I found that I experienced something similar on stuff as light as adderal/vyvanse/focalin or cigarettes.
As someone who has taken most of the stuff out there I agree with trabant that they help return exit 0, and think it's proportional to the euphoria the drug produces.
I don't think we need to ban them but we need to be honest with ourselves that we're sticking cattle prods in our brains, and to enjoy them for what they are :)
Perhaps I should have included /s
Prohibition is not the answer, and while programming comparisons may have their place, comparing thoughts to a program is not accurate, especially when discussing psychoactive compounds. Different drugs do vastly different things in the brain.
I must have missed the memo that Prohibition worked after we banned alcohol and weed.
This is a ridiculous overreach. The end game is for people to stop smoking altogether, and while that would be good for American health, this is so unnecessary. It is not the prerogative of our peers to maintain our health.
It is our free right to poison ourselves in the ways we desire. In ten years from now when cigarettes are fully illegal and those "darn ignorant poor people who just can't help themselves because they don't know any better" continue to swell up and die from overeating, are we, the wealthy class, going to dictate what they are allowed to eat?
I wish these were rhetorical questions but as we continue to socialize the cost of medicine we need to be very explicit that we are OK paying for others' bad decisions as part of the package. If not, we should not socialize the cost. Dictating what risky behavior is allowed is the wrong move, because there is no limiting principle.
For example, in a world where we dictate like this, how long until we ban climbing rope because it makes it too easy to climb rock faces, which leads to injury and socialized health-care costs?
This ban is a serious assault on American freedom and a return to puritan morality.
EDIT: some phrasing, may affect the comment below :(
They are banning sale, not use. It seems totally reasonable to say we don’t want anyone to profit from selling highly addictive health damaging products. This is ok. Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
The suggestion that we should restrict healthcare based on the degree to which a person is culpable for their disease is a terrible idea, and impossible to implement.
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
Yes this is my argument.
>The suggestion that we should restrict healthcare based on the degree to which a person is culpable for their disease is a terrible idea, and impossible to implement.
We talked past each other here.
I did not mean that we should remove an individual's access to healthcare due to their habits.
My intent is that if we're OK with spreading out the cost of health care to every citizen, we must also be OK with the fact that some people will cost more due to their habits. If we feel the need to dictate which habits are proper in order to make the costs more lean, maybe we should reconsider spreading out the costs at all, and hold off on socializing medicine.
Socializing the cost of medicine is not a bad idea, but telling people which habits are proper in order to make the costs more lean is a dangerous idea with no limiting principle.
I don't find this very convincing, considering the large downsides for the individual and community. I work in healthcare, so perhaps I have a different perspective to you.
I may not work in healthcare, but I work in health-tech, most of my family worked at a health insurance company for most of their lives, and previous generations were tobacco farmers in KY.
We can build a city on a hill, but what's the point if we can't let loose in the way we want?
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
So when do we ban highly processed foods that are killing far more people every day? Not sure what the difference is aside from it's acceptible to play Mommy to smokers but not the overweight/obese.
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
That is the argument, and I find that it holds up just fine. It's not like cigarettes appeared on the market yesterday, their dangers are well known. Adults should have the ability to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are harmful to themselves.
> Adults should have the ability to make their own decisions
How many people actually really make their own decisions, and have all of the information available to do so? Does the right of those people to take that decision and have their chosen product available cheaply and conveniently outweigh the incremental harm that accrues to everyone else merely tempted by the cheapness and convinence?
Eric Garner was killed because of the policies that created the a huge black market for cigarettes in NYC. the absurdity is they are banning flavor which isn't the harmful element. at the same time they are legalizing marijuana including edibles across this country. in a free country you have to allow people the liberty to make poor choices. putting out health information and reasonable restrictions is as far as the govt should go.
Two parts to this:
- You are highlighting the negative consequences of a ban. There are of course negative consequences to a ban, the black market issue is far from the most important one. But as inidicated in the press release, smoking is a huge health problem causing untold suffering, loss of income, loss of productivity, unnecessary healthcare costs etc etc. These pros and cons of a ban need to be compared in a sane manner.
