Vast majority of it is just cheap coffee labeled to be this and marked up for tourists / gift market. Have tried it, just tastes like cheap old coffee. It’s not something genuinely sought after by coniseurs.
That makes this even dumber. If it actually had a good taste i could sort of understand it, in a honey sort of way. Sounds like it’s just a silly novelty.
It’s always about the story. Same reason restaurants get 2 and 3 michelline stars. It’s about how pretentious and fancy you can make everything surrounding the meal and not about the meal itelsef.
I’ve eaten at a 2 star Michelin restaurant. It was definitely theater and not a meal. The Menu is one of the best dark humor movies I’ve ever seen because it’s honestly not that far off lol
One star restaurants are the way. They usually have been so focused on their cuisine at that point they haven’t yet become super pretensious. Plus you actually have a shot at getting a table at these.
They just threw pencils and erasers at me if they needed me to listen. Most of what they were talking about was covered in the book so they just let me read it. The only exception was math.
Imagine getting dissaproval votes (or whatever we’re calling not downvotes) just for sharing a completely neutral retelling of something that happened to you lmao
Wait you mean like you have time at school where you’re not being actively taught? At my school and in the uk in general (i think) that was never a thing for us, studying was something we were meant to do in our own time
Slovakia here. The school is kinda crap. 2 times each week the whole day is subject called “Professional training”, but we almost never do anything at all in there. Whole 2 days of nothing, I am being serious. It’s basically just for attendance, and even that just partially. If you arrive 4 hours late, the teacher will sign you off as if you were there the whole day.
I hope it changes this year. I hope.
Also, math teacher allows us to listen to music during exams. That was her idea, actually.
But we have also integrated the phones into the process. Teachers send us notes we’re meant to work with during classes, on our phones. Likewise we do exams on our phones. Adapt and overcome. This is already high school though. Only the first hear of high school is mandatory, now I am here because I want to study, not because I have to. I could leave anytime if I wished to do that.
Nearly half of my time in public school (depending on the class) was time spent independently working on things. Time that the only thing between me and completing a task was disregarding the various noises my classmates were making.
Did you read the “during study time” part of the comment. I certainly don’t think student’s shpuld be listening to music when a teacher is actively teaching.
This has been an awakening to Lemmy’s philosophical and literate ideals.
Just do what I did in school and put an earphone down your sleeve. Rest head on hand. Listen to music. It’s not difficult, I got away with it in exams ffs (I dont recommend that last bit btw, that was young stupidity in hindsight)
During class. You made up “study time”. No one cares if your on your phone studying during “study time” in the library. But if someone is lecturing you shouldn’t be on your phone or have earbuds in.
Westerners deciding who’s doing real socialism or not. Westerners expressing their most vile sentiment for foreign countries rather than their own imperialism. Westerners praising the words of their own imperialist intelligence agencies. Westerners unironically praising their own nations for civil liberties like the freedom of fascists to assemble, freedom of racists to express themselves, freedom of parents to own their children, and freedom of school districts to continue racial segregation. Westerners praising imperialist nations like Norway as socialist while using bold language like fascism to describe places under that same exact threat of imperialism, like Cuba and Vietnam.
Westerners claiming foreign governments are merely pretending to be socialist, while claiming unorganized misinformed chauvinistic westerners are the true heirs to socialism, despite all they do is post online and complain about foreign nations.
Westerners praising anarchist movements from 100 years ago despite having no common cause with those movements, no connection to the circumstances within them, and probably no actual admiration of them. Westerners praising a bastardized, sectarian, perverse form of anarchism rather than attempting unity with organizations in their areas. Westerners refusing to speak with actual anarchists in their area, who by and large don’t give a shit and just want to hand out food or help at shelters. If Buenaventura Durruti were alive today he’d be regarded with scorn by western chauvinists.
Westerners continuing to bring up Trotsky of all people, who wasn’t relevant to world affairs for the last 15 years of his life and certainly not the past 80 years. Westerners not reading a single word of Trotsky’s work, westerners focusing entirely on Trotsky’s feud with Stalin, westerners not knowing that Trotsky was a literal military commander. Westerners calling themselves Trotskyists in 2023 for some reason. Westerners deciding they have a feud with Joseph Stalin, a man who died in 1953.
Westerners attempting to praise their own socialist leadership, who happen to be a scattered group of imperialist-aligned social democrats, Twitch streamers, and actual antisemitic grifters such as in the case of Caleb Maupin.
I dont want to be a victim of hexbear road rage thanks. You guys just vomit out material in hopes that you can string it together to form a cogent argument. Then you come back smug as ever asking why i didnt respond to the 10k talking points as if I was a human encyclopedia.
