postozoan's comments

postozoan | 8 years ago | on: A day without JavaScript

And the vast majority of those, if they want to use netflix, just whitelist it anyway. The amount of revenue lost must be tiny compared to the costs.

postozoan | 8 years ago | on: A day without JavaScript

You also don't see car manufacturers change their designs so that they will accommodate drivers who've decided to remove their steering wheel, nor do car manufacturers design their cars for some possible future world without gasoline.

postozoan | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: A Browser-based Blockchain

I like how it starts you up instantly and how simple mining, helping the network and transactions seem to be. Really well done. I found a quick block too and sending/receiving transactions and getting the confirmations seems nice and fast. As a user it makes me pretty happy.

However, turning your coins 'permanent' somehow doesn't seem nearly as intuitive. I have no real idea how these coins are now tied to me. I found my block on chrome, and launching the site in incognito mode / firefox doesn't show the funds in my wallet. This would make me worry about deleting my browser history/cookies/etc and I'd have no idea how to access these coins on another computer. How do I go about making these coins tied to me beyond some form of browser storage, and why isn't that process explained somewhere? Right now it feels like a mild breeze might erase my wallet and the coins in it. Is this something that'll be dealt with in the future?

postozoan | 8 years ago | on: Bringing back the Somali shilling

Besides externalized costs, which is gigantic issue that is not easy to solve. These problems are also clear market failures:

Large scale goals with large public benefits but which come at high costs will not be achieved without high level cooperation. For every individual market participant, the public education system, the public highway system, the public energy system, etc. have costs far exceeding their means. Yet every market participant benefits enough that they are happy they exist. The level of cooperation needed requires organization at the scale of at least local government.

Dealing with external factors, such as other nations -especially if they're hostile- or natural threats. Individual market participants can not muster armies (unless they are at the scale of governments), cant bargain with foreign governments on equal terms and will not provide (preventive) care for disasters/diseasese/etc. Would microsoft or walmart vaccinate everyone?

postozoan | 9 years ago | on: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined

Yeah, the slow and steady rise of stock prices across the board is in large part just an effect of increased money supply. Sure, lifting along with that passively is cheap and reliable way to make money. But since these types of passive investments care little about how efficiently the beneficiaries make use of these investments, there's the danger that inefficient companies end up with too much capital.

If that happens, you end up with resources such as labor being wasted. The efficient usage of the available resources is of course a much better indicator for the quality of the economy than the rise of stock prices.

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