- The 'Whatabout' argument, whatabout alcohol, marijuana, gambling etc. This is not an argument which can guide us on what to do with tobacco. If the question is, why are we doing something about tobacco but not any other X problems, the basic answer is because tobacco causes a huge burden of problems, and there are only very small upsides to smoking for an individual, and very large downsides for the individual and almost everyone else.
I think there is a lot of research showing that 'putting out health information and reasonable restrictions' doesn't achieve much. If you are agreeing that something rather than nothing should be done, why do something that doesn't really work?
>the basic answer is because tobacco causes a huge burden of problems, and there are only very small upsides to smoking for an individual
Doubtful. The real answer is that public opinion on smoking has turned so strongly against it that these bans won't create enough vocal opposition. The anti-vice authoritarians only stop here because they would be eviscerated if they tried to ban something like alcohol. But we should be careful about emboldening the moral busybodies with national victories.
>The anti-vice authoritarians only stop here because they would be eviscerated if they tried to ban something like alcohol. But we should be careful about emboldening the moral busybodies with national victories.
Bingo. The state is dictating virtuousness for our own good.
I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure it will be the same. The companies that make cigarettes are few and far between and are much more likely to obey government rules to make sure they stay in good graces of the government and can keep selling their other highly profitable products. With alcohol people could make it in stills in their basements and with pot it came from across the border - maybe menthols will too but I'm not sure it's a high value enough product to do so that I would consider it a 1:1 comparison to pot.
I have no idea, but second layer networks have much different properties than a custodial paypal service has.
In terms of USD vs BTC spending - I imagine a lot of people will want to spend USD, and BTC will serve as a store of value and backing asset. USD is possible via stablecoins though.
Stadia doesn't cost anything per month to use. I can see how their horrible wording on the website and insistence on signing you up for the 10$ a month Stadia Pro can make it seem otherwise. I actually signed up and paid for a month because I thought it was necessary. I asked for a refund the next day and they refused me.
You can play it on any device (no chromecast necessary) with basically any input method. I'm a huge fan of the tech and would use it more often while traveling with a laptop if it had more than a handful of games. Or a search bar in the ux.
As usual Google does 80% of the work and gives up when it realizes the last 20% is the real hard stuff.
AOC is closer to a regular ol' populist. Note how she and Cruz were the first to join the ranks of angry people online in lambasting Robinhood before they could explain themselves in the GME debacle.
I think divisibility will get in the way eventually. What happens when over a period of 200 years enough keys are lost to where there are only 10 million Satoshis left in active circulation?
Surely by then people will move over to a new chain, be it a fork of bitcoin or a different one entirely with new features, and history will have to begin anew.
There are billions of ounces of gold out there, and ounces can be subdivided as small as technology will allow without any one else having to agree to a protocol change.
Said every software developer ever, shortly before realizing that an entire ecosystem has been built upon X and any change would have to ripple through what is now our global financial system.
I commented to respond to this and deleted it, since I realized I was making some wrong assumptions. If you saw it, please disregard it.
I'm still not convinced the change doesn't require a hardfork, which would involve switching chains, right? I feel like the possibility of hard forks being necessary hurts bitcoin as a "gold replacement"
As a liberal from a very loudly conservative state who moved to California, I believe that California's classist policies are racist when it comes down to brass tacks - especially its feudal age prop 13. I'm glad Ezra all but said so as well.
Just to muse, when I was younger I assumed people who were very into yoga and its aesthetics were chill people. As I've aged into my late 20s, most of the people I know who practice yoga and its aesthetics have excruciatingly stressful day jobs and horrible anxiety. They are some of the least relaxed people I know.
I now ponder if they're so loud about relaxing because they want it so badly. Anecdata for sure, but maybe there's more to it.
I wonder if progressive America's increasing focus on purity and aesthetics are similar?
