magicsmoke

5 ms·

1.
by magicsmoke 5y ago
The state could already force people under their control to sell commodities to their soldiers for clay tokens. Why switch to gold, a much more difficult resource to obtain and produce coinage with? Was clay suddenly no longer convenient fo
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
You should rethink that phrasing. That's a heads I win tails you lose kind of proposal.
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
This was a really enjoyable read and actually helped plugged a few gaps I got from Graeber's work. I personally think his model for where money originated is very solid. Early human tribes work on emotional kinship ties and obligations
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advancements is. If the free market was all we need, then why
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NYC vote. Planned obsolescence is also a form of this. Wh
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass. Investments they would not have made ot
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
If you're in a situation where a state is after you, cash or bitcoin isn't going to help. If they decide you owe them hundreds of millions, they'll claw it from you when you try to spend that cash on oil and find out your tan
8.
by magicsmoke 5y ago
If you subscribe to MMT, the IOU here is that the government promises not to throw you in jail for failure to pay taxes if you give them some tokens every year. If you own land within the boundaries of a state, and you decide not to answer
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
On the one hand, they're right to cringe at the tone-deaf socialist era government communist propaganda. "How do you do fellow kids" with a communist flare. Clearly produced by cadres in their 60s in a communist bubble. On th
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle, they&
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Using drones wasn't going to dramatically increase the damage someone like the Boston Marathon bomber did or decrease his chances of getting caught. Would be domestic terrorists are deterred by the fact that they are domestic and will
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Depends on what is considered a loss. Bombers flying towards the political capital = launch the nukes. Navy sunk and the enemy is setting up a blockade = maybe we'll go be north Korea instead of giving up existence here. Both sides bur
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
It might also be instructive to compare with medicine or law. These practitioners are also liable for their actions, have to be licensed by a professional organization, and can have their credentials revoked in the event of gross incompeten
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
It's weird that most of the discussion is focused on a false dichotomy between a single universal language for all humanity, and preserving every single language that exists today even if they only have a few dozen speakers. The realit
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Gree
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
As someone who speaks a language that may be going the way of the dodo in a couple of years, watching his family back home decide not to pass it onto the next generation because it has no economic value and takes away from the rat race of s
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Astronaut: English Cosmonaut: Russian Taikonaut: Chinese Spationaut: French Vyomanaut: Indian Based on their entries on wikitionary it looks like most phonetically written languages are able to express all these terms. Whether they commonly
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
The confusion over Chinese names and logograms is pretty funny considering that in Chinese, western names are written with a set of phonetic logograms and losing that spelling information with latin/cyrillic characters makes it hard to
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect http
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Contractual penalty clauses are activated: Good luck collecting, get lost. Credit rating is dinged: In the eyes of the lenders that debt trapped you. Why would you still want to be rated well by them? Country cannot secure international fin
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Nationalizing the infrastructure is always an option. Unlike the US, China can't send marines around the world to seize the property.
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
There's a kind of twisted logic to it. If your construction techniques are constantly improving and the high volume of construction incentivizes you to develop more cost efficient construction technologies, then planned obsolescence of
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Looks like Kylin OS uses the Linux kernel. While not impossible to use in a real-time application (SpaceX Falcon 9 uses it) there's definitely work involved in stripping it down enough to work as an RTOS. NASA Perseverance uses VxWorks
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
> (c) any act aimed at collecting information to the prejudice of the defence or security of the coastal State This could have an extremely broad interpretation. Any military ship sailing through territorial waters with some passive wire
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
I meant that if he was willing to put his family through that much trouble, they probably weren't that close in the first place. In which case, what does or doesn't happen to family left behind isn't a large factor in decidin
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Even in a nonauthoritarian country, defecting means you'll never return again to see your friends and family anyways. Given that, defectors probably consider making a political stand more important than their personal connections regar
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
Probably higher than your average citizen without access to classified information, but not high enough to make defection a common occurrence that significantly hampers intelligence work. Some hackers may be disillusioned with the system, b
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
If that's the case we would see an effort to reverse those wrongs by reverting all the economic benefit that America gained at the expense of Native Americans. All the land and lives taken, and all the wealth and prosperity they could
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
The cost to launch that weight into space and make sure it hits its intended target on landing would make it prohibitively expensive.
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by magicsmoke 5y ago
It seems like what's implied behind this question is that any Chinese hacker that's exposed to uncensored material would immediately turn against their evil regime, so the regime must constantly be on guard against ideological inf

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