bruiseralmighty's comments

Wasn't the 'protest' of overpriced or non-existent public APIs for popular websites really the additional server cost due to endless web scraping? The whole concept of a general strike of subreddits seems like an antiquated way try and strong arm Reddit into complying.

If all these subreddit had instead migrated their users to a hastily built alternate frontend that web scrapped reddit.com, the entire mother site could have been taken down quite effectively.

There's plenty of methods for routing around ip-address blacklisting or region blocking.

Just as there's no law against web scrapping there's no law protecting the labor rights of the moderators who work for free. Overall it just strikes me as a weaker axis of attack.

> All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe [20th century respelling of educate] the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. ̶/̶s̶a̶r̶c̶a̶s̶m̶

Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.

This is true, but the tradeoff is that now your central DB is a bottleneck that is difficult to scale.

Having the applications keep a cached version of the db means that when one of them runs a complex or resource intensive query, it's not affecting everyone else.

My current driver is a pre-2010 vehicle. I really don't want to buy any of these newer cars. Maybe I can import one from Cuba.

> Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited

Although I agree with the Treasury's actions here so far, this is a potential issue. They should instantiate more stringent rules for banks that who cater to business accounts and then raise the cap for insurance on those accounts to a number that makes sense for small businesses across the country.

Too many CEOs and CFOs were allowing their business checking accounts to sit in dangerously uninsured positions. Headliner being Roku with nearly a half a billion dollars sitting in a single checking account with SVB. But plenty of smaller businesses leave ten million plus dollars in their accounts as a course of business as well.

The actual amount those accounts can be insured for needs to be formalized and it should probably be higher than the standard quarter million for consumer accounts as this is way too low for business larger than a half dozen employees.

Its not so much a problem for the government to be metering out private keys on proof of heartbeat, but rather that it will always want to tie them to an actual identity.

Nobody wants to or has enough trust in telecommunications to present their driver's license in order to participate in an online forum. If DoD really could provide a private key to bypass captcha tests then it could be useful, but there is a zero percent chance that it doesn't get tied back to people with real-world consequences almost immediately.

A persistent, costly ID for online communications and commerce is good and well implemented in an OS like Urbit, but relying on DoD maintaining them is too risky given the current laws around government surveilling, policing, and an ascending domestic 'war on terror'.

Play is important to a child's development. Try to refocus and retain that the context of the conversation is about medical interventions not playground games.

It is self-evident that reversing a decision to play freeze tag is orders of magnitude easier than reversing a dental tooth cleaning; a mundane medical procedure.

> Declaring the body to be correct and the mind wrong seems arbitrary...

Hardly, our understanding of the human body is more experimentally valid and much more aesthetically developed than our understanding of the human mind. If there is some kind of 'mismatch' as you say and the body appears well regulated, then the medically responsible move is to defer to it.

There will never be a clear cut definition of health, but most people can innately tell what a well regulated body looks like for their culture.

For instance, most Americans know they're fat or obese and that this is not good for their long term health outlooks and will have detrimental affects on other aspects of their lives. Some may choose to be okay with this, but very few sincerely argue that being fat is 'healthy'. Most will try to lose weight (excess fat) at some point in their lives.

Sometimes we remove body parts that are no longer well functioning within an understood ordering of the body. Inflamed tonsils can be removed, large wisdom teeth pulled, even ovaries can be discarded if they're found to be hosting cancers, but all of these are examples of organ dysfunction. We know what is regular, non-painful, and non-disruptive about the human body because many human beings spend a lot of time in that state and most begin life in that state before transitioning to a disordered state. When that transition happens, medical science seeks an explanation for the dysfunction: how did these tonsils become inflamed?, why do wisdom teeth crowd the mouth?, how did this woman's ovaries come to carry so much cancer?

We look for the cause of a dysfunction in order to treat it.

If instead we remove the well functioning breasts of a 15 year old, or replace a healthy penis because a patient informs us that they abhor their member, or prescribe a blocker for an otherwise well regulated puberty, then we have inverted the entire thrust of centuries of medical understanding. We are taking a healthy body and searching for a malady that we have been told must be there. Once there is no longer a discernment between the regular and the dysfunctional for a human body then an explosion of maladies abounds all begging for treatment.

If enlarged breasts are causing spinal issues then perhaps they should be reduced in order to correct those issues. But why not removal? We remove enlarged tonsils, why not enlarged breasts? Surely the removal of them would also correct any spine issues. In fact, it may even be ethically easier as the doctor and patient do not have to contemplate a correct breast size. But of course it is unlikely the patient or doctor ever considered the wholesale removal of the breasts in these cases because both approached the question with an idea already in mind of what a healthy human body would look like despite they're not having any precise agreement on the topic beforehand.