How would I distinguish you, based only on your reply, from someone who took one look at two whole paragraphs and decided you weren’t going to read that but had to keep arguing no matter what and spewed out some sour grape nonsense?
I dont read very good. Im just a brown person from Guatemala sitting in an internet cafe. I dont want paid 30 quetzales to read shit. I want funny hahas
How should we frame our arguments in response to a meme that paints every single prominent socialist and socialist country as fascist without addressing each one?
Really the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim, shouldn’t it?
OP didn’t need to compare every socialist movement to fascists but they did, we didn’t need to reply to most of them, but we did. But we’re supposed to tailor our arguments to you, someone admits to not actually caring about any of it? No thank you
We don’t ignore it when a socialist country takes security measures, we say they’re an unfortunate reality of steps a country has to take in order to defend itself against external and internal aggression. Having your country go socialist earns you a lot of enemies and having a lot of enemies means you have to build up things like intelligence agencies, military apparatuses, and centralized agencies for combating sabotage and spying. These are things every country does, but western nations like to paint the security measures that socialist nations take as purely authoritarian, or needlessly tyrannical, or whatever other word gets thrown around. The nations yelling at socialist countries to change their domestic policies are usually the most imperialist and have the most to gain from socialist states being dismantled.
When your enemies are the global capitalists who operate global finance and industry, you should probably build up something to defend against it. Nukes tend to work as a deterrent, but they only go so far when you’ve also got an internal population that can present a security problem.
China’s taken the smartest strategy of all honestly. They’ve intertwined their economy with the imperial powers to the point it’s impossible to disentangle. The west can’t take violent action against China, since that’s where the industry is.
Also, so called authoritarian measures against our enemies are a good thing. It’s good when fascists, racists, and imperialists lose civil liberties like the freedom to express themselves, organize, fund politicians, or operate businesses.
Do you think that we will see true communism ever arise from authoritarianism? I don’t think that is possible.
I think that authoritarianism is a lot more palatable to the imperialists than actual communism would be, I worry that, quite apart from it being wrong to curtail civil rights, by being authoritarian a socialist state is simply dancing to the tune of the imperialists.
I don’t think I’m comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don’t have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Personally I don’t believe the term authoritarianism is a useful description of anything. It’s too vague. I’ve seen one definition that’s like “a system that rejects the involvement of certain groups or interests from the political process.” Well that would be all socialist nations by default, since socialist countries by definition have denied political representation for the capitalist class in some way.
A better question is: How is a socialist country supposed to defend itself? It may not be possible for a country to achieve what Marx called upper-phase communism. It may not be possible for money, states, and all property to be abolished. That’s a question for the future. But when a country tries to curtail the power of capitalists, even attempts to create what’s known as true communism, they find themselves on the receiving end of an entire world against them. Sanctions, invasions, sabotage, spying. The shape that a socialist country will take is the result of its conditions. We’re living in a world dominated by capital and socialist countries represent a resistance against capital. If socialist movements are threatened, they either defend themselves or collapse.
You’re right that countries are dancing to the imperialists, because the imperialists hold the most power right now. That’s why an anti-imperialist movement is important, why a multi-polar world is important. Once the threat of imperialism subsides or is defeated, then I’m going to guess socialist countries will begin to express their policies differently.
I don’t think I’m comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don’t have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Is there any society that isn’t this? A central authority deciding how to distribute rights is a governing body.
Socialism is a movement about denying the right of property to capitalists. That’s the entire purpose of the movement, to elevate working class people to the point of dominating society and to restrain or abolish the capitalist class. Landlords and capitalists shouldn’t be able to exercise the same rights they have in a liberal capitalist nation. Fascists, racists, transphobes, imperialists, etc shouldn’t have any civil liberties and should be subject to arrest, reeducation, or worse.
Thanks for sharing, believe it or not I am a communist myself and I agree with most of what the video said. I just don’t see how communism can ever emerge from authoritarianism, because if the defence against imperialism is authoritarianism are we not still dancing to the imperialist tune?
Comunism can only emerge from authoritarianism, by definition, because every single class society is authoritarian, and thus every state is. And as Engels noticed, revolution is the most authoritarian thing that is.
Imperialism is not the same as authoritarianism. To know what we mean by “imperialism” read Lenin’s “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”.
