Vice has a good video on drug dealers lining up to use a Bitcoin ATM every day somewhere in an American ghetto. Bitcoin is 100% about drug dealing, gambling, and tax avoidance.
You would have to be a total moron to go through all the hoops to use it otherwise. Its kinda like running desktop linux in that way.
A lot of Bitcoin volume is criminal in nature. What is contested is that a large fraction of criminal fund flows go through Bitcoin.
For the same reasons it sucks for individuals (volatile, slow, expensive, publicly recorded, difficult to spend and difficult to convert), it sucks for criminals.
In most countries there are no hoops. In most places in Europe it's harder go get a bank account than to get bitcoin. Does that mean only morons go through all the hoops of obtaining bank accounts?
With any WSJ article, just open twitter and copy&paste the title. Any link to WSJ from twitter will get around the paywall -- even tweets from the official WSJ twitter account.
Great if you like the provider's content. Quite bad if you like any content not owned by one of the few Internet providers, who can't offer such freebies.
Everyone agrees we are moving towards a world of platforms. Each big platform holder will buy or ally with an isp and smaller content owners will pay 30% rev to use those platforms, just like today with google play store, app store, steam (for games), etc. thats reality, why be a luddite about it?
How is it somewhat plasubile? Visual differences in a mushroom's biology mean nothing. The fact that mushrooms have the same DNA + RNA structure as all the rest of Earthly life is a dead giveaway that this hypothesis is nonsense.
>If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not?
Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents / divorced / never married
I wouldn't have thought this until I had kids, who "forced" me to greatly expand my social milieu beyond my fellow geeks and musicians.
Our kids got involved in some activities (e.g., violin lessons) that are almost exclusively the domain of the upper middle class. I remember attending a large group recital with maybe 100 kids, and virtually none of them were obese.
I have young kids. If violin lessons are apparently so expensive as to require you to be a millionaire (not merely, say, a six-figure-earner), what is a class or event I can go to to see all the poor, obese kids that I haven’t come across yet? I don’t live in a frou frou part of my town. It seems more likely to me that cultural forces are at play.
> the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today.
That is one narrative - the stepford wife vs the welfare mom, the soylent drinking tech worker vs the beer drinking factory worker. True to some extent.
But it was Taleb in Antifragile that noted in a room full of banking exec and policy guys, only the wait staff will exude physical dignity. I think you can extend that observation further and see the lower working class (like waiters, personal trainers) opening up an appearance advantage on the upper intellectual class (lab rats and office workaholics). Not so for the true elite though - vc's, celeb's, etc.
To generalize: The comfortable and sedentary elite have an advantage of appearance over the comfortable and sedentary poor. But being poor and trying to escape it is a more healthy lifestyle than to be upper middle class and try to escape into the elite.
I was in Turkey during that time, it was noy better for the bast majority of people. Turkey had a per capita gdp <$3k and i vividly recall seeing shoeless people even in the wealthiest areas of Istanbul. Totally changed today, Turkey is richer (per capita) than many EU member states.
The funny thing is, many people there believe that Turkey is one of the most advanced economies. The propaganda machine is amazingly successful. The person you are replying to has access to all the information to see how wrong those arguments are, yet simply ignores everything. I said funny but I mean more like a tragicomedy.
The majority of jailed journalist are there under anti terrorn laws regarding the PKK. While its not something I support, you have to compare today’s Turkey with yesterday’s Turkey and not with today’s Sweden.
It was a crime to even claim to be Kurdish in the past. Elected mayors were jailed simply for saying they were ethnic kurds. Wearing a headscarf was illegal in schools, courts, etc. Even an AKP president’s wife was stopped from wearing a headacarf in a public hospital while visiting a wounded soldier!
In a way, I guess its a sign of Turkey and AKP’s success that we are now being held to European standards. There are 100 journalists in jail currently. Previous adminsitrations would have simply sent the government deatb squad to their doors and ended the matter rather more swiftly rather than subject itself to such Western critism over public statistics.
In a way, I guess its a sign of Turkey and AKP’s success that we are now being held to European standards.
As far as numbers of imprisoned journalists are concerned, Chinese standards would be an improvement. 150 journalists[1] doesn't sound like that much, until you realize that's something like half the global number...
Hey, why don't you try to support any terrorist group in your country? I am not talking about some pseudo-terror groups, talking about real ones, like PKK. The amount of civilians they killed might constitute a whole country.
The scope isn't quite the same, but Germany went through a series of left-wing terrorist attacks in the 70s.
There's a (German) article[1] by Günther Nollau, former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, that might be of interest. The title translates to something like Sympathy alone is no criminal offence.
I have only cursorily followed what has been happening in Turkey, but newspapers getting shut down, rulings by the constitutional court getting ignored and a president who unironically cited Nazi Germany as inspiration for a functioning presidential system raise quite a few alarm bells...
This is not 1977 unfortunately. Try ISIS in Germany or in social media, if you are confident enough about the division between sympathizer and supporter.
What GDP/capita band was turkey at before Erdogan? Answer: $3k (google it yourself)
Also, why do you say ‘stuck’? Growth is still rapid despite ~4mil refugees, a war next door, and a difficult geopolitical environment. Europe collectivel lost their shit over a million refugees!
Banning wikipedia was stupid, but hardly matters to anyone with 3 neurons to rub together. Even free browser-extension class VPNs are enough to get around that ban (and the bans on porn sites as well)
I am sure many top tier developets and other talent have left Turkey, but this is a common problem across the middle class world. Look at tiny, free Estonia or other EU countries near Turkey. They are worse off already and are de-populating rapidly (bulgaria, romania, etc)
Turkey is far from perfect, but I continue to support AKP because they continue to deliver. The main opposition (CHP) are members of the Socialist Internationale and are unreformed old leftists. They ran the country for most of its Republican history and didnt deliver anything for the vast majority of Turks. We didnt get economic growth or freedom. Just google around for the level of Kurdish support for Erdogan, i think many on this site would be surprised.
Normally I don't bother presenting arguments to AKP supporters, but you cannot make statements based on GDP per capita growth without actually comparing the changes in income inequality, purchasing power parity (both inflation and exchange rate), and increased taxation with little government investment in return over public infrastructure. In addition to that, the opportunity costs and potential growth levels are also very relevant here.
Looking at Turkey in its own bubble might look great to you, but try to do so by also taking into consideration all that is not so rosy. You can ignore rampant corruption by showing off with the figures that go up, but you cannot possibly ignore the unsustainability thereof.
Finally, Turkey has had a turbulent past, even recently so. Attributing the bad times only to the parties in charge during those periods is an ignorant thing to do. AKP and Erdoğan got very lucky with the timing, and I strongly believe that any other party could have done a similar, and even better, job in terms of economic indicators.
But are cars more valuable than piles of metal, plus other factors like wages, advertising, factory/office leases, etc. We have a word for this -- net profit.
You would have to be a total moron to go through all the hoops to use it otherwise. Its kinda like running desktop linux in that way.