sail's comments

Can you say a bit more about this? How does a quantity of one affect supply so much?

Historically technology has been more successful in affecting political change.

> Wealth will always equal opportunity and influence to some extent, so inequality will always be a bad thing to some extent.

Perhaps, but we may all be surprised to how little extent. Instead of giving up, it's worth giving a better world a try.

I can't think of a bigger complement to a writer than to explain something clearly and yet that somehow turn into a controversy.

Because if the writing is clear, which in this case it is, it means the problem is the audience. It means the writer found a genuinely confusing and probably undervalued topic.

Good job, pg.

Mike, can you imagine any way to run a cryptocurrency so that growth doesn't threaten decentralization?

Could a cryptocurrency not be controlled by those who can afford to spend the most in CPU power (like governments)?

Could consensus occur by human power?

Could one design against this?

This may be naive but why can't Bitcoin fork? Forks historically produced better results.

Why would switching to a cryptocurrency that is better designed be a bad thing?

First: "Sweden, for instance, has a higher startup rate than America, and less income inequality — as do a number of other countries."

To the extend it can be measured, the metric that matters isn't the number of startups ("employer enterprise birth rate" in the Sweden link). It's the net value generated by them.

Second: "Would anyone choose the second world?"

Yes, startup founders would. Because they can fix poverty with the value their startup generated.

What stood out for me:

My PhD advisor never seemed to care particularly about publishing papers; rather, he wanted to move the needle for the field, and he did (multiple times).

Racking up publications is fine, but if you want to have impact on the real world, there's a lot more you can do.

This is inspiring Steve.

Did you try different price points? Do you have data to share about this?

Did you have a full-time job while you were building it?

You are discounting a strong trend: expensive products become commodities.

Plus there are degrees of richness. It's easy to name examples where rich people have been trusting their personal information to faceless entities for years.

> to match their other unreasonable status enhancing purchases

You don't know the purchases of the audience you are referring to.

How to live.

A central place with 10-sentence (or less) summaries from the most important books. So I could read everything from this one place in 1 month and bootstrap myself as a human.

e.g. like Derek Sivers's book notes from https://sivers.org/book but shorter and denser.

This seems to have started by Derek Sivers:

https://sivers.org/nowff

> The 140 character limit is long past its purpose

What was its purpose and why is it long past it?

While reading, I take a photo of a sentence I like. Later, I look at the photo and write down the part I liked: writing seems to ingrain the conclusion in my mind.

Can you imagine yourself ever wanting anything more?

You put a lot of effort into this. What makes you believe it's important to consciously remember things we learn? Maybe the knowledge is supposed to seep into our bones.

Maybe it's enough to record, find something when we need it, but not necessarily remember it. What proof do you have that remembering everything doesn't come at a cost?

Paper: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darya_Zabelina/publicat...