The way it’s written, it sounds like we could download it in the US, after the law was passed, for 180 days, and then do whatever we want with it. Unfortunately, after that point, the test of it being “developed” in China would probably be met for anything but a near-total rewrite.
That’s not infinite. Bitcoin is just one of many participants in the wider currency market. The bet of people speculating on Bitcoin is that its market share in the market will continue to grow. So the absolute upper limit of its valuation is basically that of the global currency market. In more practical/realistic terms, it has technical constraints as-is that limit its use as a day-to-day currency, which limit it to a lower point, since other currencies have to be used for small transactions, and hence, have to take some other portion of the global currency market. And so on.
Not exactly gambling. Rather, the market is trying to anticipate and calculate these shifts in valuation. Individual participants may try to catch it early to get a good deal. Many will fail, including buying at a bad deal. People will get caught up in hype because it’s a novel invention as opposed to some same-for-same replacement. That’s just the price determination mechanism. Currency shifts, and market adjustments in general, are messy. Any time one currency dies, there’s a flight to others.
Disclaimer: I have zero Bitcoin. Also this is just explaining mechanisms, not justifying or supporting them.
The theory behind capitalism doesn’t require infinite growth. A society could have continual “profit” based on the use of renewable resources. The explanation for why we’re constantly expanding our exploitation of the planet is a little more complex than just an inherent trait of the economic system. That’s kind of a nasty oversimplification that people apply.
The popularity of both of the imperial genocidal candidates is the result of centuries of conditioning and the collapse of the education system and free press. It’s a cyclical problem. We vote them in, they keep us stupid, we vote them in again.
The popularity of both of the imperial genocidal candidates is the result of centuries of conditioning and the collapse of the education system and free press. It’s a cyclical problem. We vote them in, they keep us stupid, we vote them in again.
The internet is the foundation for the solution. This is the only thing that evaporates the illusions and divisions rulers create for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with red scares, witch hunts, inquisitions, and all the other same crap from history. Unfortunately they’re chipping away at it - centralized social media is a powerful propaganda tool with no constitutional restraints, as is online censorship and surveillance.
Fascism is a massive violent manifestation of ignorance. The only real solution is to undo the brainwashing of humanity - their brainwashing with religion, their brainwashing to accept abusive hierarchical rule, all of it. Everyone must fully understand.
People responding with “guns”, “WW2” - we did that already, 70 million people died, and here we are again. Why and how did it come back? What is the actual source of the problem? Treating this problem as only solvable with mass murder isn’t exactly putting you on the moral high ground. What conditions give rise to acceptance of fascist beliefs, or the acceptance of a fascist leader? What are the mental, social, cultural, behavioral traits of the people that do accept that? How can those traits be prevented from forming?
A key element to defeat things like fascism, which build themselves on the popularity of fear, is that voting can’t be free-for-all. Voting should require, or be weighed with, some sort of licensing, testing of sane mind, awareness and understanding of at least current events, review of known association with dangerous anti-society parties, etc.
This is inherently anti-democratic. Who decides who’s qualified to vote? Is it you, with your infallible understanding of every issue?
OK, so a bit over a third of the population doesn’t care enough to vote. Not for anyone - D, R, or any third party. Let’s assume they’re mostly uneducated. What happens to the polling results when you compel them to vote?
I think compelling voter turnout is the last thing you should be even considering. The first real problem is education - nobody understand anything about government - not what fascism is, not how the economy works, not what imperialism is, nothing of real substance. The second problem is this “lesser of two evils” bullshit that has even the slightly-more-educated half of the population voting for mass murderers, which you can’t resolve in first-past-the-post majority rule elections, at least not with the stupid mindset everyone has right now. Electoral college is a similar problem. And what about the problems with “representative” government both failing to represent and manipulating public will for the benefit of powerful lobbies? How about systemic reform that removes their power?
You thought about any of these things?
Really sleepwalking into the plot of The Matrix, aren’t we.
Ideally without 60-70 million people dying. (looks up “how to unbrainwash people”)
Honestly, no amount of careful planning and constitutional design will restrain a society where enough people have gone completely insane. Look at “Israel”. Even 100% direct democracy there would still be a genocidal nightmare. Gets to the problem of how culture is the real driver behind the shape of society. And in that case, how religion incinerates real morality.
I used to land at basically this analysis myself, but there are definitely some assumptions that need to be addressed. We can probably agree that to a significant degree “money is power”, or at least, money can elicit power, especially in terms of directing the actions of the desperate. We witness in our society - which is not pure “free market capitalism” - that inequality is rampant. There are theoretical explanations for this blaming both government intervention and just simply the behavior of individuals within the market that centralize wealth. And, conversely, there are theoretical explanations for how government can decentralize wealth, or how market participants can decentralize wealth (including boycotts, unions, etc.). The biggest challenge with this age-old “communism vs. capitalism” debate is that establishing overall tendencies for state vs. private actors requires exhaustive historical analysis, and is not even inherent to the nature of either actor, i.e., someone as a private actor, or state actor, can act in a way that either centralizes or decentralizes wealth. The only overarching principle you can even safely state is that the actions of a state are distinct from those as a private actor because of the “monopoly on violence” factor, i.e., the ability to enforce unfair demands that people can’t escape in practice (a behavior that leftie types usually accuse capitalism of, inversely, by pointing to corporate monopoly power - which of course, depends on the dictates of a state or equivalent body to enforce).
The only way I was able to resolve the problems with this whole analytical framework - communism, capitalism, state, private - was to reject this terminology entirely and perform the analysis in terms of individual behavior, actions, inanimate vs. animate, and the ethical properties deriving from those. A “state” is a useful abstraction at times and a confusing complication at other times. “Capitalism” and “communism” as terms have no universally agreed upon definition, resulting in unproductive, endless, circular debates. What we’re really trying to do is design a social system that maximizes outcomes for every criteria we like - equality, prosperity, individual wellbeing, health, lack of environmental externalities, etc.
That gets to the root of the problem. We have “checks and balances” designed around the idea that separate institutions would check the excesses of each other. Even if you don’t accept the “Republicans and Democrats work for the same people” theory, well, now all three branches of government are majority Republican, and not even in a way where there’s significant internal division or strife, so it’s just a bulldozer. The stupidity of not including popular recall votes in the Constitution - or really, just not having a mechanism for popular referendums, vetoes, etc. - is I think its biggest fault. The “representative democracy” model is inherently flawed because you can corrupt representatives, while corrupting an entire population, while not impossible, is a hell of a lot harder.
Sure, if you say so.
Oh, now it’s owned by the Chinese military?
Which part of “freedom of speech” involves precluding us from ingesting content from a country our government decided it doesn’t like? Or electing to send our own device data or interactions to that country?
That unanimous decision made it perfectly clear that the government knows something we don’t,
Yeah, they know who pays their checks.
My bet is on the genocide being much worse than even TikTok was showing,
TikTok showed them incinerating an entire civilization. Not sure what you saw on there.
If that were true then they wouldn’t have given ByteDance the option to sell 80% to citizens and continue operating.
Except the entire point of that is the U.S. ownership would succumb to that pressure.
Sidestep providing the evidence and go straight for the personal attack. Nice.
Oops, replied to wrong comment.
Yes, we had this kind of logic before. https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test Turns out that “regulations” that restrict key democratic functions of societies are actually weaponized by tyrannical states against marginalized people.