And you might noticed how authoritarianism in my first sentence is used incredibly wide, it’s not a mistake, it’s one of those terms that have no useful meaning, it wasn’t even useful to start with, and especially not when it went through the liberal media and social media mill which had tendency to either purposefully or acidentally (or both) twist definitions to the point they are unrecognizable. Therefore to broadly talk about “authoritarianism” is meaningless, that word is unhelpful as definition and can be used at most as the cliche to deflect discussion (and note it’s been used in this thread in this characer extensively by liberals who sure as hell aren’t opposing it because they support authoritarian societies as well).
True communism is stateless, so how can this emerge from authoritarianism?
Because history and society exist? States exist? Regardless if you are for transitional socialist state or you are some kind of utopist wanting to implement instant communism on a press of a button, that communist society will be necessarily build on a base of the current one.
as tankies for justifying their repressive ideology
What lack of dialectic materialism does to a mfer.
You do always discuss by asking questions this loaded? Especially after making completely outlandish claim that new society can’t be build on base of the old one? Not even posadists went that far, that sounds more like some apocalypse preaching.
That it’s fun to do and informative to others. It might be fun for them too.
The reason I was asking morality yesterday was because that was the main question of the post. America bad and Russia bad are moral questions, so I was asking them as such.
It’s actually axiomatic. I can’t really prove or justify why one should be good or bad, or why they should be good or bad to one another. But that good is good and to be strived for is the staring point of the philosophy.
I don’t define axioms. It is the general definition commonly used, as recorded (but not decided) by the dictionary. Do you in fact have a different definition?
They have the actual meaning that the majority or community gives them. But that isn’t necessarily static. But you’ve shown no evidence that it’s changed in this case. That’s what I’ve always been saying.
What do you mean settled? Do words meaning change? Absolutely. Quick examples from Google are awesome, egregious, awful, terrific, smeart->smart, nice, wicked, presently, etc
So if someone told you that you were using a word or words incorrectly, because the agreed upon usage of that term was decided, you would accept it and wouldn’t pedantically argue that point instead?
But is your fun the morally justifiable kind? I’m trying to get to the bottom of this in a truely high-level idea discussion with the morality understander important-high-level-ideas
Yes, because engaging with hexbears is a waste of time. They are not here in good faith. Either that or they don’t know any better, which in practice amounts to the same thing.
That’s a fair question and in all honesty the answer is no, because based on what I can easily see and understand of hexbears, they aren’t intellectually serious people and to the contrary are more akin to a kind of 4-chan trolling community than anything worth actual intellectual engagement.
I could be wrong, but so far I have yet to see any evidence as such.
We got told to cool it with the emojis on other instances, because there’s a Lemmy bug that makes our emojis look giant when we’re not on Hexbear. A lot of us think it’s funny though that our pig shit image takes up the whole screen. I want it to be larger.
I honestly have never seen a pleasant conversation with a hexbear. I am looking forward to when hexbear and all chapotraphouse leninistas are purged from these forums so you guys can fester in your own bile. Im crossing my fingers.
Because you walk into threads about issues you barely understand and say stupid shit. If you were less ignorant maybe you’d get the convos about backyard farming and cats
It’s ok if the joke goes over your head, comerade. The Lubyanka administration doesn’t give you enough resources to comprehend Western sarcasm. One day
Said no one. Except you. You either know what a Gish gallop is, or you don’t. A long comment is not necessarily a Gish gallop. In this case the charge is entirely accurate.
As if it’s somehow impossible to make a long comment in support of a single argument? As if Gish galloping comments don’t actually exist? Do I follow your logic properly? What part about this do I not understand?
Their argument was that so called Western socialists are mostly just Western chauvinists who make their determination on what movements are “real socialists” based on how closely they align, racially and culturally, to the West.
That’s precisely the point. These guys have a toolbox of fallacious arguments and techniques that they regularly trot out. The Gish gallop is one of them. Another, that you see being put to wide use in this thread, is redefining words and terms to fit their narrative.
The people who hate America the most are probably Iraqis with dead children, or American indigenous people kept in poverty.
I know there are westerners who have a better conception of socialism and are more amenable to international working class efforts. I know a lot of them. I’m from Texas lol. I don’t like it when westerners, like fellow Americans, look down their nose at other countries. Calling a nation fascist because it doesn’t meet your western ideas of what socialist utopia is supposed to be? It’s bizarre to me. It always seems racist.
Westerners have a strong tendency towards national chauvinism and it’s rare to meet someone more internationally minded unless you go looking for them. You can probably agree with that.
I dont think you could find someone who hates America more than an American
If your hypothetical American had a button that would sink the entire country to the bottom of the ocean, would they press it without a moment’s hesitation?
If not, then they do not hate America more than me.
That is a wild take. People have seen there kids burned to death in an American drone strike. Or had their family executed in front of them by special forces death squads.
Bone juice kills the green things and the moving things. There is a reason they aren’t making more bone juice. All moving things that had it have died.
I know you’re being funny, but to answer the question I posited: every summer, after people came back from towing their caravans up through the mountains, my dad’s shop would be replacing loads of clutches with people complaining about the weird smells their car started making. Or the sudden trouble they had shifting.
Tell me you are a diesel driver without telling me. By the time you get an average gas car moving the light is red again if you don’t rev it to at least 1500
Ah, you mean that because diesel cars have more torque, you can do things like starting uphill with just the clutch.
I was wondering, because I certainly didn’t opt for a handbrake start for the fun of it. My car’s engine simply died, if I lifted the clutch too far without accelerating and ‘too far’ was far below getting enough torque to not roll downhill.
You let the clutch up until the rims start to drop a tiny bit, at this point you can let off the brake and move your foot to the gas. You shouldn’t move backwards as long as you are slow and feel for the engine to not stall
If you can’t hold the brake with your right foot and roll start with the clutch left foot without touching the gas, you need more practice.
exceptions given for fully loaded old as dirt pickup trucks that don’t like to idle properly, those you can heel toe… not that I’d know anything about that of course.,
I haven’t driven a whole lot of cars and none of them were old as dirt pickup trucks but I’ve seen enough where the idle gas was not enough to get the car rolling on an incline without stalling it. Sometimes you just need a good handbrake start
Well, it’s just a trick you need to get the feeling for. Start one foot on the break, and other on the clutch. Let clutch go halfway, without stalling the car, and quickly move your right foot from brake to gas. Press on gas pedal, while releasing clutch. If you do it right, the car starts driving forward, even on a upwards hill. It takes practice, and every car feels different.
A good indicator for learning this – especially if you don’t have the feel for your clutch yet – is to watch your RPM counter. If it starts to dip, the clutch is starting to engage. From there on, continue as described.
If you’re on a really steep incline, you’ll have to press both the brake and gas pedal at the same time using your right foot, while feathering the clutch with your left. I’ve heard this called the “heel toe” technique.
If your engine has enough torque or if the hill isn’t steep enough, you can ignore this and just ease off the clutch while transitioning from the brake to gas.
Last season iirc, when Kim moved to another city and changed her name & style in order to keep out of the radar. She was together with some guy that kept repeating YEP rhythmically during sex.
By “being slightly critical” they mean even slightly implying that China is not in every way a completely perfect utopian paradise incapable of doing wrong.
I’m from hexbear, people are critical of it all the time on hexbear. You just can’t criticize China and not know the people there are far better off than those in the US
Mao killing the sparrows during the four pests campaign was bad. The cultural revolution produced excesses that didn’t need to happen if it was handled better.
Oh look nobody on hexbear is going to hate on this comment.
Modern day China is both capitalist and emperialist and has a disregard for basic human rights. It is not in any way shape or form a communist state. Oh, and it actively tries to censor and erase the fact that it ran down its own citizens with tanks.
How is China imperialist? The other stuff you’re saying us wrong too, but i know the propaganda you will point to to get there. But imperialist? You mean Belt and Road? Building hospitals in Africa?
You mean the theocratic slaver state of Tibet that was liberated by the PLA? That’s a fine place to start to show that you are just another western left anti-communist.
Edit: I’d recommend Blackshirts and Reds to understand the phenomenon of left anti-communism in the West. If you’re serious about communism, it might help you understand the rift driven between you and the people you call “tankies” …wordpress.com/…/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-…
There’s a big a difference between the two actions. Let’s start with the US. They “liberate” Iraq and Afghanistan and proceed to extract value out of the country. Byzantine networks of private contractor orgs: Haliburton, KBR, Blackwater all making money, along with the military industrial profiteer complex. These countriee were hollowed out for profit and foreign extraction. US empire nakedly acts to make money for the ruling class.
Now, where is that in Tibet? Where is the capitalist extraction? Where is the hollowing out and using up of resources? People in Tibet are now freer, and better educated, and live better lives now than when they were slaves to the lamas. Its not cynical double speak to call what happened in Tibet liberation the way the US government claimed to he liberating Iraq. They freed an enslaved people, that’s not an act of imperialism just because it involved an army. An army literally named the People’s Liberation Army
You don’t know how to actually counter what i said because you don’t really know about Tibet or the PRC, or understand that while its not yet operating under full socialism, it does have a dictatorship of the proletariat guided by a revolutionary vanguard party. Not understanding these things, yet having an opinion about the PRC is charitably naivete
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, swims like a duck, annexes other countries like a duck. But it insists it’s a platypus so I guess we’ll pretend it’s a mammal.
