willholloway

More than 62 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, maybe they were the ones up voting stories on 4chan and Reddit because they agree with him.

You know you are in a regulation bubble when the caution and judgement of the most highly trained professionals in our society is reflexively concluded to be inadequate and inferior to that of bureaucrats even when said professionals are working on the DEAD, whom they have no chance of harming.

The regulation fetish has become a form of magical thinking. In the thinking of the regulation fetishist, the lack of explicit permission from authority is in and of itself dangerous, but the danger could be easily neutralized by a talismanic permit!

The fact that these professionals have already adhered to countless existing regulations and have been trained to safely deal with bodily fluids and infection risk is immaterial to the regulation fetishist. The government has not explicitly granted permission for this exact activity. In this mindset anything that is not enumerated as an allowed activity is dangerous and should be forbidden.

Me too.

Personal happiness doesn't factor in to it, missing very early bitcoin was a result of flawed thinking, which I intend to correct.

Be careful with these negative HN comments, they have cost me millions.

I first heard about bitcoin right here, when it hit $3 per coin for the first time. That was a huge event.

I had my own reservations about investing in bitcoin, but reading the comments here prejudiced my view.

VC's say it's not the losses that get to you, it's the companies you miss out on that scar you.

Not investing in Bitcoin at $3-5 was the single worst strategic decision of my life.

It was something that could have saved me years of toil, it was an easy ticket into the Big Game. A massive influx of economic energy, a fantastic counterstrike to entropy was right there, and it was easy. So easy to buy, granted it would have been not easy to hold through the dark times, the dips, the panic.

Oh, but if one did!

None of the hard work of starting a company, finding product-market fit, hiring a team, raising funds, fighting off the inevitable bandits that will come for their extortion money in the form of frivolous patent lawsuits...

None of that. Just easy, huge, beautiful, juicy investment capital right at my fingertips.

Oh the land that could have been bought! The development deals that would have flowed and the opportunities that could have been pursued. Instant entrance to Ruling Class, a ticket to the best club on earth.

'The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They would ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise. "If you please, Reb Tevye..." "Pardon me, Reb Tevye..." Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes! And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know!"'

- If I Were A Rich Man, Fiddler on the Roof

And it's that emotion thats fueling crypto asset valuations right now, along with actual riches created by people who didn't give in to the negativity, the doubt, the fear.

The thing has value. People like this thing. They like it all over the world. There are infinite uses for something like money + code + global computer networks.

And a thing doesn't have to be perfect or solve every problem to have value.

The standard that commenters here hold crypto to is not the same standard they hold startup companies to.

With companies if they do something some people like enough to use, they say wow what a success, look they are a real company with profits!

I mean even if the only use for crypto currency is regulatory/legal arbitrage, that's insanely valuable and would have merited an investment.

What I got from reading Paul Graham's own writing on the genesis of YC, was that his key insight was that VC's should be funding more companies, and earlier, and giving founder's much more control.

The other key innovation was funding in batches, in classes. This created a close-knit ad hoc community with shared goals, and one in which teams whose ideas were not finding traction could join teams whose ideas were.

Check ebay, packs from hover boards that got recalled are available.

The cost can be $1 a cell, a pack might have 20. Each cell might be 10-12 watt hours. It takes 3 cells to produce 12 volts.

Jehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century.

You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage.

The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...

A major problem with anonymous sources is not just the inability to verify the claims, even more troubling is the inability to assess the motives of the source and their context and agenda.

The phrase "American officials" connotes an objectivity, as if the information was revealed by God himself.

Yes but in the universe of knowledge work, what is work and what is not-work?

Do we count work as "being in the office/lab"? Or do we count work as thinking about the problem?

If one were building a company like Tesla for example, I would count going to the gym and thinking of the problem domain while running on a treadmill as work. I would also count thinking of the problem while going for a walk as work.

If one has really set one's teeth into a nasty problem, things like going to a party, or social calls like seeing friends not engaged in the problem, isn't relaxing, it's frustrating.

I think we should redefine the parameters of this conversation into time that depletes the body and time that replenishes it.

Being in front of a computer for long periods is hard on the eyes, it can be hard physically especially if the ergonomics aren't perfect. Being at the office for long periods can be draining as well because unlike being at home there aren't places to go that are replenishing on demand.

If one has a good sit/stand desk and spends a lot of time coding while standing, 10 minutes lying on a bed is incredibly replenishing for example.

The other dimension here is that perhaps it is alienated work that is inherently depleting. Working for someone else, or on something one does not really want to be working on is draining.

Working on something you care about is invigorating and I can't see how spending less time in that state can possibly be more productive than more time in a productive, non-depleting state.

Agreed, a tremendous work with a dream like quality, a phantasmagoria contrasting vapid American consumer culture, against bloody reality in the lands the great powers toy with.

Also interesting observations on William Gibson's work and the genesis of the EFF.

Definitely worth watching in it's entirety.

It's central thesis, that the current state of affairs has become too complex to predict for elites, and that either a fake, simplified reality is both created and presented to the masses, and also willingly retreated into.

Plus great stuff about the cynicism created by the failure and capitulation of social movements.

One of it's assertions is that Gaddafi willingly accepted a false role as a global supervillian because he liked the attention and status, and was in fact not actually responsible for some of the terrorist acts attributed to him, was completely new to me.

History and reality is hard to know in an age of state sponsored manipulation campaigns, intelligence and counter-intelligence, spycraft and subterfuge.

One has to look at any attribution as highly suspect in this environment. Cui bono?

I think you can look at the alleged Russian hacking of Podesta's emails and the subsequent releases as an example of that perhaps.

But I wouldn't hold out too much hope for an outpouring of democracy and more equitable relations between individuals and states in an age of total global electronic surveillance. That is a weapon that is extremely expensive, complex and singular.

Count me pessimistic, Orwell continues:

"We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another.

The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable.

Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors."