xotesos

To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it.

A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.

People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.

There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.

I think it is even beyond this.

Most of the time humans are talking about the wonders of polywater to each other.

A giant game of telephone telling each other complete nonsense.

"The soviets have found a new form of water that freezes at –40°F, pass it on!".

IMO the whole idea is basically bullshit when applied to everyone as a blanket statement.

I know I would not be a good parent. I know I would resent the kid. It is bizarre to me too when someone who is married says this. Marriage isn't happening either for me so I 100% would be paying child support to a woman I absolutely resent too.

On the contrary, I think people who have children can not imagine the freedom that you have with never having children after 40. Children cost a fortune in currency and opportunity cost. I don't have to help with home work, pay for someone's college, pretend to have fun at some boring kids baseball game. Most of all though I have to live my dreams myself because there is no kid to live them through instead.

There is simply no way I would have lived the life I have if I had children. The valuation between the two situations isn't even close in my mind. I suspect there is a huge amount of coping and denial on the part of parents because once the kid is on its way, what else are you going to do?

To me it is an absurd comparison.

Someone stealing a billion dollars is committing a far worse crime than someone that murders me.

The problem I have with this is imagine what a statistical poll would be if you posed the question "would you spend 20 years in jail for 1 billion?"

There is a good percentage that absolutely would sign up for that, obviously a much different result than "would you spend life in prison to get a billion dollars".

Maybe more useful if hierarchical relationships exist but I just love treemaps in general. I love the way they can make the most of that given screen space. A bar chart would not be able to fit in that screen area because there has to be empty space in a bar chart.

There is so much wisdom in the old saying you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.

Humans are just such stubborn creatures.

chatGPT3.5 hallucinated packages. chatGPT4 has found me about 10 awesome python packages I didn't even know existed.

Personally, I don't really care if anyone drinks or not. I am super hydrated and if people want to stay dehydrated they are just going to get smoked.

Totally agree. What is hard to see right now in business is talked about by Charlie Munger in Poor Charlie's Almanac.

What you describe will save your company money because you are an early adopter but in the long run, everyone is going to do these kind of things and the savings will be passed on to the consumer.

Munger mentions this talking about a textile business they had. The new more efficient machine wasn't going to make the business better but just end up passing savings on to the consumer so they actually sold the business.

Management wouldn't have prioritized that project for engineering because it would have cost too much and have uncertain benefits given the cost.

This is all massively deflationary and certain highly prized skills that cost $120k a year per right now, will be $20 bucks a month in 2024 dollars someday.

The most profound thing I have read is a short mention in I See Satan Fall Like Lighting.

Something like the more we become the same , the more we become engulfed in mimetic rivalry.

I suspect it sheds quite a bit of light on the modern divide in the US. Not a divide because of differences but because of similarities.

Not a fan of Trump to say the least but it also seems rather obvious who is functioning as a the scapegoat mechanism for a large group of people.

If you are low balling yourself on salary in a cheaper cost of living area you can't compare yourself against someone in San Francisco who is good at negotiating and bragging about it online.

I don't have kids, I find children to be annoying at best but even I can not imagine not paying teachers so much as to make it a prestigious job that is tough to get.

From just a purely economic perspective, it seems like a trivial investment given the higher order effects.

Instead, we are going to suffer the higher order effects in the opposite direction.

Just insane but we seem to be getting really good as a society at making dumb decisions.