Are you familiar with my meme?
What’s happened?
Me:
nostr: Oh you just missed Jeff Bezos.
Me: 
I'm asking because I keep running into signup walls like this and it's not good for my mental health
The internet wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Somewhere along the line it turned into corponet, a kind of sales pipeline hell.
Also… As a Brit I can buy full worldwide travellers medical insurance that includes USA, even includes cancer treatment and terminal prognosis and it costs about £200 / year.
But a US citizen in the wrong state is denied care, because the doctor isn’t licensed?
Huh?
There is no scenario where you mandate vaccines, because a good vaccine protects the recipient.
With a good vaccine, the people who choose to get that protection are removed from the problem, they are literally immune to the problem and thus have no basis to mandate others to do anything.
A bad vaccine, one that doesn’t protect the recipient… why would you mandate that? What does that achieve?
Sam Harris is trapped in a paradox and doesn’t seem to recognise his broken train of thought. Also, he looks ill, is he OK?
His mental model of the issue is just plain wrong. I think he might be dumb? The bit he seems to fail so hard on…
if his kids are vaccinated in this hypothetical scenario with the hypothetical super safe, super effective vaccine… then QED… he believes they are perfectly safe, no?
If the vaccine works as he described, then his kids can safely inhale the airborne virus and be fine. The prevalence of the virus is irrelevant… the prevalence of sick infectious people is irrelevant… unless of course, the vaccine doesn’t actually work.
His position is paradoxical. It’s just wrong.
Yeah, I’m not sure there is much design or forethought to it?
I think people just flock through ideas and beliefs in this manner, rather like murmurations of starlings. No single bird decided that the flock will turn left, its more an expression of a complex system.
For humans the truth has nothing to do with it at all, it’s more a case of behaving predictably to signal trust patterns and loyalty during resource allocation. It’s a sort of compression algorithm for the individual to act in concert with many other individuals in order to create a mutually advantageous structure of some kind.
People fall into these patterns merely by following self interest, not because they followed any instruction. But yes, they can often be severely injurious to people outside of it.
Passwords and the entire auth stack are atrocious.
How many web services does the average person have?
I think this has been known for some time.
Is alarmism real? Yes.
But is human induced climate change real? Also yes.
[Now fight your instinctive (media trained) reaction to those two stated opinions and read on…]
It’s just that climate change is a much smaller and less consequential problem than people have come to believe.
Some people have actually chosen to not have children, because they believe the planet will be uninhabitable by 2150. This kind of stuff is absurd in the extreme.
Cancer is 100 times larger problem than climate change. Cancer kills 1 in 6 people before they reach old age. People you love will die prematurely because of cancer. Yet the climate change agenda gets 50x as much funding globally, as cancer research.
This is a grotesque misallocation of capital, that results in 1.2 billion unnecessary deaths (1 in 6 people!).
You can get large parts of society to believe outlandish things, and once people publicly advocate an opinion they usually get locked in by embarrassment and consistency bias.
Even if it means taking the research funding to save a billion people and spending it on literal King Canute projects.
Yeah I would agree it’s contentious. I think there was a tonne of market speculation in China, so the government there was keen to pour cold water on it quickly, which they have.
I would say it’s very unlikely that LK-99 wins any prizes. I also think the theories put forward by the original authors wont go anywhere, but some of the response papers that churned up a lot of new hypotheses are pretty valuable so there’s actually is a chunk of new stuff to investigate.
Stepping back the timeline suggests something can pop out at any time, which is why it’s worth monitoring the SC space and it might actually be prudent to act like room temp superconductors already exist. I expect to see it in my lifetime. 
What if negative headlines are the thing that drives us to improve stuff?
A whole bunch of important metrics have never been better (less violence, less famine, less disease, less illiteracy, less poverty)…
Meanwhile the press have never been more doomer…
… and bizarrely improvement has never been faster.
🤔
Humans are weird.
nostr is much simpler than bitcoin.
I’m not sure many of these NIP’s are required, seems like people trying to twist nostr to do many things outside the original scope.
You could declare nostr complete.
Pensions are a disaster.
Too much bad system design is enshrined in legal and tax codes.
Too many people ignorant of the rules of the very game they are playing.
Everyone should leave school with a full understanding of the tax code, including how businesses are taxed.
It would result in vastly more entrepreneurialism. People don’t understand that a biz only pays tax on profit, whereas an individual pays tax on their entire revenue.
You could encrypt your notes and sell keys. I’m sure Apple would love that.
Would be nice if you could just save draft notes to work on them later. Maybe store a bunch of notes, or even schedule them being posted.
Add some good tools for improving content quality.
“I can’t self-censor my stuff on this censorship resistant thing… a disaster.”
First time on the internet?
