A couple of years ago my kid took a funny picture of the cat and put some white text on it and said “look I made a meme!” I told her “No, you made an image macro. it’s not a meme unless it goes viral.” and even her mother who’s older than me told me I was being pedantic and any picture can be a meme.
If you want to be pedantic, it’d be good to know that that’s not what a meme is. A meme is a unit of cultural information—analogous to a gene being a unit of genetic information. A meme may not go viral, just like a gene might not be successfully copied onto other generations, but it’s still a meme nonetheless :)
Yeah yeah I’ve read Dawkins :P My definition is based on earlier internet when things were what they were and became a meme as they were shared. Of course a popular image macro haz become meme but so can a questionnaire (wtf was wrong with us??)
A meme is just “A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.”
Anything can be a meme. I mean, the entire first Shrek movie was a meme, just like the bee movie.
Man, I hate identity politics. It really has been an extremely useful tool to get the wealthy to divide us so that we won’t care about our own deliberate impoverishment.
At the same time, whenever someone is mean to my trans homies I want to punch them in the throat.
I legit had this stupid fucking argument with this moron who claimed that they should have the right to be intolerant. No dude, your rights end where your fist hits my face. People claim freedom we aren’t completely free, we live in a society together. We agreed as a society that murder and assault are not allowed, and that could be considered curtailing “freedoms”. These morons though don’t see the nuance and just want to be racist pricks
Hear, hear! I mean, that moron has the right to be intolerant, but not to reshape society in their image. And they aren’t free from the social consequences of their personal intolerance.
Great movie all around but that scene really stuck with me. The world may come to a fiery end, but they’ll be damned if they let that stop them from being good to each other.
The Blockchain is amazingly useful, that’s why the establishment did their best to make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility. A banking system running on Blockchain is one where the Pentagon can’t lose trillions of dollars annually.
All your points are about an obsolete idea of Bitcoin, a PoW public blockchain. A PoS private blockchain with private keys not handled by the users would invalidate your entire list.
You mean PoS, which feature is literally that the more you have, the more you can stake, and the more you can earn in return? So basically the system that has built-in wealth concentration?
Yes, but if we are talking about a private permissioned blockchain, there’s no need to obtain returns from staking. It can be even a Proof of Authority tokenless network for what banking care.
Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information. A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now and they’ll keep owning the data, they could reverse transactions, be covered by several layers of public encryption, guard the user’s wallet/login, etc.
Don’t mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That’s only an unfortunate use of the technology.
Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information.
Yes
A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now
How? They’d be doing extra compute work for no reason (validating already valid transactions), and storing extra data (lots of hashes) for no reason, so it can only make infra costs more expensive. Plus the added complexity meaning you have to hire an extra team just to understand it.
Don’t mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That’s only an unfortunate use of the technology.
That speculative world as shitty as it is, is the only proven use case of the technology, if you take that away then blockchains are even less useful
The PoS option was to highlight that power consumption doesn’t have to be an issue. Of course, PoS has its own issues.
The network can use any other type of proof, like Proof of Authority where only a buch of validators owned by the banking system can process the transactions. The network can be even tokenless, no profit or incentives from it, just the secure architecture.
You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.
In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn’t happened yet despite years of development, b) it’s never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands
All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power
The keyword is “private.” The redundant system all the banks maintain can be reduced to a private, permissioned blockchain, creating a network for the banking system to handle their own transactions in addition to a seamless inter-bank communication.
I doubt a network for just one bank can be that useful compared to the current situation.
Also, I’d say that every bank has (had?) a team researching the blockchain.
payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
Not necessarily. You could have a federated system, where only big players like banks participate in larger blockchain, like banks already do with forex and wire transfers and pay ridiculous fees to clearing agencies, and clear out local transfers locally, possibly inside their own smaller and much faster blockchain.
Just to elaborate here. You are describing one implementation of a blockchain that provides a cryptocurrency. Blockchain is literally just another form of a database. It’s just that it can contain traits that would allow the database to be shared and distributed unlike typical databases. Currently there are some companies that are utilizing blockchain for their inventory systems. They aren’t using any more energy than they would with a typical system. They are just doing it to keep an unchanging record of past transactions which helps with fraud and loss prevention.
P.S. Money laundering using a system that is publicly distributed and has every transaction involving usd paired with an ID, social security number and enough pictures of your face to make a 3D model is genuinely idiotic.
Bitcoin only consumes the energy people put in it. It literaly would adjust to only consume 20W if that’s what was available. But that also means it can absord an infinite amount of excess energy if necessary
which Blockchain are we talking here? How does it compare to the current banking infrastructure?
again, which one? How does it compare to the current pricing?
escrow is a thing, someone can build up a PayPal equivalent on top of a Blockchain, the list goes on
the current system doesn’t do great here, some Blockchains makes it way more traceable, in fact
skill issue, but also solvable with a PayPal equivalent
not a fact, what does this even mean?
does it?
You could say the Linux kernel is an astronomically terrible idea because it doesn’t do anything…but it is just the platform, the good comes from what people build on top of it that add all these quality of life features you miss
You seem to have conflated blockchain technology with cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, but that’s not it’s only use case. Literally every problem you have listed relates to crypto and not blockchain itself. Blockchain is just a ledger of transactions. A private company using it to say, keep track of their inventory, or track their payments, or use it for document control, can implement it however they want.
Ok so firstly you’re not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording (“replace the banking system”), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.
Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I’d be interested to know what those are, because to me if you’re not running a decentralised system then you’re only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.
For some background, I’m well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I’ve also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.
How does one make a point using an example they know nothing about? To be clear, I agree with you, but as someone who has read a fair amount of M&E and know a ton of people who have read M&E, they are among the top 1% of readers in terms of sheer volume, but also curiosity and intellectual honesty.
Combined with the fact that the vast majority of Marx and Engels was social science, not ideological polemic, I get the impression that you are giving advice that you haven’t actually taken. Which would be fine, we are all contradictory beings to some extent. But it does beg the question.
And if you had read them, then I would want to know your insights on what you had read
That’s a lot of conclusions you jump to there, buddy.
I simply got the feeling that I got to a real Marx-head, when mentioning him and Engels in passing gets that reaction. Since I don’t particularly enjoy these kinds of conversations, I backed off.
I’ve read a bit of both Marx and Engels and watched a lecture on Marxism. I enjoy parts of Marx and don’t really like what I’ve read of Engel’s original work., is that enough?
What have you read of Engels? Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is one of my favorites. Other than some of his letters, forewords, and some essays, I’ve been really wanting to read The Conditions of the Working Class in England, since it’s referenced in Capital; and I think I have something else saved by him on my Kobo, can’t think of it ATM. I think Engels is really easy to grasp; Marx is a phenomenal writer but unless you’re in the mood to read about 1. Economics 2. Dense academic history or 3. A blistering criticism of some “Young Hegelian” scholar like Feuerbach or Bruno Bauer its hard to find something of his to just easy-read. The Manifesto is pretty accessible but it was mostly written by Engels, the two men were really one author most of the time, and I’ve read the manifesto several times and while its good its not my favorite work.
Sorry for coming off confrontational, but you picked two very good and influential thinkers to target. You could have said “don’t just read Malcolm Gladwell and Sam Harris” or “Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro,” who are all hacks, but very popular authors; whereas Marx and Engels have fallen out of fashion. It’s conspicuous, is all.
Dude, I told you that I’m not into that kind of discussion. And it turned out exactly the way I was afraid it would. I think that’s why you got downvoted, btw.
Also, you sound like the kind of guy I was making fun of in my first comment.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
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