Cool. It was one i found very clarifying when i was trying to learn more about AES and sort through the reality of those countries as opposed to the Western version of them
Oh, and it actively tries to censor and erase the fact that it ran down its own citizens with tanks.
Are you saying that China doesn’t censor or try to hide this? Can I just go to Tienanmen square and start talking to locals about what happened there and they’ll openly talk about how awful it was?
What do you think happened at Tienanmen Square? Because you might want to figure that out before you start grinning like a moron while asking a Chinese person about “how awful what happened at Tienanmen Square was”.
Not at Tienanmen Square. Confirmed by western reporters at the scene along with contemporary US diplomatic cables later leaked by Wikileaks. Western media is really attached to that image of the guy in front of a tank, so everyone just pretends it was the site of a mass murder. Really odd.
It is. The only evidence of a massacre of protestors in Tienanmen Square presented in that article is Wu’erkaixi’s claim that he saw 200 people shot, but he had actually left the protests hours before the final protestors left, and literally everyone else present (including western journalists) says that the last protestors left peacefully.
Edit: Here’s an overview from the former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post, who was in Beijing covering the protests in 1989.
While we’re on the subject of propaganda: what was it that made you believe China “ran down its own citizens with tanks”? What is the actual source of this belief.
Do you see how dishonest it is to claim that even slightly criticism of China is forbidden on Hexbear and then when the person speaks to you offers substantial criticism, your counterpoint is that we disagree when you say extremely bad shit about China?
What is a slightly negative thing about China that you feel you couldn’t share on hexbear.net?
That’s a fairly normal time for parties, especially with friends. Even though I mostly do this in my home village (so ~500m from home), it’s common to party til 6 am, or rather until someone complains to the police, for many festivals.
The rich can easily exploit the political system and lobby for favorable laws = Not only is it pay to win, the devs suck the dicks of their biggest whales
Whistleblowing corruption is dangerous and might often end in persecution against the whistleblower = Reporting cheating whales is a surefire way to get yourself banned
The wealth inequality gap is mind-boggling = You’d need to grind nonstop for a total of 5 billion hours to buy one of everything on the cash shop
Markets don’t “create wealth”. People’s work creates wealth. Banks don’t create wealth, they create debt and allow more money to go into circulation than actually exists.
Regulation isn’t only desired, it’s crucial for any market economy to work, lest they devolve into corrupt, abusive monopolies and oligopolies. Granted, bad regulation can be equally abusive and real cases are plentiful.
Just as important as regulation is taxing who has more money, because generating wealth won’t automagically distribute it in any ideal manner. The worst problem nowadays is just how easy it is for rich assholes to legally evade taxes no matter which country they’re from.
Markets don’t “create wealth”. People’s work creates wealth. Banks don’t create wealth, they create debt and allow more money to go into circulation than actually exists.
I think the world would make a giant leap forward if we could all agree on this. Sad thing is that finance basically exist to muddy the waters of what value is. (EDITED, incorrect formating)
Bitcoin: 4.7% believed to be in the hands of a single person, another 3.1% in the hands of four addresses. Deflatory so no incentive to use it to make transactions. Value depends on the network effect (i.e. a pyramid scheme). Small transactions now too expensive to be realistic. 24% of the supply was created in the first year, 35% over two years. Movement of funds takes too long to be useful. Those who got in early are guaranteed to be richer than those who got in late without having made any effort…
Crypto would be great as a replacement of the stockmarket but it’s fighting to be cash instead and it’s doing a bad job of it because it’s cash as envisioned by tech bros, not actual economists.
I love posts like this, it lets me know most people still don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about. It’s honestly a bit impressive how nearly every point you tried to make is either misleading or straight up wrong.
I love posts like this, it lets me know most crypto lovers don’t have the first clue what they’re investing in. It’s honestly a bit impressive how you didn’t even try to actually argue against what I said because it’s just a list of facts.
If Bitcoin is only good for speculation and has no other real use because it’s too cumbersome then it’s like investing in tulips, and we all know how that ended :)
Real currency is backed by the work, goods and economy of a country. Gold is a mineral with intrinsic value because it’s useful to make things with. Bitcoin is backed by the hope of making profit by selling to a sucker that will pay more than what you paid… And it was meant to be electronic cash but people got greedy, it’s better for early adopters pockets to make people believe it’s a store of value that’s hard to trade (like physical gold, funny that) instead of something you can easily use to transfer real world money from one person to another without parking that money there forever…
But then you realise that the point of a store of value is that you invest X in it and you know that it will store that value and you’ll be able to withdraw whenever you need to and still have X or very close to it. A store of value isn’t something you speculate on, it’s somewhere where you put your money when you’re close to retiring or if you live in a country where inflation is very high.
