Paperweight (u/Paperweight)

Paperweight commented on U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation reuters.com/article/usa-c... · Posted by u/threatofrain

rndmize · 5 years ago

I'm tempted to say that the uselessness of Congress is in indication of something else - we've pushed too much to the federal level. The decades-long tooth-and-nail fighting over healthcare makes me think that an effective system just can't be done federally; there's too much disagreement between states. Why not scrap most of the social programs, cut federal taxes, and let states implement their own?

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Rural counties are conservative, urban counties are liberal, and never the twain shall meet.

I posit that there will always be this conflict until cities have a blue federation superimposed on a red countryside. But the constitution isn't set up that way. Maybe next time.

Paperweight commented on Microfinance Is Mostly a Scam (2015) mathbabe.org/2015/10/13/m... · Posted by u/lowmemcpu

imtringued · 5 years ago

Your characterization of stocks is just wrong. The definition of a ponzi scheme is that the returns are paid by new investors but when a company is buying back shares it is earning that money by providing a service or selling a product. That product or service is purchased by a customer, not an investor. Money is coming from outside the company.

What you are misunderstanding is that the difference between paying dividends and a stock buyback isn't that great. Both mechanism distribute money owned by the company to shareholders. With dividends you simply receive a payment. With stock buybacks you get the ability to sell the stock back to the original company instead of selling the stock to another investor.

Think about it this way. The company has a valuation of 50 billion dollar. It is buying 1 billion dollar worth of stock back every year. After 50 years the company owns itself and every investor has been paid back. Of course this is an oversimplification but it shows that even if you hold onto your stock after everyone else has "cashed out" you can still earn your money back by selling the shares to the company.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Did you even read my comment?

Paperweight commented on Microfinance Is Mostly a Scam (2015) mathbabe.org/2015/10/13/m... · Posted by u/lowmemcpu

api · 5 years ago

I long ago developed the opinion that most "innovations" in money and finance are scams whether intentional or not.

Money and finance are like power and water. They belong to a class of things that should be unbelievably boring, things you forget exist when they are working properly.

A related idea I developed from watching the cryptocurrency world is that it is really hard to have a financial system that is anything but gambling, Ponzis, and fraud. These are the paths of least resistance in finance, the things money seems to "want" to do. The vast maze of regulations in conventional finance are the outcome of a multi hundred year evolutionary battle to maintain at least some level of actual productive activity in the financial world.

The reason money "wants" to gamble and play Ponzi games is likely related to how human dopamine reward loops work. We get dopamine hits from gambling and are very prone to it, while productive investment is often too slow to deliver regularly spaced Skinner box rewards.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Finance is always gambling, ponzis, and fraud. But hey, that's not a bad thing.

Gamblers add liquidity, which is better for society than them hiding in a basement playing cards.

Stocks are essentially ponzi scheme financing. They have all the hallmarks. Then often literally use the cash from sales of stock to pay dividends. Most companies will never pay dividends, though, so the idea for a purchaser is to hold on and cash out while it's big before everyone else does.

Fraud is the worst when people have an expectation of trust, assuming they're protected by regulators. They never are. Madoff. Bre-X. Enron. Even highly regulated markets are always riddled with fraud. People should expect the market to be riddled with fraud and act accordingly - it keeps the populace wise.

Regulations are an attempt to get something for nothing which always just ends up with a bunch of friction, corruption, barriers to entry, and lawyers.

Paperweight commented on Microfinance Is Mostly a Scam (2015) mathbabe.org/2015/10/13/m... · Posted by u/lowmemcpu

macawfish · 5 years ago

Payday loans are a predatory scam.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Yup, but at least they're better than the black market alternative. :)

Paperweight commented on Palm – The best small phone for minimalists, athletes, and kids palm.com/pages/product... · Posted by u/lxm

api · 5 years ago

The entire mobile ecosystem is about spying, with any features these devices provide being secondary to their primary function of gathering information on their users.