After taking a look at 538's rankings of racial disparities in police encounters in Portland/Seatte/San Francisco/Washington DC[1], the contradictory support of BLM in those areas among it's constituents, progressive America's constant refusal to allow housing and absolute insistence on lockdowns in a pandemic that mostly punish non-white families, I worry I'm onto something.
There needs to be a word like postjudice , meaning rational judgement after the fact of long-lived experience. To be sure, induction based on finite data is never proof, but it does reach some Bayesian threshold of likelihood, always accepting the possibility of a Hume-Taleb Black Swan .
For me, yoga is like golf. As activity, it seems to be interesting, challenging, disciplined and worthwhile. There's no easy path to success, and progress takes a lot of dedicated practice. I could imagine enjoying it, and I would be slightly afraid of doing it obsessively, to the detriment of people or activities that deserve my attention.
However, my postjudice is that yogis and golfers are always somewhere on the spectrum between smugness and narcissism. In the case of golf, there also seems to be a subtext of extreme competitiveness, that belies its bucolic environment. My view is reinforced with the ubiquitous attachment of both golf and yoga to Five Star Resorts in places like Oman, Sri Lanka or Bali.
The people who do the activity completely put me off attempting the thing itself.
Somewhere along the line, neo-liberalism got marketed as a left wing ideology (it's not) and has since caused all manner of confusion as to why its expressed values don't materialize out of neo-liberal policies.
The answer is that leftist messaging is just a thin veneer over staunchly capitalistic and globalist politics. As long as people look to "liberal" messaging from corporate America, it seems unlikely to change.
This is confusing to me... I believe that neo-liberalism is fundamentally making decisions according to evidence to benefit our society regardless of tradition / religion / who said it. To me, that openness to solutions puts it opposite of many present-day conservatives who value tradition, existing power structures, historical norms, and therefore makes it a "left" ideology.
In my understanding a neo-liberal government is a fan of unblocking housing development, evidence based decision making w.r.t. pandemic responses, and police encounters. I would personally call governments in many parts of the Bay traditionally conservative as they are trying to protect what it was 50 years ago.
What does Neo-liberalism mean to you?
edits: lots of things, sorry if that confuses any responders...
Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.
It’s amazing that the popular narrative is that the average person will somehow benefit if we switch to a currency that is majority owned by a small handful of early adopters.
I’m not a fan of the current inflationary economic policy, but in no way would a Bitcoin economy be a win for the average person. Early adopters and Bitcoin whales would love it because they hold the vast majority of Bitcoin. They want nothing more than to see everyone else forced to buy it from them at ever increasing prices if they want to join the Bitcoin economy.
The average person loses in this scenario, though.
A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it local maximums, very few people would have hold on to it that long. And you can argue that if they had that kind of strong belief, they should receive some rewards for it.
It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.
> A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it
If the balance of a Bitcoin economy relies on the assumption that certain people have lost their money, something is seriously wrong.
Regardless, a hypothetical Bitcoin economy would require much further buy-in from here, making current holders the early adopters.
> It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.
The VC analogy isn’t good at all. VCs invest to fund the creation of something. What did early Bitcoin investors fund? More mining and more hype?
From another angle: Imagine if PayPal created a new payment system that used shares of PayPal as the currency. Anyone who wants to use the tool must buy some shares of PayPal, because that’s the currency. And oh by the way, most of those shares are owned by PayPal founders and early adopters, who will gladly sell them at a massive gain.
Is Bitcoin supposed to be a speculative investment? Or a stable currency for a new economy? We can’t just pick and choose from either definition as convenient for the argument.
There is no alternative for the monetization of an asset. Gold was the same. Some people believed in it, many didn't, and as it monetized over time those that believed in it early benefited most.
The same is the case with anything valuable that might become money, including the USD, if you consider that it was originally distributed in a manner that was pegged to gold and that gold was monetized in the same way as described above. The idea that you could materialize a money in any other way is unsupported by history.