Lol, you want me to spell it out for you dumb-dumb? Ok
4.7% believed to be in the hands of a single person,
You’re talking about Satoshi Nakamoro here. Other than a few test cases, no Bitcoin has ever been moved out of these wallets and Satoshi disappeared in 2010. People have continued to donate to these wallets over the years as a kind of tribute and to burn coins. While it’s technically possible he’s still alive, the fact that there has been zero movement from those accounts and that any movement, no matter how small, would immediately be seen and reported on makes it unlikely that these will ever be touched.
3.1% in the hands of four addresses.
Those are exchange addresses. It’s like trying to say that 4 entities control a percentage of all US currency and then it turns out you’re just talking about banks.
Deflatory so no incentive to use it to make transactions
Except of course the security, the fact it can be used across borders by anyone with an Internet connection, in poorer countries it can be more stable than their own currency, and just general preference.
Value depends on the network effect (i.e. a pyramid scheme)
This is absolute nonsense with “pyramid scheme” attached to the end. As more people use it, the value goes up because it’s accepted more and more places and has a higher liquidity? That’s literally part of every currency ever.
Small transactions now too expensive to be realistic
You show your hand that you haven’t bothered to update your views on Bitcoin since 2019. Not only are fees back to being low on the main network, with the introduction and adoption of the Lightning Network, fees are down to pennies or less.
24% of the supply was created in the first year, 35% over two years.
Yes, that’s how halving works. You present that with an insinuation that any point they could just mint more btc. This is ignorance at best, but more likely intentionally misleading.
Movement of funds takes too long to be useful.
Again, guess you haven’t been paying attention for a few years. This issue has been solved with the Lightning Network with transactions usually going through faster than tap-to-pay transactions with a regular debit/credit card.
Those who got in early are guaranteed to be richer than those who got in late without having made any effort.
Welcome to every investment opportunity. Those who get in early take a higher risk for more reward.
So yea, every point either misleading, or straight up wrong.
We’re blindly trusting this person not to do anything with their fortune!
Exchanges have never done anything shady and (for a second time) we’re trusting them even though they’re all established in countries with as little regulations as possible.
If something that can fluctuate by 50% of its value is more stable than your local currency you’re not investing in it, you’re buying USD, or in the case where you have access to Bitcoin you’re buying stable coins.
What the network effect means is that the only reason it keeps its value is that more people buy it at a price where people who were there earlier are making profit. If there’s no new buyers then it’s worthless. See the pyramid drawing itself now?
So the technology is bad enough that it requires a separate tech to work properly? Going back to your people in poor countries, how do you expect them to deal with the transaction cost to move their funds in and out of the L2 when required if they can only afford to buy a couple of dollars worth at a time?
It just shows how much early adopters could pocket and how unfair it is if it was to become the default currency, even more unfair than regular cash.
See #5 and let’s add that the reason fees are lower and transaction speeds faster is only because demand is low at the moment, Bitcoin’s network hasn’t changed. Still, when transactions were taking an hour or more to go through, how would you have dealt with paying for something if you had realized you didn’t have enough funds on the LN and you needed to transfer from your regular wallet? Or very simply, if you’re paying for something and the person at the receiving end is a true maximalists that sees how flawed the LN is, do you pay them hours ahead for something they’re selling you? That’s what I call a trustless transaction!
Oh so as pointed out in OP’s meme it’s not ok for traditional rich to be rich because they jumped on opportunities, but it’s ok for the Bitcoin rich to be rich because they jumped on an opportunity, got it 👍
The biggest difference imo between bitcoin and USD is that participation in bitcoin is completely voluntary whereas participation in USD is mostly not, especially when you look at the things done to maintain global USD hegemony and the consequences of leaders who try to, for example, trade oil in currency other than USD or create a hard currency for their country when the de facto currency is USD. Were someone to print (which i can’t believe ppl in this thread don’t realize is a turn of phrase) a bunch of new BTC then it would only affect people who voluntarily chose to participate in that system, whereas if someone printed a whole bunch of USD and injected it directly into the stock market, those affected worst by this are not in the system by choice, and many times they participate only by coercion.
I’m not a crypto guy by any means. But your point 5 doesn’t make sense. Almost all of our digital infrastructure is systems being supported by other systems.
If you want to look at debit/credit card processing that is legitimately “bad enough that it requires a separate tech to work properly”. The banking systems that existed before cards needed new systems to process those payment methods. From the outside looking in, your critique could literally be applied anywhere for anything.
