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allen
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hopescrolling webšŸ°

probably would have been better to keep using Latin and, in doing so, not set the groundwork for local dialects and their cultural significance to go extinct/merge.

I mean the fact you can call it ā€œBrazilā€ like it’s still one thing shows it’s nowhere near far enough.

dude I’m way beyond ā€œnorth and southā€. we’re talking Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, Naples, Rome/Papal States, Marche, Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Venice, Genoa, Lombardy, Piedmont … maybe even finer distinctions. these can be kingdoms if necessary/desired, I don’t really care.

I’m an Italian disunification maximalist. AMA.

I swear to god, if you understand the difference between flows and stocks, you are grasp finance better than 90% of the industry’s ā€œprofessionalsā€ …

I find the most charitable interpretation that assumes good faith is they are test nets for potential future bitcoin features and apps, whose technical contributors are unwittingly being milked by fraudsters.

a surprisingly large proportion of the technical bitcoin founders I speak to have only very slight variations of essentially the same story: ā€œI got into eth first, played around, had a great idea, tried to implement it, couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, in the meantime learned more about economics, finance, energy, and distributed systemsā€ (i.e. the problems bitcoin actually solves), eventually saw the light, and here I am.ā€

mrs allen on an idea I have for a talk:

ā€œgive it in Riga, that will really slapā€

it’s not great but it’s good, very funny, and worth knowing all the references that have seeped into popular culture.

you can always tell when people haven’t read Snow Crash because they say ā€œthe Metaverseā€ unironically.

oh shit, it’s not both nostrils is it?!?

did you take that picture upside down? or stay upright but flip the camera? I has confuse.

please can every future version just add a digit of pi? that way you are still incrementing but also it stays funny forever.

Replying to Avatar Mike Brock

I don’t think you can rely on the notion that some conception of normative ethics can be expected to represent some sort of center of gravity, which pulls individual behavior, and by extension, collective behavior towards functional outcomes that more closely align with that under their own weight.

This is actually at the middle of my objections to many arguments people make about the ā€œinevitabilityā€ of certain futures: be it hyperbitcoinization, or the belief we will regress towards something more like an anarcho-capitalist future, merely because of some functional behavioralist weight that these supposedly universalist conceptions of ethics supposedly tend towards. Because those systems are somehow more "self-consistent" in terms of their ethical constructions (a point I object to, but will not do so here), or that the a priori arguments around the superior incentives in some conception of economics will wash away the hypocrisy.

I believe these sorts of arguments are fanciful thinking, and indirectly advocate for depoliticization. That we don't have to engage in political power games to advance our interests. Instead, we can simply wait for the hypocrisies and self-contradictions of the current systems of power to play out, and can expect future outcomes to "naturally" come into alignment with some notion of universal ethics and purer notions of economic incentives.

I just don't buy that. I know it makes me feel like a party pooper to say that. But I don't think the completely a priori arguments that get made in that direction seem reasonable against what I understand about human nature (particularly as it pertains to group dynamics), collective action problems (like classic tragedy of the commons issues), or empirical counterexamples from history itself.

I try to push a pro-bitcoin narrative through the lens of accepting these as problems. Rather than assuming these problems just "go away" when everything comes out in the wash.

I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not saying this *will* happen for xyz nonsense axiomatic reason. I’m saying that, as an individual making decisions, you should act as if everybody *can* ā€œlower their time preference through learned self-restraint,ā€ even if that may not be true.

in fact I’d go further and say that successful group dynamics and the resolution of collective action problems to a large extent depends on it: people only cooperate and restrain from negative-sum violence at all when there is reason to believe that meaningful trust can create a positive-sum outcome. if you don’t believe you will be treated fairly because you are just a high-time preference idiot/idler/whatever then you won’t develop or reciprocate any trust. hence for those who are low-time preference clever/industrious/whatever, the moral thing to do is to act as if this (probably to some extent true) underlying distribution is actually false.

I’d even go as far as to say that civilisation depends on the self-fulfilling inertia of this choice continuing to be made by a majority, if not a supermajority.