> the most oppressive cultures have highest number of women in tech
Like the US in the 1950s.
It's not a matter of interest, it's that it has actually been the case that women are locked out of many high paying prestigious jobs, and software is/was the best available, where it isn't so prestigious.
There was a time when women simply could not get an engineering degree. And so, someone might study math, and end up as a programmer whose job title was "engineering assistant" to a male engineer.
Should check out the currency by Damien hirst. He made a “real” piece of art and a correspondent nft. One of which has to be destroyed at a certain time. I believe most will destroy the physical version. https://www.heni.com/
Shocking to see how out of touch hacker news is with crypto. I guess not much has changed since coinbase was launched on HN and faced a bunch of naysayers then also.
Shocking how every criticism of crypto is met with "you're out of touch" or "you're close minded" while the actual technical and social issues get overlooked.
Shocking to see how most criticism is just hand waving “technical and social issues” without citing any details.
And when they do those “issues” are almost all out of date and ignore current technology. Crypto uses too much energy ignores Ethereum converting to PoS in six months. Crypto has no practical use ignores $150 billion in decentralized finance applications today. Crypto is too slow and expensive to transfer ignores super high capacity L2s and rollups that are processing tens of billions in transactions today with essentially zero costs.
> Crypto uses too much energy ignores Ethereum converting to PoS in six months
If it doesn't get delayed yet again. And if it works. Also, right now it's BTC the one with the biggest market cap and name recognition, and I don't think that one is going to change anytime soon.
> Crypto has no practical use ignores $150 billion in decentralized finance applications today
Can I get a loan without 100%+ collateral yet?
> Crypto is too slow and expensive to transfer ignores super high capacity L2s
Tens of billions? Zero costs? Where is that?
You also forget the following issues:
- Irreversible transactions mean that scams, bugs and fraud are much more difficult to fight and revert. If someone steals my card I can cancel it and be safe. What if I lose my crypto wallet?
- DeFi does not actually bring anything new to the table other than "decentralized". It will still have to deal with all the problems of financing and loans, from scratch. Default risk, collection of collateral, predatory loans...
- The current economic system doesn't work too well with deflationary currency.
- Volatility. As long as crypto is more of an investment than a currency, people will prefer to have their actual money in something more stable. And as long as supply is limited, speculation will always be present.
- A big one: governments! It's pretty naive to think that governments are just going to give up monetary policy to an algorithm and a bunch of nodes in the blockchain.
- The main new thing from the blockchain is decentralization and authenticated record of transactions. Claiming that it's going to solve problem that have nothing to do with those two features is wishful thinking, usually from ignorance of the problem space.
Both of these sound like they made a regular bank, or a p2p lending platform. You could make exactly the same thing they're proposing without crypto. The goldfinch one is weird, as it completely glosses over the part of borrower defaults.
> Fast, feeles, higher tx troughput crypto, NANO:
This looks interesting, but the problem is the same as with Ethereum: too many coins, each with different technologies and protocols. Meanwhile, BTC still is the best-known one and the one with the highest market cap. The energy usage problem is not going away anytime soon.
This is quite common in trust less scenarios. We call them pawn shops or "empeños' in México. They are one of the most important lending instruments over here given the high default rates and lack of legal means to get money back for a non-collateralized loan.
Except that in this case, the collateral needs to be actual money. While in real life you can give someone a physical thing, you can't give it in the virtual world (and NFTs do not matter here: if I have the NFT title to your house but I can't evict you from it and sell it, it's useless).
These DeFi loans are less useful than pawn shops. That's the point they're at right now.
One issue with crypto is that it doesn't produce any value (it consumes value) and it has no intrinsic value. So as an investment it doesn't make any sense.
It's pretty obvious to me: it's a sign of the aging of HN average reader. I experienced the same phenomenon in Slashdot back in the day: Comments in the first years were very interesting, constructive and enticing. As the population grew older, it started questioning everything without analysing (less space than a nomad?). Nowadays the level of the conversation there is terrible.