Again I don’t even use Bitcoin. That’s just a bad argument.
Thing is Bitcoin maximalists are always defending Bitcoin as being perfect, that’s a major difference in the attitude of those who use the technology vs everything else (except Linux maximalists that are pretty much the same type of people).
To expand on that point and explain WTF I’m taking about:
Bitcoin’s network is so slow and transactions so expensive when demand is high that people now need to move their funds to a parallel network (called a Layer 2) where transactions happen in isolation and when people close their “account” the funds are moved back to the main network with balances being updated based on what happened on the Layer 2.
A problem is that it doesn’t eliminate the speed and fee issue completely as people still need to move their funds from Bitcoin’s network to the lightning network (and back eventually). That means during busy periods you’re still paying 30$+ to move your funds to the cheaper alternative and you still have to wait, potentially for hours, for that transaction to happen if you didn’t have enough funds in your lightning wallet to pay for whatever you’re buying. All of that means it’s not worth it for someone who doesn’t have a lot of money in the first place to buy Bitcoin to use it as cash, when the whole point of Bitcoin was to be trustless electronic cash (see Bitcoin.org for the whitepaper).
When transactions fees are low enough on the main network that small transactions aren’t as issue anymore? Well the Lightning network isn’t as useful anyway because transactions also happen quickly enough that it’s not an issue in most cases.
The point of crypto is to have a trustless decentralized system. Not Lighting network has watchdogs making sure fraudulent transactions don’t happen (not trustless) and a tendency to centralize: medium.com/…/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightnin…
There’s a whole lot of info out there about the flaws of both the main and the parallel networks and there’s even maximalists that believe Bitcoin is perfect as it is and the Lightning network shouldn’t exist.
You’re right. But they don’t want to hear it. Just like how most of the world believes in sky people and don’t want to face reality.
The world has been living on FIAT currency since WW1 when virtually every country left the Gold Standard. It’s been ingrained into everyone that deflation = bad, inflation = good. Yet at the same time every single financial advisor recommends dumping your savings into deflationary assets (houses, stocks, etc)… Okay. Makes sense to me.
39% of Americans do not invest in the stock market. Fuck them I guess.
Having 2% deflation instead of 2% inflation would be good for the economy. It would be a baseline to compete against for companies and mean less people would invest in bad investments that just beat inflation.
We also need to stop this ludicrous idea of infinite growth of the economy forever in order to be able to afford to retire. It’s detremental to the environment and to the quality of products the economy produces to expect such.
Inflationary policies and fiat currencies are the fuel behind both world wars lasting as long as they did.
Ancient Rome prospered with a strong currency, when they started debasing their currency it started the fall of Rome. The same will happen to us.
I agree that there is an unhealthy attitude to capital growth. That definitely needs to change.
As for the 39% of Americans not investing, how many have pension funds or other retirement schemes that do the investing for them? Regardless, they are free to choose what they do with their money. If they want to hold it, so be it.
A period of deflation might make for a good break, but not as a permanent solution. Investment inspires innovation, and innovation in new technologies will be vital in combating climate change.
I can’t comment on the wars or Rome but I think there are multiple factors there, fiat maybe being one but of what significance?
I’m not pro crypto per-se, but your argument is only valid for bitcoin, not crypto. Most of it is even worse to be fair, but there is a future for sane crypto IMO.
Since nobody else responded to the stock market argument: it’s how cash is envisioned to work by Austrian school economists, not the economists currently in charge. The average person needing to trust strangers with their money is not good.
It’s an entirely different perspective on how money should work (that was de facto illegal for decades), and only now can we put our money where our mouths are.
Also wastes energy and hardware (which includes rare earth metals mined by slaves) to endlessly compute hashes. Great solution for a post climate change world let me tell ya!
100%? Impossible. But they can effectively ban it.
Pass a law that makes any US company, or company doing business in the US, not allowed to host E2EE-enabled apps. This now bans them from the App Store and Play Store. 99% of users won't find or choose to side-load for android users. Then they can make E2EE actually illegal to distribute in the US. They'll almost never bother going after individuals, but this effectively makes hosting a US-based website unable to distribute E2EE programs. So people will need to use foreign sites. Which the US can force ISPs to block via a whack-a-mole on individual sites.
This isn't very likely, but hell Congress was decently close to banning TikTok for no real reason so who knows?
Man, I don’t even know anymore… Covid, War in Ukraine, Climate change, Upcoming 2024 Election, feels like too much has been going on. 2024 could mean the end of everything. (I’m a non-white immigrant so I’ll be the first ones to be targeted if the election doesn’t go well).
