Some people are about to get wrecked.

Even if the fundamentals of NFT marketplaces were solid -- they're undoubtedly not -- the macroeconomics are starting to indicate that a deep and probably fairly prolonged recession is imminent. It's going to be painful for most people. It's going to be devastating for NFT gamblers who spent money they really couldn't afford.

This is the foundation of all security. The reason you can send your credit card over the internet is because the search space for the keys exchanged during the TLS handshake is large. Very large.

We're still in the early days. The growth of Bitcoin is tracking somewhat closely to the internet itself in terms of adoption.

We're at the comparative point where people are using 28.8K modems and learning how to send "e-Mails" using pine. It's still mostly a novelty that some few people are starting to find useful or at least are seeing some potential. But it's still the point in time where pundits are on national TV scratching their heads about what this Internet thing is at universities that some people are starting to connect to from their home personal computer and snickering about how it will never catch on because they would never read a newspaper on a screen.

Your comment has been deemed false by the Disinformation Governance Board and moderated as such.

Not because any information is untrue.. we just don't want people to think about it. Have a good day.

Not really. "Few" is subjective, and 0.5% of the population is arguably "few" for a pandemic of this nature. I don't think those arguing that deaths have not been "few" are wrong, they're just looking at it a different way.

An interesting note is that the total death count in the US for people less than 50 years old is about 69k. It gets more difficult to argue that that isn't "few".

I read an estimate last year for "life years" lost per Covid-19 death to be about 14 years. If we're at 1 million deaths now, that's 14 millions "life years" lost. This is actually a more meaningful statistic. Any death is unpleasant, but there's a difference between the death of someone with less than 15 years left on the planet versus the death of a young person who has yet to experience their first backache. One could argue that 14 million "life years" is a lot to lose, even if they were mostly lower qualify-of-life old person and sick person years. I agree. I also agree that, relatively speaking, it's actually quite few.

Great, thank you.

Do you have any links to articles that delve into the math? The interest payment is staggering already, so it sounds plausible. I'm inclined to repeat this claim, but I'd like to first find out if it's true. I'd love to find out more precisely what rate would likely lead to an imminent default.

I know the interest payment for fiscal year 2022 is $305 billion (according to the official budget), but I don't know the correct assumptions to make to accurately model the effects of rate changes in order to complete the analysis.

Never heard of it since I don't follow Twitter or Tesla very closely, but ... maybe it was a troll question?

If Twitter doesn't lose employees, they need to be fired. Undoubtedly part of Musk's calculation is that Twitter should be a considerably smaller company. So that doesn't really matter.

As for advertisers... yeah, no. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are. Activists have been somewhat successfully in using fake outrage to get advertisers to drop contracts with people the activists don't like, but that effect it's had on most content creators has been mild annoyance. And it's ceretainly not a strategy that's going to work on a platform the size of Twitter.

I don't know much about Twitter but I was under the impression that DMs were private messages between users. Sounds like a perfect use case for e2e encryption to me. I heard some people were upset at the idea of Musk suddenly having access to their DMs when he takes over, so it's even a solution to a problem people are actually talking about.

I believe Musk has already commented on several other ways he wants to improve the platform, including an edit button, so I don't think we need to get pissy just because he mentioned an improvement you personally don't care about.

Honestly it seems to me people are inventing reasons to hate Mr. Musk. It is difficult to detect derangement in oneself in the moment, but some might recognize it if they took a step back, took a deep breath and tried to analyze why an eccentric billionaire buying a company to make its product objectively better fills them with rage.

It takes a high level of privilege to be able to ignore alternative currencies. The parts of the world with easy access to historically-stable currencies like the US dollar are full of people who seem to have no comprehension of what it's like to live in a country with an unstable currency. They don't seem to realize that regular, affordable access to USD and EUR is not a thing.

The increasing adoption of Bitcoin as a currency is occurring from the ground up in South America, Africa, and Asia countries because the people are looking for a life raft. I'm glad you're in a position that you don't need a life raft, but maybe don't look down your nose so much at those who are just trying to grab hold of whatever they can to stay afloat above their sinking national currency. It just so happens that such people live in poor nations with deeply corrupt governments, as you point out, but that's not their fault.

These people are so insulated. It's incredible. I guess Twitter has enabled this to happen. They only view news sources that confirm their biases, and Twitter helps them avoid being exposed to alternative ideas.

If you're concerned that people are becoming untethered from reality, I'm with you. I completely share the concern. As far as I can tell it's not restricted to one side. In fact, if anything it might be more prevalent and a more serious problem nowadays for the far Left. I will explain my reasoning:

In 1984 -- since you brought it up -- there are at least two mechanisms by which the Party controls information: the memory hole, and forcing people to say things that are not true (e.g. 2 + 2 = 5) until they internalize and believe it. Only one side has engaged both of these mechanisms, and it's not the Right.

Memory holing requires institutional power to actually pull off. I claim you can't even do it without already having a lot of control. The Party would not have been able to do it if they didn't own the Ministry of Truth. Today, the Left controls almost all of the institutions, and I claim they are the only ones even in a position where they could pull it off. They control academia, the media, "big tech", most large corporations, and the government (not only the elected government at the moment, but for decades now they also control the permanent state). That's a lot of institutional control. Furthermore I claim that not only do they have the potential to memory hole, but they actually do. There's a recent example where WaPo is flatly denying doxing Libs Of Tiktok even though we see this is false thanks to the Wayback machine; but they're still trying to memory hole anyway. There's a pattern of reporting false news and never retracting or acknowledging in any way the false information, even when the truth comes to light.

The next mechanism, forcing people to say things that are not true or even just things they don't believe, is a phenomenon exclusive to the modern Left today. There's no "live and let live". They get very angry and will retaliate and try to ruin your life if you won't repeat fundamental lies akin to 2 + 2 = 5. Basic truths such as "men cannot get pregnant" must be denied. They bully corporations to go along with the lies, further cementing their institutional control. The Right (as a generality) can be wrong and even lie, but they don't try to force other people to repeat the lie as the Left does. If they believe an untruth that, for example, climate change isn't real, at least there's no crusade to force the other side to submit to the idea.

So yes, I am concerned that people are becoming increasingly untethered from reality. But if the book 1984 has any valuable insight into why, I think it points mostly to the Left as the source of the insanity.

No lawsuit ever failed to uncover electoral problems, because no investigations were ever done. Most lawsuits didn't proceed because of legal technicalities unrelated to their merits, especially for reason of filing limitations.

Wow, yes you literally did miss that.

Dozens of police officers were injured and hundreds of rioters were arrested in D.C. for committing violence during Trump's inauguration in 2017. Did you forget this happened? Or is it possible were you so insulated that you never knew this happened?

Hillary herself has done multiple interviews "whining" about how she believes 2016 was stolen. She and other top Democrats have never conceded the 2016 election. They claimed (falsely) that the election was fraudulent. One might say they "spread disinformation". They made up a narrative about Russia involvement which is debunked but fulfilled its purpose of dogging Trump throughout his term. That's pretty scummy.

These are things that actually happened. If you're upset that Republicans got hot and bothered by the 2020 election, maybe you should be equally concerned that they didn't begin the national tradition we now have where the losing party falsely claiming fraud.

It's not only that building a company and a new product is hard, but any competing product that hopes to win over Twitter's users by being pro-censorship is dead-on-arrival.

People might think that's what they want, but they don't.

Twitter reached critical mass because they allowed freedom of speech within acceptable limits. It was only after Twitter reached critical mass that it became captured by extreme anti-free speech idealogues. Twitter never would have been more than a novelty echo-chamber if it started out against free speech.