I don't understand it as an investment. Guess I should've been more specific. I went with brevity thinking the context would suffice.

This was meant as a reply to the article about bitcoin correction.

So sorry,

Flowery nice words flowing from the talking points of others. who just ignore the litany of coin failures, fraud, scams on astoundingly large scales, and outright facilitation of reprehensible trade. A country that talks about turning to crypto has nothing left in options, and it won't help them.

The day that currencies are routinely valued in reference to Bitcoin, you have my attention. But that day will never come. Never? I'm saying never.

I'm very in tune with the technology and the ostensible "healthy" points of these vehicles. I don't understand them as an investment vehicle, so I don't invest in them. I'm not an ideologue. Investment is not philosophy. If you want to back it to throw off the shackles of what you perceive to be a doomed system, go for it. Have fun.

And being a doomsayer is nothing new. Get in line behind all the people who have been predicting the fall of the global financial order since the 1800s. Someday one of them will be right, but you'd be a fool to hold your breath. 10 years from now, I'll be buying my groceries in my local currency, carefully invested and grown.

I long ago gave up trying to understand crypto. And If I just don't understand something, I don't invest in it. So this is all just mildly interesting noise.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - Keynes

We're going to teach most of those kids how to ask AI for everything anyway. Their value-add will be dubious at best. They can autocorrect their lives. We need them literate enough to order off of Amazon.

So long as we right-size their expectations in life it should all work out.

There is no rational conversation to be had. Anti-vaxxers have heard the best, simplest arguments, and they have rejected the premise. You can no longer get there from here, so stop trying to reason with them. Their response will be something like rejecting the source of your data as untrustworthy, which is the most effective way to reject that which you don't want to entertain.

This is a good example of the old truism: you cannot counter an emotional argument with a logical one.

Case in point. A family friend told us all back when we all were lined up for the first Covid vaccines that she was so sad for us, since we'd all be dead in six months. Had lunch with her recently... still as strongly anti-vaccine today

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

You could say you and I, or the royal we to refer to society in general, and I think it would apply pretty well.

But even taking one of your examples, say, Freedom of Speech, there's a whole ton of complexity that muddies the waters. How about communicating porn to 10 year olds? Or slanderous speech?

Even within these blanket, simplistic, and lofty ideals our tolerances bob and weave.

Your assumption that the difference in price between the Tesla and the Chinese offering materializes in a quality difference. Is that true? I'm not sure that it is.

The implication is that core beliefs should be immutable, and we don't share that axiom.

I think he's ignoring the cost per kilogram to get it there. I suspect that heat management strictly by radiation won't be fast enough, so you'll still need to crank up surface area to cool the chips. So you can't even save mass there.

Of course my non-physicist brain might have that wrong..

So, to paraphrase, you think that a society shouldn't gravitate towards accommodation, except in your direction?

A society is a population that finds a way to balance out the will of the individuals with the need to reduce friction between them. Sometimes you get to be in the majority, and sometimes not. And having to watch society evolve away from you is inevitable. Old people have been doing that forever.

No. In the truly vast majority of cases, you were neither betrayed nor lied to. The exceptions to that are few. You just don't notice the avalanche of fulfilled promises that surround you because those things aren't noisy. It's like noticing the downtime in 99.99% uptime.

You trust your life every day in thousands of ways that things in front of you are as they seem. Mostly without thinking about it. Above all, you trust the sciences implicitly. You just don't notice it.

It's not just distrust of media, or just the blind willingness to delegate our opinions to the loudest voice in the room. We don't trust anything anymore and that's a real problem. Plenty of people would rather trust random idiits than people educated in a field.

We're not on the same page, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. And that makes it really hard for a society to function.

It sucks. But here we are.

https://www.dailycartoonist.co...

She was amused, and even wrote a preface for one of his compendiums. Class act.