Values are not a disability.

Because that’s not how human nature works

Solarpunk is optimistic. You’re probably looking for Green Growth or Cyberpunk.

Trust starts to weaken with scale

You don’t need to use an altcoin, you can use the real legal tender of many countries you “don’t trust” to buy stuff. Buy Argentine currency and use it to trade. You need to trust something at some point, and what you’re (maybe unknowingly) doing is trusting authoritarian institutions. Code cannot substitute for that.

Your argument seems to be “Authoritarianism is a reasonable thing to sacrifice in order to enable trustless purchases” in the same breath as “But also I don’t even trust the authorities”, assuming you’re arguing for an altcoin.

like money and trust are opposed

OK let’s say you owe me a dollar and I just remember that. How is an altcoin superior to you trusting me?

trust in people doesn’t scale at all

So you do think it’s a real dichotomy?

but if we use paypal and ebay i can kinda trust those 2 platforms

If they are paying paypal, you are leveraging paypal to create a threat of violence on them. That’s not very Solarpunk of you.

I’m more than happy to alienate them. They don’t trust me, why should society work according to their whims?

Why not just trust people?

They’re using “Mr Kumar” as an example here, but this story goes back a long way. Huge parts of the wealthy northern suburbs, and prime real estate near the most popular beaches in Sydney are held by a handful of people. They bought this property a long time ago, but the “newer” property investors are basically working off that template. You can actually walk around those suburbs and find a bunch of empty properties. They don’t care about the rent, they prefer to show as little income as possible. They just want the capital gains when they sell. Often these people are retired and can get significant tax concessions.

The “newer” investors are doing this but with properties which are much cheaper. They do it like a job or a business. It’s not healthy for the country either, but it’s actually less of a rort than the institutional wealth in this country.

Just going to echo this. It’s a tough balancing act to allow a bit of fun and shit posting while also preventing abuse and the mods are doing amazing, and the instance is in great technical health too. Thanks all. Really love being in this online space which is actually pretty tough to achieve.

It’s important to recognise the mechanism is more important than the intent. If people cannot blow the whistle safely, then the “government” can freely keep secrets. “Government” is in air quotes here because often it’s the spooks or the military who get to keep secrets, often from the elected officials. This means that MPs are often kept in the dark (and sometimes on purpose, in a Berejiklian-style “I don’t need to know about that” sense) and this means that a bunch of people who we pay taxes for can do what they like with impunity.

If the secrets are kept, then the people keeping the secrets are not accountable to anyone. This is a serious problem if they start to violate the rights of people on Australian soil. You might feel like it’s not going to be you, but it well could be. There is no safety on that gun. The only way around it is to make whistleblowing safe.

Good comeback though.

bread and circuses…

So I have been asking myself why I held some of my beliefs, and the answer is that I “learnt” them at a really young age, maybe 4-10 years old. It was an age where I basically knew “nothing” and I guess I filed it away for clarification later and that “later” never came. All of a sudden I’m much, much older and asking myself why I even believe this strange thing and the answer is “they got me when I was young”. If I wasn’t exposed to other thinkers who asked me to re-evaluate my ideas, I might never have questioned them.

I love how they’re like… frenemies during the fight, so three’s a bit where he grabs a metal pole and breaks a window of a car, realises what he’s done, says sorry, throws the pole away, and they go back to fisticuffs.

Watched this recently. “I’m here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum”.

No one has made mention of the 83.7%. I think it should be 17% odd smaller.

Sorry I know it’s like that glass eyed guy from last action hero.

I do this. If you want to actually want to use or donate the processing power, this is kind of a good thing. However, there are a lot of downsides:

• Computers are generally much lower power than a heater. This makes them very slow to “react” to heating needs. Heating a small room, even with a 500W PC, could take an hour or maybe more.
• Heaters have a thermostat, which computers don’t, so even though they are very laggy, they also don’t stop heating when the temperature is right. This means they can overshoot and make the room uncomfortably hot.
• You could set up an external thermostat but then you need a load which can be switched on and off.
• I was using folding@home, but the work items take a long time, and switching them on and off will increase the time taken to resolve the work item, which in turn means the system could get annoyed and use someone else’s computer to resolve the work item faster, or worse, blacklist your computer.
• Using your PC to generate heat will use up its maximum lifetime. The fans aren’t built to be running at max speed all the time, the CPU & GPU could wear out, and the power systems will also wear as time goes on. You sort of have to align that lifetime against usage. This is likely fine if you see the computation as a donation or if you have important stuff to compute, but it’s probably not worth just wasting the cycles.

Well that too, but it doesn’t require legislative change.

A recent Unlearning Economics Live video had Cahal mentioning that it was pretty easy to identify essential workers, and if that’s the case we should earmark housing for those workers in the relevant areas. If it’s been so easy to classify them, there should probably be other similar accomodations (eg tax breaks) from a payment perspective.

One thing which is irritating is just how ingrained Bunnings has becomes into our culture. Many people just go to Bunnings just for browsing. Unfortunately, they will also suck the air out of the room and basically force you to go to them. I have had to go to bunnings on occasion and have spent well more than I wanted to there.

You’ve got it backwards: Capitalists want to take the skill, craft, and intelligence out of a job so people are more replaceable, even if it makes the end product worse.