It was considered worthless at the time so many weren't careful with it. People are going to be a lot more careful when their coins are priced at 44k+.
Bitcoiners bring up inflation as if our only two options for investment are cash under the mattress or buying Bitcoin.
I keep my investments in companies and assets like most other investors. The economic stimulus might devalue the <1% of USD cash I keep around for transactions, but my actual investments will likely benefit from the stimulus. As a bonus, I get to operate in an economy that has been buffered against the effects of COVID.
It’s amazing that Bitcoin proponents only ever want to talk about the USD (or other local currency) value of their Bitcoin, yet they want us to ignore the fact that Bitcoin isn’t the only option for investing cash.
If the underpinnings of an economy accrue value purely to speculators while devaluing (in BTC-relative terms) actual assets and value creation, it has a major incentive problem.
What’s the one and only thing Bitcoiners want you to do with Bitcoin? Buy. That’s it. Any other use, including spending, is actively discouraged.
1) Not a currency, 2) Debateable that it's value at all, and 3) "controlled by a select few people" is a remarkably paranoid/conspiracy way to frame that central banking is a necessary function of government.
1) I can use it to transfer monetary value, which is good enough for me,
2) the market puts it's current value at 45k$,
3) doesn't change the fact that central planning has created a very fragile economy.
That is not a "risk" in the sense of adverse outcomes. Anyone can throw bitcoins in a wallet and forget about them for 10 years. There is no risk of adverse outcome involved in doing so, and people should not be rewarded it.
Just get in at the ground floor and then promote it to everyone you know. They’ll invest, which makes money for you, and they’ll tell friends, who will invest...
I'm not convinced that your average tax paying American will benefit from this - if anything the difficulty in taxing wealth and loss of ability to print/control money granted to Americans by American guns could lead to a noticeable decrease in quality of life for them.
That being said, there is a tremendous demand from people in many countries to defend their wealth from less stable environments that seek to control their ability to freely transact/store wealth.
No idea how it ends, or even if these cryptos deliver on their potential. Any idiot can see there are many roadblocks, and I personally think that Bitcoin's price is wildly manipulated (and most likely a ponzi).
However, as someone who has 2nd hand experience with poorly run govs stripping peoples' wealth for political reasons, I'm very excited by these possibilities in spite of some of the negatives.
For the record I have no Bitcoin, but I do run a node for another crypto I find interesting.
> I’m not a fan of the current inflationary economic policy, but in no way would a Bitcoin economy be a win for the average person.
Don't confuse the cause and effect. If there's massive inflation and bitcoin becomes highly relevant, you're losing if you hold USD, no matter what! The arrogant central bankers are the cause. Nobody is cheering for that. Bitcoin is just a hedge.
If you're afraid of stagflation and you want to park your money in something that holds value, what should you buy? Precious metals, which have been manipulated for decades? Property, in the context of yet another housing bubble?
the early adopters don't control the network. they are just actors on it. Even the richest btc holder can't freeze your wallet or prohibit you from spending/trading/sharing it.
I have come to believe that this part of the value is absolutely enormous. It takes control of the money supply out of government's hands - which on balance, I believe is probably a bad thing in a democratic country.
On the other hand, it's incredibly powerful / valuable if it's allowed to exist, and I think the cat is already out of that bag.
That is a popular narrative partially owing to some very ugly zombie tropes and the archaic understanding of wealth as shinies to be grabbed - but it simply isn't true. We had it already with various (bi)metallic standards and they had documented worse problems.
Fiat currency has yet to cause wars of conquest to prevent deflationary lock up that proceeded to crash the economy through inflation after causing untold personal suffering /on success/. The maligned federal reserve already takes care of the "try to hyperinflate our ways directly out of problems to get reelected".
If anything it could have the more "neutral" role of financial network independence but it still suffers the flaw of interchange chokepoint control putting them back to square one.
> It takes control of the money supply out of government's hands - which on balance, I believe is probably a bad thing in a democratic country.