Hey, dude, I feel I somewhat understand you, because I was the same, and am the same. But here’s something I learned a while ago that helped (obviously didn’t kill it). It’s by now a cliche and is totally commercialized, but hey, if it works.
Habit 1: Be Proactive: Focus and act on what you can control and influence instead of what you can’t.
There are a lot of things you can’t control/have causal effects in life. You will kill yourself worrying about them. Drop the bad news you can’t change. If you already know who you are going to vote for, just don’t read the political news. Do you parts for the climate change and forget the rest. etc.
70% of all pollution is created by maybe 100 companies. Your “carbon footprint” is just a corporate ploy to shift responsibilities and the focus of the discussion around climate change to that of the individual.
Damn… Yeah, it‘s rough. Life is never all butterflies and rainbows, but it‘s also easy to forget that there is also much potential for good things to happen as well: Indulging in new and old hobbies, the next night out with friends, some really good food, a weekend trip to somewhere interesting and so much more. It‘s important to shift perspective from time to time. Keeping a journal for what you‘re grateful for/happy about is one technique to iron out that negativity bias a bit. Note that this is not the be all and end all solution for keeping all depressing thoughts at bay. If it‘s still a problem, please seek professional help.
it‘s also easy to forget that there is also much potential for good things to happen as well: Indulging in new and old hobbies, the next night out with friends, some really good food, a weekend trip to somewhere interesting and so much more.
All of those things pale in comparison to the impending end of the world.
Hate to break it to you bud. The world isn’t ending. It’s going to still be here. Humanity is going to still be here. We’re going to survive the worst of it and continue going. It’ll get real hard but at no point are we looking at the end of the world or of humanity. The stuff that’ll be really bad won’t be any time soon. Probably not in your lifetime. You can go ahead and live your life and have fun.
As far as our civilization is concerned, it is. Global warming will cause desperate wars over rapidly dwindling resources like food and inhabitable land, and desperate people with a nuclear arsenal and nothing to lose will be intensely tempted to launch their nukes. Sooner or later, someone will, and then humanity as we know it will be gone. Only scattered groups of survivors and rich people in bunkers will remain after that.
It’ll get real hard
That’s quite an understatement…
The stuff that’ll be really bad won’t be any time soon. Probably not in your lifetime.
It was 115°F in Portland, Oregon a couple of years ago. That is an absurd, beyond-the-pale temperature for this part of the world. Global warming isn’t some distant threat for future generations to worry about; it’s here and now.
You can go ahead and live your life and have fun.
I’m already not having fun. Cost of living is skyrocketing. I’ll be lucky to still have a roof over my head in a few years. And that’s assuming global warming stops right now and doesn’t make the situation any worse, which is of course a blatantly unrealistic assumption.
No, they are just smaller in scope, as in they are more on a personal level. For me, I value that much more. And not to discredit the concern (we should be), but doomerism has never amounted to anything.
There must be something really wrong then, like no insulation at all, or improper grounding. $350/mo for one bedroom apartment electric bill is insane.
Last time I was in a studio apartment it was like $70/mo. In a 3 bedroom house I’m in right now it’s around $120-150/mo currently.
Idk if it helps but a friend of mine has similar problems with depression because of the world going to shit. (Even though here problems aren’t so severe). I once showed her the Solarpunk genre/Movement and it worked (at least a bit). It let a bit of sunlight and hope in her heart and she has fallen directly in love with it in the same way I did. So maybe it helps a bit looking into it and get a bit of a hope boost.
Can’t really say it’s not that bad so I’ll just say that I hope that your tomorrow is slightly better than your today. Also there are a lot of people that value you as a human and want you in their community. Fascists are just louder (and more dangerous). Sending you love.
Take heart. America, like all developed nations, can’t live without immigrants to counteract its declining birth rate. If you live in fear that all immigrants will be expunged, you can relax.
Meanwhile women have already been targeted and shot at and hit because one of the last elections didn’t go well. Gay and trans people are being erased from places like a Florida and Texas right now.
Turn that anxiety into volunteer hours registering voters, or helping women access critical healthcare.
Try to limit that kind of negative news to once a week. You’ll still be informed but things you can’t change won’t be so much at the center of your mind.
Like this is somehow the fault of sync’s dev. Go ahead folks, the donate to lemmy button is at the top of the page, go ahead and click on it if your morals are so true.
Honestly. This isn’t some centralized platform. Donating at least some of the profits to the people making the app possible seems fitting. While I don’t agree with the API pricing of Reddit, I think it’s fitting that it should cost something at least, if not only to cover wage for the people working on the API
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