It is similar to what happens in the mainstream: I'm 40 years old. I see chatroulette, snapchat, ticktock and dont understand them. I could dismiss them as stupid, unnecessary and fads. But the truth is that they are new takes on old subjects that maybe I dont understand; whereas 20 years ago I was on top of what was new or yet to come.
I mean, Long Island Iced Tea -> Long Blockchain Company got the "yay" [sic] of Wall Street but the "nay" of "people who recognized that an Iced Tea company claiming they could magically reinvent their business around blockchain with no specifics as to how"; and subsequently it turns out that, actually, there was no business plan and it was an insider trading pump and dump move. I'm sure before the insider trading charges that the executives of the company were absolutely happy to have market approval and leases on yachts, as anyone would be.
I should say, I think Coinbase is relatively well situated to capitalize on crypto, and it's a real business. I also think it's pretty well situated to shrink and deleverage if there's a decline in the crypto market. I don't think they're a scam.
I just mean that using market approval as evidence that the market is real, not a scam, not a trend, or does something useful is foolish. The point-in-time correlation of market success and fundamental success is nearly 0, even if the long-term correlation is very high.
Recently see also: NFT mania. Surely you'd rather be the artist that gets paid $50 million for selling some bits even as the process is widely derided, since you the artist aren't the bag-holder later on when it turns out the bits aren't worth $50 million.
I know a dev (used to work from Leeds UK, i don't know where he is actually) who created a crypto with 2 friends for someone who had the "yay" of Wall street. Long story short, he collected 200k for a 3-month job as actual payment, and another 600k when he sold his shitcoins (that's what he shared in our alumni group at least), i think the shitcoin creator escaped with 3M and a lot of people actually lost money.
I thought it was funny and an actual tax on stupidity, but now i understand that it was targeted at poor and/or young people who did not really had to money to loose in these schemes.
Plus the technical difficulties with crypto in general. There is a higher bar for getting someone to set up a crypto account than it is to take a credit card number. A lot of people would just go "screw this, I can find porn on the Internet without this nonsense".
Nobody wants to hear it. Everybody wants to believe Trump was the “worst president ever” but this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration.
>this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration.
You're missing the obvious point (as the British, Russians and innumerable others found out) that Afghanistan is not a nation per se. It's a collection of regions, clans, families and warlords.
We picked certain warlords (the enemies of the Taliban) when we went into Afghanistan and the ones we picked were/are just as insular, corrupt and narrowly focused on their own interests as those who support the Taliban.
We spent 20 years and a trillion dollars "training" the Afghan military and police to support the Kabul government.
And as anyone could have (and many did) told you, as soon as we left, the army and police just melted away and the Taliban took control.
This isn't a surprise, nor is it unexpected. If Bush II, Obama or Trump had pulled out the troops the exact same thing would have happened.
Now it's done and we can let the Afghans go back to killing and oppressing each other as they've done for millenia.
It's not pretty, and many will suffer, but it's not our war and we should never have had any part of it, except to kick bin Laden out of there and make it clear to the Taliban that they need to make sure folks who want to attack the US don't ever take up residence in Afghanistan again.
But instead we went with the failed strategies of the past (nation building) and the inevitable happened.
It's not Biden's fault. It's not Trump's fault. This is all on Bush II. We should have gone in, kicked al Qaeda ass (we did), make sure the Taliban knew we would make them pay for supporting al Qaeda (we did, somewhat) and then went home.
By the time Obama took office, we were completely entrenched in the corrupt regime in Kabul.
tl;dr: This was never going to end well and it's about time someone had the guts to pull us out. Now the same folks who were in a lather about "Obama's forever war" are complaining that Biden ended it. Feh. It's just political posturing and bullshit.
> We spent 20 years and a trillion dollars "training" the Afghan military and police to support the Kabul government.
