The US actually has a series of social safety nets. There are massive government programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security which provide real, measurable safety nets to the most vulnerable in society. There are also hundreds of thousands of charities, churches, and non-profit organizations that donate time, money, and resources to assist families going through hard times. There is also the US Military, which serves as a government-backed career path for millions of high-school graduates.
I think you're thinking that the US got ahead through exploiting labor. You missed the biggest piece of it though - the US welcomes (or at least until recently used to welcome) massive amounts of highly-educated immigrants from all over the world, and crucially has built a culture and society where those people can feel "American" fairly quickly in a way that they would never if they moved to Switzerland or France.
Being able to brain-drain the entire world and then smartly arm those people with unlimited capital to build their companies and dreams is the "unfair" American advantage. It isn't unethical, it's just not something European society supports. That, and the 30-year mortgage.
1) It's subsidised through cheap labor. The start-up whose founder live and work in buildings built by undocumented labor. Eat food grown by that labor, and served from food trucks run by undocumented labor. It's innovation subsidised by misery.
2) the brain-drain is unethical because it takes subsidised education of individuals without returning anything in return. Emmigrants should get a bill of the cost of their upbringing. It's really free-loading, especially for a country with such a poor public education system as the US.
We basically have that in the US except the government has a monopoly on the police force. The libertarian police corp would be infinitely better as at least there would be competition for police services.
You need legal systems to enforce trust in societies, not code. Otherwise you'll end up with endless $10 wrench attacks until we all agree to let someone else hold our personal wealth for us in a secure, easy-to-access place. We might call it a bank.
The end state of crypto is always just a nightmarish dystopia. Wealth isn't created by hoarding digital currency, it's created by productivity. People just think they found a shortcut, but it's not the first (or last) time humans will learn this lesson.
I call blockchain an instantiation of Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer running on a hybrid human-machine topology.
We are burning through scarce fuel in amounts sufficient to power a small developed nation in order to reverse engineer... one way hashcodes! Literally that is even less value than turning matter into paperclips.
If gold loses its speculative value, you still have a very heavy, extremely conductive, corrosion resistant, malleable metal with substantial cultural importance.
When crypto collapses, you have literally nothing. It is supported entirely and exclusively by its value to speculators who only buy so that they can resell for profit and never intend to use it.
Well, not literally nothing. You have all that lovely carbon you burned to generate meaningless hashes polluting your biosphere for the next century. That part stays around long after crypto collapses.
The “$10 wrench attack” isn’t an argument against crypto—it’s an argument against human vulnerability.
By that logic, banks don’t work either, since people get kidnapped and forced to drain accounts. The difference is that with crypto, you can design custody systems (multi-sig, social recovery, hardware wallets, decentralized custody) that make such attacks far less effective than just targeting a centralized bank vault or insider.
As for the “end state” being dystopian, history shows centralized finance has already produced dystopias: hyperinflations, banking crises, mass surveillance, de-banking of political opponents, and global inequality enabled by monetary monopolies. Crypto doesn’t claim to magically create productivity—it creates an alternative infrastructure where value can be exchanged without gatekeepers. Productivity and crypto aren’t at odds: blockchains enable new forms of coordination, ownership, and global markets that can expand productive potential.
People now have the option of choosing between institutional trust and cryptographic trust—or even blending them. Dismissing crypto as doomed to dystopia ignores why it exists: because our current systems already fail millions every day.
What they are saying is that we have a system that evolved over time to address real world concerns. You are designing defenses to attacks that may or not be useful, but no one has been able to design past criminals and this is evident because if we could there would be no criminality.
> Dismissing crypto as doomed to dystopia ignores why it exists: because our current systems already fail millions every day.
This only makes sense if crypto solves the problems that current systems fail at. This have not been shown to be the case despite many years of attempts.
Boycotts are different from unsubscribing. You can boycott Chic-fil-a and then one day return, but cutting off monthly revenue streams all at once is a much different dynamic. It takes a lot to get those customers back, especially for a service that already reaches most Americans.
I cancelled on Wednesday night. We probably haven't watched anything on Disney+for two or three weeks; the value was getting lower over time (possibly because we've watched a lot of what we wanted to).
Had it not been for this event, I'd have probably just let the subscription hang around indefinitely (or until some big price increase caused me to reevaluate it), but as you note, it's going to be a struggle to get me back --- not because of the politics involved, but because the politics got me over the "eh, can't be bothered" hump to evaluate the value I was getting and it came up kinda marginal compared to when I first signed up.
Maybe. There are lots of people who subscribe to these streaming services for a month or a season and then cancel, and then sign up again later because there's a new show they want to watch.
""For the first time ever in our country's history, we are making leading-edge 4nm chips on American soil, American workers — on par in yield and quality with Taiwan," Raimondo told Reuters."
Exactly. A Taiwanese company has just started manufacturing leading edge semiconductors in the US. SpaceX, on the other hand uses Taiwanese semiconductors mostly packaged by STMicroelectronics in Europe, although it's announced plans to in-house some of the packaging. Because until recently, it was kind of assumed that buying things from other countries because they did them cheaply and efficiency was sensible business rather than a glaring supply chain weakness or "your continent doesn't innovate, our country is better than yours"...
See also European companies and their choice of launch options...
Check out the tech behind avalanche beacons for some inspiration. They are meant to locate bodies buried deep in snow debris fields within a meter precision. You have to also have a beacon to search for another beacon.
Surprising as it may seem, avalanches are easier to avoid [1] and easier to handle it comes to communication[2]. To an extent of course[3].
[1] I used to be terrified of the concept of an Avalanche. However, at the end of the day you're only exposed to an Avalanche if you choose to be or live next to a large mountain in the winter. It's not even like Hawaiians living next to an active volcano. All you have to do (in terms of living) is to move away during Avalanche season. Hawaiians atleast have the excuse of "it hasn't erupted in 10 years"-maybe. THe other example is if you're a skiing/winter-sport enthusiast (like me). And you simply balance your chance of an avalanche vs the reports and "how much fun it sounds to ski with your friends"
[2] If you find yourself in an avalanche situation, you need/must do your best to "swim" to the top of the avalanche. There is gear that can help you do so outside of beacons or "signal based" notifications. Once you've established all those unfeasible, you're left with the same tools a "sudden earthquake victim" is up against. You still have the upper hand because a simple handheld transceiver (from like Icom, Kenwood or Yaesu) will have 100x the range through snow vs one through liquid water or concrete.
[3] Physically speaking: ice is eventually going to behave like water under enough depth. I think.
We know that the administration ordered the name change for the Gulf of Mexico, and immediately following that order the data layers via USGS broke. Probably because someone (or some organization of geniuses) tried to change it directly without consulting anyone.
Trying to sea-lion your way through this convo after the person replying to you gave a detailed breakdown of the situation is gross. Don't be a sycophant.
See my response above. My intent to look for more info was misread as defense of DOGE. They're a bunch of clowns in a town that has lots of other clowns all entranced to the same person. There are lots of people who could have messed this up as well.
