bodiekane

Stolen phone -> access to finances (through password reset emails/SMS or just apps on the phone) -> no ability to pay for medicine/healthcare -> death.

Stolen phone -> post offensive things to users Twitter account -> fired from job -> lose healthcare -> death.

Stolen phone -> send violent threat against police posing as phone owner -> SWAT team shoots on sight -> death.

Every good aspect of modern life and modern medicine, technology, etc started with fundamental research that can be made to sound silly.

Some grad student studies the effects of alcohol on fish, learns something new about biology, publishes it so that other students and researchers learn about it, and a few years later after some new studies based on that initial research we get a new cancer drug.

Somebody spends $1 million studying the effects of music on dairy cows, learns that they produce more milk if calming music is played and farmers increase revenues by $10 million per year by adding speakers to their milking rooms.

The billions of dollars spent blowing up infrastructure in the middle east is just a loss, but money spent on research is how we've cured diseases, increased crop yields, launched satellites, and made it so that everyone can have a supercomputer in their pocket that can stream HD video through the air.

That populist narrative was popular on social media, but the truth is the exact opposite.

Germany had relatively reasonable debt and government spending relative to taxes.

Italy had entirely dysfunctional spending and Greece was essentially a house of cards built on fraud. Without the Eurozone, Greece would have faced bankruptcy and/or hyperinflation, but instead they got bailed out by the rest of the EU.

Check out Michael Lewis's book Boomerang that covers the distinct problems Iceland, Ireland and Greece faced. The TL;DR on Greece is a country with massive social spending and tiny tax receipts, that took out massive and entirely unsustainable debt thanks to the other Euro countries and then inevitably was unable to pay it back.

Germany was the hero who saved the EU from complete implosion, but instead of being thanked they get misplaced anger for being the only responsible ones in the room.

>who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC

That seems like an obvious choice to make. Managing people, looking at Gantt charts, meeting with compliance & legal and all the other organizational work of management is tedious, boring and miserable. But it pays well and signals high-status, so people do it.

If you've won the Nobel Prize, you don't need any other signal of high-status and he's surely making plenty of money at Anthropic. Of course he'd choose to spend his time doing interesting work for lots of money instead of boring work.

Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?

I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?

Ya, the word "transplants" here seems to mean something very different than you're interpreting it as.

This isn't a hospital procedure like an organ transplant. It's material placed into the recipients colon through an enema, nasogastric tube or possibly even just taking some pills.

So it might range from done at home to done during a 30 minute visit to a clinic.

Cycling has a pretty rich history of people injecting themselves with things they bought on the internet- EPO, testosterone, etc.

The bodybuilding subculture has been injecting testosterone, about 50 different testosterone-like drugs (Tren, Clen, Deca, etc) for the past 50 years, HGH for the past 30 years and IGF for the past 15 years.

The psychonaut subculture has been buying research chemical derivatives of serotonin and dopamine for decades for their psychedelic effects, and the nootropic community doing similar things for compounds that increased attention, memory or mood.

In prior decades, the transgender community often relied on buying & injecting drugs on the internet for gender affirming care they were unable to get from their healthcare systems.

There are risks, but also, if tens, hundreds or thousands of other customers have purchased and used something from the vendor, that's probably as reliable of a signal as most regulatory regimes are.

"Authoritarian nightmare" is an accurate description.

Calling this student's project a "harassment platform" is misleading, emotive language.

The payments are going to a government. They're not using bitcoin to hide the payments, they're using it because receiving USD or Euros or whatever would mean that a hostile government could seize the funds from the bank.

The tracking is unique though. I don't know who had the $20 in my wallet before me or what series of payments it was a part of, but crypto has the curious property that over time, essentially all crypto money will have at some point passed through wallets associated with controversial entities or transactions.

I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of how the school officials, guards and police acted in this behavior.

Tea is still available on the app store, which is a far more targeted harassment and slander app, than this one that was clearly more of a 4chan style "for the lulz" that no one would take seriously.

I don't think the "broken windows" metaphor is very accurate for healthcare. A lot of healthcare spending is along a gradient of elective vs necessary and some continuum of quality of life improvements.

For instance, I could live with allergies, and all my ancestors just had to, but I have the option to spend money on allergy testing services, medicines, treatments, etc. People spend money on in-home professional care to get better treatment than going alone or relying on family, or spend money on care facilities as appropriate for their circumstances.

We have medicines for depression, anxiety, restless leg syndrome, ADHD, birth control, acne, weight loss, low testosterone, ED, poor sleep, eczema, psoriasis and a million other issues which people in the past, or people in developing countries today, simply had to live with that we have the privilege of having access to treatments for to improve our quality of life.

I know people who are affluent and outwardly "healthy" who spend thousands of dollars per year in the "healthcare" category that's entirely discretionary, but lets them keep looking young and playing tennis at 70 years old, or helps them juggle work, family and fitness at 40.

I consider it a small green flag, if the award is from somewhere semi-reputable.

I've worked at places where employee surveys were done by the 3rd party to decide on winners. Companies that know they mistreat their employees won't bother and some companies will have management surprised when they find out how poorly their employees rated them on those surveys.

I don't think of it as really being a big positive, but it at least weeds out many of the worst.

Seems like the main reason it's gone up all these years is "Early adopters successfully evangelized to get more mainstream bigger-fools to buy from them at elevated prices".

At this point, Bitcoin is fully mainstream and the biggest fools have bought in. People hoped that the Trump election would mean a new giant pot of dumb money (government/tax dollars) would buy bitcoin, but now that they've realized Trump will just issue his own crypto memecoins that bet is unwinding.

I don't see where the buying is going to come from in the future. Every cab driver and retiree and stay-at-home-mom already knows about bitcoin. Maybe Tether prints another imaginary 10 billion dollars to buy bitcoin and prop up the price though, so it could still maintain for a while.

And yet, millions of people work 40 hour weeks and take a couple vacations per year while working in razor-thin margin industries like grocery stores and low margin restaurants, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, retail, trucking and services ranging from hair stylists to accounting.

Sane working hours and vacation time should be taken as a given in the modern economy. Unusually long work hours should be reserved for unusually highly paid professions like investment banking and surgeons.