redahs (u/redahs) - Readit News

redahs commented on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest medium.com/@danrobinson/e... · Posted by u/gottagetmac

Qworg · 6 years ago

Why? This is unnecessarily encumbering the utility of money.

Real and Useful: people can use the money as a store of value, medium of exchange, and a unit of account - and enough people believe in it.

redahs · 6 years ago

Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervised labor, and worsens inequality.

redahs commented on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest medium.com/@danrobinson/e... · Posted by u/gottagetmac

emerged · 6 years ago

Writing this sort of bot seems like a legitimately fun and interesting thing to work on, but somehow I have less than zero interest in actually doing it. There's just something intrinsically repulsive about the entire blockchain world to me where I just don't want to touch it.

I don't mean to offend people who do love blockchain tech, in many ways I don't blame you. But is this feeling I have somewhat common? I'm not even sure how to justify it.

redahs · 6 years ago

The traditional american school of thought on money is that

1) the optimal supply of money is externally determined by the needs of commerce for liquidity,

2) new money can be created to meet the needs of commerce through public loans secured by real property pledged as collateral without any fixed artificial limits on supply

3) money may be circulated with an expiration date to discourage long term hoarding,

4) general governments should retain the ability to suppress the private issuance of bank notes and regain public control of the circulating medium of exchange in order to emit unsecured notes to pay for defensive war expenditures in the event that it cannot obtain loans from private banks and it is existentially necessary to do so

So some of the ideals espoused by blockchain activists may clash a bit with that.

redahs commented on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest medium.com/@danrobinson/e... · Posted by u/gottagetmac

pjc50 · 6 years ago

As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.

redahs · 6 years ago

In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property.

The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to pledge as collateral which the public can auction in the event of non-payment.

This way money is placed in circulation so that the interest paid for the first use of legal tender is publicly collected and immediately spent back into the economy and so that the total quantity of money expands dynamically in proportion to the aggregate quantity of physical durable capital.

redahs commented on A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen wclk.com/post/moon-landin... · Posted by u/zolpidem_dream

Causality1 · 6 years ago

We/our government is completely unwilling to invest the multi-trillion dollar expense of creating a permanent moon colony. In light of that, I believe arguments to the effect of "a moon base would make Mars easier" are baseless since creating that type of installation on the moon would dwarf the cost of a single shot to Mars and back. In light of that, our current moon efforts are nothing but make-work doing things we've already done because Mars is actually hard.

redahs · 6 years ago

Which is rational. The annual product of lunar soil is zero. Extending the margin of production to the moon will lower wages and increase poverty. The only way to get the general public behind the idea of settling other planets is through remote terraforming. If there were robots, domes, mirrors, and synthetic organisms put there first to provide free soil, air, and water to settlers, then the annual product of lunar soil be above zero, and off-planet workers could actually receive wages.

redahs commented on A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen wclk.com/post/moon-landin... · Posted by u/zolpidem_dream

redahs · 6 years ago

There's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.

redahs commented on The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population [pdf] web.stanford.edu/~chadj/e... · Posted by u/daviday

travisoneill1 · 6 years ago

The important part of economic growth is GDP/capita, not total GDP. And if we are to keep growing GDP/capita without destroying the environment, a population decline is absolutely necessary. Increasing population is only economically beneficial in the most short term sense.

redahs · 6 years ago

A population decline is certainly not necessary to continue growing GDP/capita. What kind of neo-Malthusian nonsense is that? The economy is operating nowhere near peak performance... at least 1/3 of GDP is lost annually due to private capture of economic rent.

redahs commented on We Must Revive Gopherspace (2017) box.matto.nl/revivegopher... · Posted by u/stargrave

ethbro · 7 years ago

Well said. The article conflates a content / rendering problem with a protocol solution.

A lightweight HTTP/TLS subset that severely limits client-side execution expectations would seem to accomplish the same goals.

While repurposing all the amazing tech we've built since the 1990s.

Essentially, "just pass me the bare minimum of response to make Firefox Reader View work."

... but then we wouldn't be able to serve high-value targeted ads, would we?

redahs · 7 years ago

If the desire is to make online content more readable, it might be worth starting with the assumption that all content downloaded from the network will be read on a black-and-white ereader device with no persistent internet connection.

This assumption might require substantially reworking the hyperlink model of the internet, so that external references to content delivered by third-parties is sharply distinguished from internal references to other pages within the same work.

redahs commented on Can China Turn the Middle of Nowhere into the Center of the World Economy? nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/mooreds

mensetmanusman · 7 years ago

The U.S. lost claim to leadership with Vietnam, and then doubled down with Iraq. It is common in history for the most powerful leaders to mess things up. It is the cycle of life.

redahs · 7 years ago

The U.S. lost Vietnam because rural farmers thought U.S. troops were working for land lords. Land lords would take control of rural areas and start charging farmers rent after it was cleared of Viet Cong. There is a similar problem in Afghanistan: the Afghan government raises most of its revenues from sales and excise taxes, and doesn't tax land owners on property privately seized from rural residents. Since it doesn't tax land and has not centrally issued titles to rural residents, it doesn't have good records on land ownership and can't prevent private land seizures effectively.

These are not inevitable problems. Our politicians just don't understand the difference between land and capital and have undermined U.S. efforts to promote land reform in Asia after it worked so well in Japan.

redahs commented on Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite nytimes.com/2019/01/25/te... · Posted by u/pseudolus

empath75 · 7 years ago

It’ll be a problem because ultimately the people who own all the capital won’t need anyone else to survive. They’ll build walls and robot guards and live in their utopias of plenty while everyone else starves.

redahs · 7 years ago

The ownership of land by value is more unequally distributed than the ownership of capital. Capital depreciates and needs to be regularly replaced each generation. The wealthy have never needed robots to live a life of plenty; they can extract as much labor power as they need through rent.

redahs commented on U.S. Oil Production Is 23 Years Ahead of Schedule bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/petethomas

ethbro · 7 years ago

... And go back to the stone ages.

Fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with burning oil. There are certain applications where it will continue to be the best energy choice.

More important is (a) taxing oil consumption to offset the negative environmental effects & (b) transitioning away from oil where it makes sense.

redahs · 7 years ago

Compact urban settlement is a direct market substitute for the hydrocarbons which would otherwise be required to transport goods and people across longer distances.

The most important thing we can do to transition off of oil and fossil fuels is to maximize the intensity at which we utilize renewable resources which directly substitute for them.

We maximize the intensity at which urban land is utilized by phasing in a 100-1200% national or global land value tax over the next century on the appraised market price which all land is expected to sell for if cleared of improvements.

We can also promote the development of a national, inter-state, zero-emission, passenger & freight rapid-transit market several times faster than automobile highways by allowing private rail and hyper-loop operators to deduct qualified ticket sales from their land value tax liabilities.