Of the mobile platforms, Apple seems the least like this. They seem to actually care about user privacy to some extent, but that's also because they are the most expensive and therefore have revenue more closely tied to their users as actual customers. I still wouldn't let Apple totally off the hook though. They still gather telemetry, and apps on iOS spy as much as they can possibly get away with. Virtually any mobile app is loaded with as much spyware as can possibly be packaged with it and tuned to gather maximum data without being too annoying or visible to the user.

It would be really hard to change this as long as there is such a market for user data. It's too tempting to load apps (or the whole phone) with spyware and cash in. Add to this the fact that governments around the world are certainly in the game both financially and covertly. The only way to really have a privacy-first mobile device would be to lock it the hell down and not allow apps to do anything without explicit user interaction... especially location awareness or any kind of sensor or camera/microphone use. Even with a really locked down phone apps would still try to find clever ways to gather data, and there's a lot of exploitable surface area.

The only other way to fix it would be legislation. One way would be to legislate HIPAA-like protections for intimate user data such as passive audio recordings or location information. Leak a users' location info or sell it without their permission? That will be $10,000 per violation, where a violation is a single location data point for a single user. This would instantly convert user telemetry data hoards from assets to liabilities. Of course what would probably happen is all this stuff would just move off-shore and into shell companies that can't effectively be fined or sued. Legislation might not even work and might make the industry even shadier than it already is. There's too much incentive to spy.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Since the curated boutique App Store idea got perverted, perhaps the cure is to go back to Steve Jobs' original plan to use PWAs.

Paperweight commented on Three people with inherited diseases successfully treated with CRISPR newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/leonnoel

shock · 5 years ago

> blocking the caries vaccine for decades

Please give more details.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

It's a simple model - make a genetically engineered S. mutans that slightly out-competes the existing, but without generating the lactic acid waste products that softens tooth enamel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine#Attempts_using_...

Dr. Jeffrey D. Hillman invented it in the 1970s-1980s at Harvard under NIH grants (https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-DE004529-10). Swab inoculation and you're done. It worked perfectly in animals and humans.

In the 1990s, he founded Oragenics, to try to commercialize it. The FDA gave them the runaround for about 20 years before they finally mysteriously gave up. In 2016, he got a 17-year patent, so I guess it'll be shelved until 2033 at least.

There's something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Why should a simple application of genetic engineering from the 1980s take 50+ years to make it to market? It's either a complete scam or a conspiracy.

Paperweight commented on Three people with inherited diseases successfully treated with CRISPR newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/leonnoel

Paperweight · 5 years ago

But will the drug approval agencies allow genetically engineered therapies for anything disruptive? For example, they've been blocking the caries vaccine for decades.

Paperweight commented on Fitful nightly sleep linked to chronic inflammation, hardened arteries news.berkeley.edu/2020/06... · Posted by u/ClarendonDrive

metrokoi · 5 years ago

This is so frustrating. Surely millions or billions of humans having terrible sleep is not just some genetic abnormality, and we did not evolve to have terrible sleep only fixed by modern technology. There must be some underlying issue that can be addressed for the majority of people.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Same goes for myopia and crooked teeth.

I've asked my optometrists and orthodontists what cause these problems and just got shrugs and big bills.

Paperweight commented on SimRefinery Recovered obscuritory.com/sim/simre... · Posted by u/velmu

nnx · 5 years ago

I wonder if it supports negative oil prices.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

Where's the disaster menu?

Paperweight commented on Simplifier simplifier.neocities.org/... · Posted by u/_sbrk

nerdponx · 5 years ago

Not a single condensed source, but there's an abundance of this type of content on Youtube, from both hobbyists and professionals.

Paperweight · 5 years ago

The only problem with YouTube is that it's not organized. It's not indexable or printable. Videos are on Google's servers - here today and gone tomorrow. Videos are GREAT for stuff that you can't put into text, and YouTube excels at getting info out there from people who aren't that good with computers :)

What I'm thinking is a real-life open-source "tech tree".