Of course, no country, democratic or otherwise, will allow this to happen. The idea that you can have monetary policy exist outside of government control is a bit ludicrous. Government does still control the guns after all, and they can make anything they want illegal, as the US has done with gold in the past.
Taking neither side, but just thinking of my parents - neither of who are anything 'tech' or anything 'finance'. Completely normal in most regards.
For them, someone actively controlling the supply of money is probably a good thing. Anything they have is pretty safe in a bank and somewhat covered by the government. Their taxes pay for police, sewage, the bins to be taken away, their roads to be repaired.
I love the idea that people are seeking to do incredible things in the crypto space, but all too often it seems to be lumped in with people's desire to transfer money across borders (again, useless for the everyperson) or avoid taxes - which if we all did would probably be a big negative. Assuming the government didn't step in pretty quickly, because what government wants to lose control?
As soon as you start talking about cryptocurrency with oversight to protect my mum and dad, where people aren't just trying to get rich quickly and make sure taxes are paid - people seem to dial out pretty quickly.
> As soon as you start talking about cryptocurrency with oversight to protect my mum and dad, where people aren't just trying to get rich quickly and make sure taxes are paid - people seem to dial out pretty quickly.
There is literally no role for the key feature of blockchain - decentralised ledger, proof of work-backed transactions - in this case. You might as well use a trusted, regulated party with a database. You know, like Visa do.
The "incredible things" are also pointless things. That also burn energy like there's no tomorrow. Double meaning intended.
I believe the value of cryptocurrency is to neuter governments' abilities to inflate or devalue currency with the push of a button, and to improve our ability to transact freely with one another.
I absolutely agree with you that money needs limitations, such as hard rules on supply increases. A money supply that is uncontrolled in such a way that you can make more or less whenever you personally feel like it regardless of the other users' intentions won't be useful for very long.
I personally think of cryptocurrency like a constitution but for money - whereas before whoever had the biggest guns could decree How It Is Now, the guns will be powerless to what is written down. In this way, it removes power of a select few to control the supply of money for their benefit.
I don't know how this ends. Is it a net negative to the human experience? Anarchy? The select few who got into bitcoin early wielding all the power now? Taxation falling to the wayside and a deterioration of quality of life? Each of these is somewhat possible, but as someone who has 2nd hand experience of what a country can do when it has free reign to issue whole new currencies and remove old ones or devalue the existing one into oblivion, I don't really care.
I think that's a great goal to have (I'm pro anarchy and for the dismantlement of all governments) but I don't like spending all this energy just for it.
Besides, government will stop all of this before we get to anarchy, if we want anarchy (or even moving in that direction, instead of the opposite as we're doing now) we need to get there politically.
Any government can say at any time: "Everyone holding cryptocurrency is a terrorist and will be persecuted" and use their monopoly on violence to enforce it.
Incidentally, that's the reason I never invested in BTC (and missed out on this generation inequality wealth transfer).
> I believe the value of cryptocurrency is to neuter governments' abilities to inflate or devalue currency with the push of a button
Central banking is necessary function of government. If government saw their ability to do it being actually "neutered" then it would get shut right down.
I am not saying that it can't be mismanaged by a state, but you do not have anything better than state fiat money.
> personally think of cryptocurrency like a constitution but for money
>I am not saying that it can't be mismanaged by a state, but you do not have anything better than state fiat money.
I agree with this! At the moment I don't see many things that are better yet. I hope to see an obvious winner someday.
EDIT: For the record, I hold no Bitcoin. While it has a lot of potential value in creating Freedom To Transact, I'm not convinced the current price per unit is anything but a Pump and Dump. If Bitcoin is a Constitution of Money, it's a pretty fucked up one.
As someone who has taken most of the stuff out there I agree with trabant that they help return exit 0, and think it's proportional to the euphoria the drug produces.
I don't think we need to ban them but we need to be honest with ourselves that we're sticking cattle prods in our brains, and to enjoy them for what they are :)