> And as anyone could have (and many did) told you, as soon as we left, the army and police just melted away and the Taliban took control.
I get the impression that one of the mistakes there may have been that the US was trying to train the Afghan military to use the "modern system" of warfare like the US (lots of training and high-tech gizmos), when they may have only been capable of the "static system." I don't know any actual details, but all the officials in US press conferences emphasizing how "well-equipped" the Afghan Army was gives me this impression.
> It's not Biden's fault. It's not Trump's fault. This is all on Bush II. We should have gone in, kicked al Qaeda ass (we did), make sure the Taliban knew we would make them pay for supporting al Qaeda (we did, somewhat) and then went home.
I agree, but the temptation of nation building is just to great to resist it seems. The PhD's and think-tankers look back at the 'Wise Men' of the post-WWII era, basically inventing the modern world order and want to have a go at it. They want to point to the killing and destruction and say no it wasn't just revenge and deterrence, but that something good was created out of it.
I truly believe it's well intentioned but it's hubris of the worst sort.
No, sorry. Trump owns the pandemic. He could have been sane, followed scientific advise and acted more quickly. Instead, try snorting bleach. Get some UV light inside the body. Hundreds of thousands dead and a good amount of that toll could have been avoided.
Nope. The pandemic was a no-win situation. When trump cut off travel to China he was called xenophobic, and then later it was said that he didn't act soon enough. The politicization of the pandemic (on both sides) was not appropriate and now we've got Republicans avoiding the vaccine out of spite.
Some of his off the cuff comments were stupid and ill-conceived, but he never actually told anyone to do anything with bleach.
His biggest mistake in the pandemic IMHO was having daily press conferences to in order to look like he was in charge and things were under control. So many things go wrong when people worry about appearances...
> When trump cut off travel to China he was called xenophobic, and then later it was said that he didn't act soon enough.
In this particular case, those statements aren’t precisely contradictory.
The travel ban was criticized because it was wholly inadequate for the purposes of preventing infected persons from entering the country, as American citizens (and their immediate (?) family IIRC) could enter freely. “Xenophobic” might have arisen out of the targeting of foreigners while leaving Americans alone, though I offer no opinion as to whether that is an accurate label.
Even if the ban were effective, it was too late since IIRC there were already cases in the US, so that criticism is accurate unless I am remembering incorrectly.
A no win situation is not one with no wrong answers; Trump’s approach [0] was equivalent to handling the Kobayashi Maru by heading a maximum warp to the nearest Federation colony and bombarding it with photon torpedoes.
[0] notably, but not limited to, obstructing early state access to emergency supplies and distributing federal supplies based on political affinity with the governor rather than need, with a deliberate strategy of maximizing the impact in Democratic-governed states and leveraging it as an election issue.
From what I can tell, I think you're mixing stories.
Trump's initial action was to restrict travel to China, not outright ban flights. US citizens and their immediate families were still allowed to fly. Whether this action was "quick" is at least somewhat debatable.
The only outright ban on flights I could find was something from June [0], well after the initial restrictions were put into place, and that was in response to China refusing to allow more flights into China from US carriers. It was also (partially) lifted just a few days later [1].
Agreed. Trump was telling us that the virus would just disappear. He was holding huge campaign rallies and gatherings with no masks and no distancing. This was very much a failure and it caused him to lose the election to even a lightweight candidate like Biden.
> this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration
The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan, supposedly building up institutions that $2 trillion were poured into as 2300 Americans were killed.
That the US would continue funding and arming Afghanistan, but would remove US troops was announced in mid-April. Within four months, the Taliban completely took over the country, a month before the final US withdrawal date scheduled for next month. It shows how much support these American-built initiatives had.
This is not one event, it is 20 years of failure. I commend Biden for cutting US losses even if it invites criticism, 20 years is enough. This is the first good, tough decision Biden has made in my opinion.
