursue our interests.
An implication of adopting democratic values is that you understand that your identity is not defined by “white”, “able-bodied”, or whatever, but by the fact that we are aware. By doing this, you’re not giving special treatment to your in-group (whichever it may be), but you’re considering all of humanity (and all aware beings) as equals and as a group that you belong to. Cosmopolitanism is an example of this stance.
Something else that is happening is that the world is becoming more reflexive. Check out Anthony Giddens’ texts on this.
But, to answer your question directly, yes, grandparents and parents are generally less welcoming and less tolerant.
There’s very few Americans who hadn’t completely decided already, maybe a couple percent. Of those couple percent, maybe a percent have an opinion on Tim Walz. And most of them are from Minnisota.
The polls seem to disagree with you, at least before Harris’ pick of Walz was announced. She’s peeled off a solid 5-6% from Trump in some states, turning him from a +4 favorite to a -1 tossup in some Georgia polls, for example, or turning a Trump +3 favorite in Pennsylvania into a Harris +3 favorite between Biden’s decision to suspend his campaign and late last week.
I’m not expecting to see Walz’s announcement making any big waves right away, but it gives them a chance to extend the excitement cycle for a while.
He’s good on climate, his kids are via IVF and he’s supported reproductive freedom in his state, he had a cat until old age took it and has a dog, he’s been married to the same woman for 30+years, he’s LGBTQ supportive, he got laws passed so MN provides breakfast, lunches, and tampons in schools,
Recreational pot sales are nearing reality in Ohio … The state Division of Cannabis Control began accepting applications [on 7 June] for new dual licenses that will allow existing medical marijuana dispensaries to also sell nonmedical cannabis.
While states with medical cannabis generally issue regulations for which patients are eligible and which doctors can prescribe, the products themselves are mostly subject to meeting lab tests for containing what they say on the label, and distribution in child-resistant packaging. Otherwise, the same stock for medical cannabis customers is about the same as for recreational cannabis.
Hence, while it might be surprising that a new cannabis dispensary could appear out of nowhere – even without a preceding medical cannabis dispensary at the same location – the wholesaling, backend infrastructure, and vendor network may already have existed, so propping up a storefront would be the relatively easy part.
Not really. It is just translating the Windows system API calls into Linux system API calls. It’s not emulating Windows, it’s an entirely different implementation that doesn’t necessarily match that of Microsoft’s implementation. It had it own workarounds to make buggy code work.
You wouldn’t call a Java Virtual Machine an emulator of another JVM either, they’re just different implementations of the same specification.
Thing is, I do kind of think of a JVM as an emulator for a processor that doesn’t exist.
WINE kind of blurs the line of a traditional emulator by having the executable run natively on the target machine’s CPU, but everything it does in regards to dealing with the host OS, the display, disk access, etc, is emulated as far as I’m aware.
A theoretical PS4 or Xbox One emulator running on x86 hardware could be just as much of an emulator as WINE is.
Maybe depending on how far you take it. A CPU instruction is different from hardware to hardware, but a function signature would stay the same no matter the underlying architecture. If we want to go through that logic then an interpreter can be thought of as a form of emulator.
Yes but an emulator emulates both the CPU and GPU of the consoles and in the case of PS4 even thought the CPU is x86 the biggest difference I can think of is the GPU drivers.
is anyone forcing you to socialize? If so, how are you forced?
And because I’m the only one with this job mentality, it’s always me the one who works while the rest do nothing.
That sounds to me like there are too many nurses then. If everyone can do nothing and you’re the only one working, that must mean only one nurse is required, right? Did you inform your superiors about this?
I don’t want to work with people who slow me down.
How do they slow you down? It seems from your post like they just don’t do much, how does that impact your speed exactly? You say while they talk, you can work. Isn’t that the opposite of slowing you down, they’re actually getting out of your way?
I’m not OP, but I’ll go ahead and reply with some possible answers.
I’ll also just use she/her pronouns (guessing op is a woman), as writing him/her may make my comment more tiring to read, and “they” may make it unclear whether or not i’m referring to OP or OP’s colleagues.
is anyone forcing you to socialize? If so, how are you forced?
Shes not literally forced to socialise, but are likely dragged into situations where the consequences of not socialising are worse then just doing it against their will. E.g people getting in a bad mood or being snarky because OP doesnt put on a fake smile and unwillingly exchange pleasantries.
That sounds to me like there are too many nurses then. If everyone can do nothing and you’re the only one working, that must mean only one nurse is required, right? Did you inform your superiors about this?
OP didnt exactly say that she has a low workload, and have an easy time completing all those tasks for others. OP is probably doing way more than is expected from one nurse, and may be headed for burnout.
How do they slow you down? It seems from your post like they just don’t do much, how does that impact your speed exactly? You say while they talk, you can work. Isn’t that the opposite of slowing you down, they’re actually getting out of your way?
They’re slowing her down because she has to do everyone elses work, thus leaving less time for completing her own tasks. This may also impact the quality of the work she’s originally supposed to do.
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