ardy42

> I'm not sure how that demonstrates QAnon members are not generally trapped in right-wing echo chambers. Are yoga practitioners exempt from right-wing echo chambers?

I suppose a significant number of yoga teachers/influencers could be secret dittoheads, but the idea kind of beggars belief.

One of the interesting things about QAnon is that it offered on-ramps to groups outside the stereotype of people would go for such a theory (e.g. "save the children"). People in right-wing echo chambers were definitely more susceptible, but it's a mistake to be reassured by that.

Also, particular echo chambers aren't some kind of primordial entity. They start all the time and they often grow. So even if something like QAnon requires one, that just means there's one more step.

> How long would it take you to establish enough credibility to be able to make an accusation like that and have people actually take your word for it?

Keep this in mind: Q is literally some dude on 4chan/8chan with a tripcode.

> There might be a few nutters out there who are so predisposed to hate JFK that they'll believe anything negative about him, but most people - even those who dislike him - would rightfully question such an outlandish statement made by someone with no credentials.

I make no claim that my example lie is a good example of misinformation/disinformation. It was only meant to show the asymmetry of effort implicit in "more discussion."

The key thing about getting a lie to stick is to hitting the right emotional buttons with it. And it's so easy broadcast lies nowadays that you can even discover those buttons stochastically, by just throwing random lies out there and seeing what sticks.

Furthermore, if your goal is not to convince anyone of anything in particular, but to just to gum up a society (which is the goal of disinformation, properly understood), you don't event need to find particular lies with a broad appeal across society. You just need enough lies that enough people fall for one or two.

> misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!

The problem with that idea is that it takes more effort to debunk a lie than to tell one. It also takes more effort to absorb a debunking than a lie. That's why disinformation works.

Here's an example: JFK ate babies occasionally, and the media hushed it up. Oswald was actually a secret high-level CIA operative, and was so outraged by this that he assassinated JFK for it.

It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort would it take you to debunk it?

It's just not practical to put all the burden of combating misinformation on each individual's shoulders. It's also necessary to stop the spread of misinformation. That doesn't need to be done by a central authority, but people who've been convinced by a lie will perceive that as "censorship" by one.

> scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles.

Scientific consensus is also not arrived at by publishing literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with "more discussion." Science has several mechanisms for "censoring" bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review), and it couldn't function without it. "More discussion" is saved for cases where those mechanisms failed.

But if there are 34 billion tethers, $18 million is like a rounding error.

The difficulty is that so much infrastructure has been built around the assumption of car use, and that will be very expensive and take a long time to redesign and replace.

> Surely there must a technical trail to investigate.

The probably is, but I'm guessing the really definitive records would probably require a subpoena to obtain (e.g. business records of the domain registrar or hosting company).

> It‘s a pretty strong case for Len to be Satoshi, admittedly. And it would explain the mysterious silence from Satoshi Nakamoto - he's dead.

I think it's pretty likely that the person (or people) who went by Satoshi is dead, and probably died before their Bitcoin hoard was worth much.

If not, you'd have to explain why someone is giving up the opportunity to never have to work for someone else to support themselves ever again. And those are less believable to me: e.g. 1) already having so much FU money they're secure in their lifestyle w/o the Bitcoin, 2) being either extremely ascetic or happy to work for someone else to support themselves, 3) deliberately choosing to destroy it for some reason, 4) losing the all keys in an accident (more understandable for a rando playing around than the creator), etc.

Were there any scientific utility to these payloads, or were they added in order to create some spacecraft porn? How much did the equipment for this weigh?

IIRC, a downward facing camera is useful for precisely locating the landing location, but I'm having trouble seeing a purpose for the upward facing camera besides getting cool sky-crane video.

> This article seems to suggest the answer is a fully automated smart home, with some kind of AI to intelligently manage your power usage. Sounds awesome, but I don't think that's ever going to be a reality outside the valley.

It also sounds awful. It would objectively be a regression from reliable electricity to unreliable electricity, like in an undeveloped country.

The only thing such a technology would do is give the power companies a BS way to shift the blame for their planning fuck ups onto consumers, because technically it would be the consumer's equipment that killed the power.

> That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though

Not all rich people, though. It might be interesting to characterize the one's that have built a utopian city, and see if they conform to some common type. Maybe they share important characteristics with modern-day "tech moguls"?

> They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently?

The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity.

Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.