And in fact, we should question the ethics of both vasectomies and birth control. In 2023 these treatments are mostly, though not entirely, considered mostly in the pursuit of carefree pleasure and fun. Why should either be condoned? We condemn being fat on entirely the same terms. Often Americans are fat because they eat too often and always in excess due to eating feeling good. If one doesn't praise obesity, then what ought they find desirable about self-imposed sterility?

Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.

It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed.

Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.

The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.

The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.

The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.

I agree for one-offs and for simple mappings. If I had to do this problem as part of some personal workflow used only by myself, then I would just use `pandas` or some equivalent for the entire thing and have it live in a jupyter notebook.

However, if the mapping is even somewhat complicated, or this pipeline has to be shared and productized in some way, then it would be better to load the data using some `pandas` like tool, store it on a `tsql` flavored database or datalake, and then exported as a .csv file using a native tool or another `pandas` equivalent again.

Having a pipeline live solely on a notebook that is passed around leaves too much risk for dependency hell and relying on myself to create the csv as needed is too brittle. Either have the pipeline live on its own container that can be started and run as needed by anyone, or dump the relevant data into the datalake and perform all the needed transformations there where the workflow can be stored and used repeatedly.

> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the West.

I think your treating 'globalization' as equivalent to 'American-style liberal democracy' in your last sentence there.

If only a hemisphere of the globe is 'globalized' than clearly the term has become disconnected from any literal meaning at that point. Both democracies and autocracies are increasingly de-globalized at the moment, its a statement about the network and not the nodes on it.

Although not yet directly comparable to the surveillance state that the CCP has created, there are have been highly successful forces within our own government to generate and implement systems of oppression within the United States. There is a definite inclination among regime elites to favor more centralized control of the public.

Just recall efforts to nationalize voting, policing, housing, and the internet. To say nothing of the covert surveillance or the plans to phase out non-digital transactions in order to curtail 'money laundering', or the gentle reminders of the IRS that they will pursue ever smaller transaction amounts. Or even the sword of 'regulation' that hangs over the head of social media companies should they not heed the _"""advice"""_ of executive agency functionaries.

It may be less formalized than China, but there can be no mistaking the current of this undertow.

> attempted assassination

That "Where's Nancy?" line comes from the report of a single police officer on scene, none of the others heard it. We don't have the cam footage or sound from the PD or the Pelosi residence yet. When CNN reported that (and they are the only ones who have done so, everyone else is regurgitating their report), they were trying to make political hay out of the situation.

Paul Pelosi refers to the assailant as 'friend' to the 911 dispatcher. Perhaps that was coded language to protect himself, but we do not know.

We do know that the attack on Paul Pelosi occurred in front of police after they arrived. It is simply too early to know for sure what the motivations or intentions were of either Paul Pelosi or David Depape that morning.

Poster didn't even talk about giving additional time, just faithfully fulfilling their end of the employment contract. It's bare minimum respect to your coworkers and clients/users to care about your work and make it as polished as you can.

A mentality of doing as little as possible makes life harder for the people around you as well. Twitter is low-stakes; no one will die due to some developer slacking off, but if you don't want to participate, then the least you can do is leave.

So proposing a hypothetical. If the only issue here is obligation to the U.S. financial system what if the only on-off ramps to e-coins were cash only?

So as an individual, I convert my cash to e-coins through some e-coin dedicated ATM-like machine. And I can redeem my e-coins for cash at another e-coin-ATM somewhere else (maybe anywhere in the world).

Would coin pools like Tornado Cash then be acceptable? It would not be tied in any way to the credit or banking systems, it takes cash only, and then just a basic utility internet connection. Maintenance for the machines and paying the internet utility would just be a fraction of a percentage fee on each transaction.

Now all e-coins would simply exist as a privacy themed alternative ecosystem to cash.

Since we are not joining the U.S. financial system, these e-coins should not be expected to have any obligations to that system correct?

History did not start in 1913. Income is not an asset, they have been two different things for longer than the United States has existed as a country. Most governments in recorded history have managed to exist without taxing income.

It would in fact be better live in a country with financial privacy where assets form the tax base instead of income. In terms of convincing the public, I think time will do the former and education the later.

This is hyperopic viewpoint.

Because it would only remove the violence in our neighborhood and not the violence 1000s of miles away. This plan is not worth pursuing.

We can grant everything you said that the Silk Road may have only reduced violence in our immediate vicinity. That is still a huge success that should have been continued. Its not a failure for only reducing local violence.

That local win could have grown more globalized acceptance; reducing the niche cartels fill. Even if it had merely encouraged greater local production of illegal drugs that alone could have reduced cartel violence in Mexico.

I guess we differ on what rights are. I am arguing that a right to privacy including financial privacy could be a natural right and its recognition or lack thereof alone by the _current_ tax scheme cannot inform of of its existence or not.

