Good! We need to hold these companies accountable. Around the mid 2010s they realized that it’s more profitable to have addicts instead of users. Casinos, bars, and cigarette sellers are forbidden from selling to children. These addictive platforms should be subject to similar limitations

Since taking office Dec. 10, Milei devalued the peso 54% and eliminated price controls on hundreds of everyday consumer products, reversing the policies imposed by former Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who ran against him for president. The libertarian leader also halted runaway money-printing that had flared up during the presidential campaign.

It seems like this guy is making the right decisions here. Seems like he’s ripping off the bandaid for a problem that previous administrations had created. We’ll see if he can right the ship.

I think his rationale is to take away monetary control from future administrations, which I think is a laudable goal. Argentina should be the richest country in South America, but its people keep getting robbed by the printing press. I wonder if going to a gold standard (or if they feel like rolling the dice, a Bitcoin standard) would be a better option.

(Cue the anti-crypto arguments because I mentioned Bitcoin)

Yup! EVs and renewables are broadly good things. Just wanted to give some added perspective :)

Just wanted to add some perspective. There’s a narrative lately that China is a champion of the green movement, which is absurd

It’s worth noting that this is not being done for environmental reasons (more half of all coal pollution comes from China), but for strategic reasons as China has limited access to oil near it’s borders.

This is not worth our time to keep arguing. I hope you have a nice day! :)

Obviously if the state doesn’t enforce the titles they’re useless. Sure if the president of a corrupt country decided he wants your house he’s gonna get it. But a DLT would prevent lower level corruption that relies on the benefit of the doubt.

If a corrupt official uses their access to change the PDF title of your house to be in his name, he could take that to court to take your house from you. A ledger would prevent that change from happening, or at least leave a permanent record of the change

Tor is not built in

Source? I’ve used Tor with Brave

AFAIK if you don’t trust the server and want to know exactly what code was run by it, there are only two options: a smart contract blockchain, or ZK Proofs (which came out of blockchain research)

It’s a social technology. It allows outsiders to validate that the election tally code was run correctly. Elections are run every day on the Ethereum blockchain often that has financial implications for the voters. It doesn’t mean they never get hacked, but it certainly gives the users more visibility and trust in their vote than a centralized black box

I don’t think running an election on a centralized database is a great idea

We agree something! :)

I think you should re-evaluate your thinking on the second part. I know it’s popular to bash on blockchains here, but blockchain isn’t all ponzi schemes and libertatians, just like the internet isn’t all phishing emails and troll farms

The research wing of the blockchain world is very interesting, at least from a nerdy, theoretical perspective

Not a fair comparison. Bank databases have been running since the 70s on code that has barely changed in that time. They’ve been battle tested for decades, so it’s unlikely a new exploit is going to be easy to find.

On the other hand, if you wanted to run an election on a centralized database, think about what that means. All the votes need to go to 1 server somewhere, which will tell us all who won the election. A server that is run by an IT team who will have root access and could be phished, or bribed, or threatened. A server that only gets a real-world test once every few years.

Users have no idea if their vote is in the database, if it’s correct, if it got counted in the final vote or not.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust the current crop of DLT tech more than the pen and paper method, but at least it’s more transparent than a centralized system

There are lots of knee-jerk reactions because people saw the word “blockchain” in the title. It’s as intellectually lazy as the shills who refuse to criticize the crypto industry for its shady parts

This just sounds like a decentralized Slack, with a blockchain to ensure all nodes have the same data. The details are sparse, but this sounds like a proof of authority system to achieve consensus between authorized nodes in the network. No cryptocurrency involved. It’s just using blockchain as a consensus algorithm between decentralized nodes(which is what it was designed for).

It doesn’t say, but since their target demo seems to be enterprises, my guess is that the idea would be companies run their own node in the network, which would allow a high degree of security and be interoperable with other enterprises.

“But you could use a federated system…”

I’m all for the growth of the fediverse, but it still has many problems. If you’re running a large enterprise that needs a guarantee that all your messages are synced, in the right order, and nothing has been removed later, a proof-of-authority blockchain is a better system than something federated

A well financed actor would find it much easier to hack a centralized database than to hack a modern blockchain

Someone gains access to your private key and you just… don’t own your house anymore?

Under the current system you don’t even have a private key. In some countries it’s fairly common for someone to lose their home because someone bribed the official to change the title records.

I think that key management is blockchain’s Achilles Heel, but there are some interesting potential solutions

Yeah this article is not very convincing

Brave is great! No ads, Tor built in, and can install Chrome extensions. I don’t use their crypto wallet and it’s never bothered me

This is less about malicious people and more about tragedy of the commons. Most people don’t want to see the environment destroyed, but are acting under their own incentives. If I cut down a tree it seems to makes a negligible different to the forest and my family gets to be warm that night. But if a million of us do it the forest is gone.

Multiply that by several generations and increasing power due to technology and we’re here now, still under the same incentives

This is the opinion of most macro economists today, but it’s not universally accepted. Macro-economics is not nearly as scientific as micro-economics, and some people will say that its models are just about who can tell the most convincing story (or the story that’s the most convenient for those in power)

There are some people who point out that things like electronics have been undergoing rapid deflation for decades and this has not caused people to stop purchasing them. The economy is a chaotic system and anyone who claims to be able to predict it’s outcomes is selling something

It’s strange to me that for a lot of people pro-natalism equals pro-capitalism. These are not opposites, in fact hyper-capitalism is likely a contributing factor to declining birth rates

It is possible to hold a left wing position and be concerned about the affects of declining population on our political stability

I don’t think it’s naive to think that there is an existential risk from AI. Yes, LLMs are not sentient and I don’t think ChatGPT is Skynet, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if we could create an entity that is generally intelligent, has goals, and is orders of magnitude smarter than humans that is cannot be controlled. And that poses a risk if its interests come into conflict with ours

Global mega-corps are already a kind of AI. They’re generally intelligent actors that find creative solutions to problems and work to advance their own interests, often at the expense of humanity, despite attempts to reign them in. A true AGI might be like a super-powered corporation, that can have it’s big decision meetings every second instead of once a week

However, I am also concerned with global regulation of this stuff because if state actors are the only ones allowed to have AI, that could get dystopian very quickly as well so… 🤷‍♂️