tnzm

Two QR codes: one of the ticket's public key, and one of your public key. Their infrastructure verifies that you're the current owner and you're in.

Or just have your phone broadcast the public keys via radio to a turnstile.

>I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property.

The common denominator between these being: process without purpose.

And this is why the parody works so well. The world is already like you describe, though it's hard to notice if you view it through the rose-tinted glasses that the ever-shrinking in-group is more than happy to sell to you for good "old" fiat money. (If 50 years ago is old.) Neoliberal "infinite growth" capitalism is already an inter-generational MLM, sanctioned by a global monopoly on violent enforcement. All power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and we have all become so delightfully non-violent... The logical conclusion: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia locked in perpetual war upon the background of a collapsed ecosystem?

Well, fuck that. Techno-capitalistic nation-states are an early-stage performance optimization. And since violent uprisings lead nowhere, we're doing the sane thing. We're refactoring 'em the fuck out of existence.

If "having a court enforce [a] process" is "simple", how come so many people already have "avoid courts", "distrust lawyers" as rules of thumb, and "don't side with authority" as a general life principle? For the marginalized majority, every state is a failed state, and every system is hostile and oppressive. The thing everyone's getting out of crypto is the same thing they've been getting out of all the other silly pyramid schemes, from Tupperware to contraband. Which is to say, the same things they've been aggressively denied by the state-sanctioned economic mainstream.

Hope. Opportunity. A voice.

A functioning parody of existing economical processes gives people the hope that there's a better economic system right around the corner. Maybe we just have to collectively sort of stumble into it.

Of course, it's only that simple if you have a simplified view of human creativity. But that's OK, too. Every invention that truly revolutionized our way of life was a somewhat accidental result of thousands upon thousands person-hours of organized research. And that's exactly what we're doing here - about as haphazardly as virtually any other kind of software development, but at the same time crowdfunded on a global scale.

Today, we're offering people the same sort of economic "junk food" that the current system has gotten them addicted to for the better part of the 20th century. Tomorrow, someone finally sneaks distributed consensus technology into the mainstream, and makes the world a little less corrupt.

It's beautiful.

Because the galaxy is a lot bigger than that subdivision, too.

What if meaningless busy-work is qualified professionals getting paid to leave meaningful problems alone because solving them is bad for the racket?

Let's face it, powerful forces in our society discourage self-control and critical reflection, and culture encourages people to have children regardless of whether they have learned those skills

Royalties, man, yeah.

Why not?

I can, but that's ugly - it violates standard semantics and generally introduces a new thing to know about.

This is also why I advocate for JS as a scripting language (if it's already a part of your stack, anyway). Curiously, every time I mention it HN gets mad at me.

Class static blocks are weird. Give me async constructors already!

Well put.

Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.

The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.

It's vicious cycles all the way down.

Wow, thanks! That's a wonderfully succinct way of putting it.

You asked what was the difference between my statement (that genetics is not more special than other causes of being more or less skilled at something) and the statement that "all is one, separateness is an illusion". I answered that the difference between these two statements is arbitrary, which I still believe to be the case. Apologies if something else happened to you.

My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.

Genetics is obviously not the same as everything else in existence; I'm not sure that even makes sense as a statement. You seem to have somehow derived that I am arguing against the concept of distinctions at all. I'm not sure if language would be feasible without distinctions.

I don't disagree with any of what you just said, but I fail to see what point you are trying to make or what you are arguing against. Without the (linguistic) act of making distinctions, everything is indeed one and the same, but that's... kind of pointless?

EDIT: Sibling poster also seems to fail to make the distinction whether (a) we're comparing genetics to other causative factors, or (b) we are comparing my statement about genetics to your "all is one" interpretation of it.

In case it's still unclear, (a) and (b) are two completely separate things and I'm not sure how this conversation got to the point of conflating them. It just serves to reinforce my belief that the ambiguity of our language's syntactic structures makes it inordinately difficult to reason about many things in everyday language. Or maybe I'm just a bad communicator. "Me bad", "you bad" that's supremely easy to express lol

EDIT2: Correction, TheSpiceIsLife does actually get it.

That's why I brought up metaphysics and e-prime actually. We can't resolve societal contradictions in a fundamental way if we do not have the tools to reason about them, and the main tool we have for that, human language, can at times be pitifully inconsistent and ambiguous - even if one does, in fact, control for people's automatic emotional reactions to controversial subjects.