The legality under existing laws has nothing to do with whether the right exists or not if its a natural right.

I also fail to see how one could construct a right to privacy that would include communications but not include financial transactions especially exchanges of value done over a btc-protocol (or one of its descendants) that exchange value with pure speech.

If congress and/or the judiciary was full of privacy enthusiasts, then the tax law would be changed majority be damned.

Hasn't precedent already been set for privacy protocols? I know the government tried to stop encryption by listing it as a munition, but they eventually lost that fight on first amendment grounds. It is hard to argue that code is not a kind of speech or expression and thus it gets some of the highest legal protection possible under U.S. law.

Tornado Cash is just a coin mixer implemented through smart contracts yes? The 'coins' themselves already enjoy some first amendment protection by being built on top of the protected encryption protocols. The smart contract itself is just another communication protocol defined in code. So it seems patently obvious that TC is allowed to exist under U.S. law.

The only remaining question is whether anyone can be allowed to use it. We actually have to get deep into first amendment jurisprudence to answer that question. Generally speaking all speech is permitted but, when it is paired with conduct, the conduct can be regulated by time, place, and manner. This at first appears a simple distinction for us. Users of TC or any e-coin standard are _conducting_ transactions. But this is thorny.

Commerce used to be conducted entirely physically with an exchange of cash. Then it was done with an exchange of electronic funds on a banks balance sheet; essentially a change on two different excel spreadsheets. But the btc-protocol and its derivatives don't function like this. They use a ledger. When we transact in e-coins we don't exchange anything. No digital coins fly from my computer to yours or vice versa. Rather all that happens is a message is sent to a public server which contains enough information to allow that server to determine that we both agreed to send that specific message. The server then updates the ledger and publishes this change to other servers hosting the ledger so there is agreement that we exchanged value.

It's not actually 100% clear that when communicating this way we have conducted anything. Sending encrypted messages like this has been determined to be first amendment protected activity as pure speech. Indeed we wouldn't have an internet today if it weren't. Having a message be encrypted inherently provides privacy and precludes restrictions on a message's content. Even when that message's content includes information to exchange value. Citizen's United also has some precedent over whether speech + conduct regarding money transactions are permitted speech when that speech is political in nature.

This leaves us only with the few recognized non-speech categories with which to regulate pure speech:

> lewd, obscene, or pornographic content; defamatory content; insulting or “fighting words”; expressive content that tends to inflict injury; speech that incites an immediate illegal conduct such as riot or violence; speech that poses an imminent threat to public safety or national security; false or misleading commercial advertising; and perjury.

There are a few categories here that may help us. Inciting immediate illegal conduct and imminent threat to public or national security. To qualify as incitement to illegal or a threat to public safety the speech has to pass the 'clear and present danger' test. This test has two parts:

* first, the speech must impose a threat that a substantive evil might follow

* second, the threat is a real, imminent threat.

This test is extremely hard to meet and just because the TC protocol is may be or even if it is likely to be used for money laundering it will likely never rise to the threshold of this test in a U.S. court. Cases where speech does meet this threat are specific threats or instructions. If TC included specific instructions on how to evade law enforcement then that may qualify.

This leaves only threats to national security as a legal basis. We have to begin by saying that many of the use of national security as a means to restrict the rights of Americans has an extremely checkered past. These were the arguments that bullied journalists under the red scare, interned the Japanese in WWII, attempted to stifle the pentagon papers after the Vietnam War, maintained the patriot act of 2001, lead to secret courts with secret evidence, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, etc. However, the standards for what constitutes a threat to national security have been much degraded in the past two decades. You could probably convince a judge or even SCOTUS that the use of TC by foreign hostile powers like North Korea and its potential to be used as a tool of terrorism from the likes of Iran and ISIS constitute a threat to national security. But arguing this not only degrades your moral character, it is also unlikely to be effective in the long term. We did reinstate habeas corpus, we un-interned the Japanese, and we did publish the Pentagon papers. Hopefully we will also get rid of the Patriot Act in the coming decades. And even if TC was determined to be a threat to national security, that determination would likely one day be reversed as an understanding of the technology and its necessity aged into the judicial system.

Privacy exists even if the government violates it due to their tax schemes. A _right_ to privacy may even exist as a natural human right. If a country decides collectively that this is the case, then what ought to change is the tax policy, not every user service.

We can argue over how easy it would be, but I would presume its possible for a government to switch over to taxing hard assets like land, machines, and shipments at ports rather than income and investment products if we decide those should be shielded by a right to privacy. Most of human history existed without a tax on income or loans (investments), an argument that a right cannot exists because of the present tax structure is like the ultimate status quo warrior-ing.