Male, female, transgender, white, black, straight, homosexual, rich, poor, country of origin...
Again, this is my point. Any time there is an overabundance of straight white males, and only straight white males, discrimination is presumed, with no actual evidence to suggest that these groups are equal in every task.
You wouldn't argue that there are not systematic differences in physical performance between these various groups, but somehow cognitive performance, which is even more strongly influenced by environment and upbringing, is not allowed to be examined objectively.
Why do you assume that I am a straight white male?
Why do you assume I lived a life of priveledge because of the color of my skin and my gender?
This is exactly what I'm describing. One cannot fight racism with racism.
Now I'm being threatened with a ban for expressing such an opinion. At what point does it become acceptable to discuss this topic? When straight white men become a minority? If we allow threads like these to be posted repeatedly, why is it ok to suppress the other side of the discussion?
I think there is a growing problem in our society, or at least what appears in media, wherein any systematic discrepancy is blamed automatically on some kind of discrimination, without consideration of the possibility for consistent differences in merit between subpopulations.
I understand that there are legitimate reasons that someone may need assistance.
My problem is with this nonsensical mentality that, without any actual statistics, people automatically assume that anyone struggling is a victim of circumstance. Or worse, that they have somehow been abused or stolen from by those with money. Which, by the way, I believe I'd a relatively new outlook in the history of the U.S.
The danger is that it encourages people to live haphazardly and in the long run is not sustainable. And, quite frankly, I have no desire to pay for people who lived selfishly in their own time.
Are you sure that the problem doesn't actually exist in Europe and Canada? Are you sure it isn't offset by a culture where the young are expected to care more for their elders?
>Her savings long gone, and having never done much long-term financial planning
And so again we are expected to pay for the mistakes of others. What incentive is there to save if you know you have a social net to save you anyway?
Yes, I understand, it is a terrifying way to live, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but if we deincentivize personal responsibility, what stops this from becoming a larger problem? How can this be sustainable?
Edit: please do not mistake my attempt at objectivity for callousness. One must divorce personal feelings of pity and empathy for individuals when discussing matters which affect hundreds of millions of people. There comes a point where there are more people requiring assistance than we are capable of supporting, and part of the solution is to discourage recklessness.
Awesome, but to me this stuff is also terrifying, and I can't quite place why.
Something about dissecting intelligence, and the potential that our own minds process things similarly. Creepy how our reality is distilled into these uncanny valley type matrices.
Also, I suspect it says something that these images look like what people report seeing on psychedelic trips...
Weird how you haven't considered population density, or housing safety regulations, or the state of the economy, or the average productivity of immigrants looking for a better life at the turn of the century compared to the homeless in modern cities...
Almost as if comparing NYC 100 years ago to modern Seattle is total nonsense.
Right, the solution is to give addicts more money to buy drugs. I suppose that'll solve the problem when they inevitably OD and we can stop wasting our money on them.
I'm not speaking from an ivory tower either, like many UBI supporters seem to do. I grew up with friends who were addicts. Ive known people who died of overdose. Plenty of kids are more than happy to throw away their lives smoking weed and shooting up, especially if they're getting their shit for free.
For the record, I support responsible drug use. But UBI is not the answer for the problems in our society, because it will hurt many if not most of the people it should protect.
Maybe some of us prefer not deincentivizing work and creating an even larger subpopulation which is entirely dependent on government and won't be employable for generations?
We live in a reality where resources still require effort and capital to extract from the environment. A society can only support so many through welfare before it collapses.
The subject is a little more nuanced than watching people die out of some kind of jealousy.
But you're ignoring the fact that bitcoin is about more than simply moving money. There is value in security and decentralization.
Further, GDP ignores consumption, it is gross product, not net product. Further indication to me that comparing bitcoin to power consumption of a small country is inappropriate. Apples to oranges.
Edit: after reading a couple articles on wikipedia, I'm confused. Gross implies product before subtraction of consumption (I.E. revenue), while wikipedia claims that GDP factors in so called intermediate consumption, which would make it more like a net value (I.e. profit). Do we have any economists browsing? Genuinely curious.
Everyone is happy to sentationalize the amount of energy that the bitcoin network uses, but no one ever mentions how much energy use is acceptable.
Nor does anyone seem to attempt a thorough cost/benefit analysis. How much energy from financial infrastructure could bitcoin free up?
Edit: vague comparisons like these really bug me, because while they make problems seem large by comparing them to A WHOLE COUNTRY, they actually offer little in the way of information. Most of us know nothing about Ecuador's energy use in comparison to any other country or industry, except perhaps that it is relatively small. But I guess it gets you the clicks...
That was one of the final straws for me. I don't think anyone should trust Facebook with enough information to completely take over someone's real life identity.
FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.
You're right, I misspoke. My point I think still stands - there are something like 1-2 thousand different Cryptos, many without ICOs, but there is little value in purchasing them, be it via ICO or an ordinary exchange.
While I suspected the same, after reading the article, the author does not conflate the bursting of the crypto bubble with the price of BTC.
After this realization I was able to set aside my indignation and observe that the author makes a good point in that most other Cryptos and "blockchainy" startups are doomed to fail, while BTC as he claims will likely recover (he makes some mention of a v-shaped price trend in BTC when the bubble bursts.
I think many crypto-currencies (with and without ICOs) are rather obvious cash grabs that provide no actual value beyond speculation (e.g. dogecoin); was something comparable going on during the .com bubble? Were there many companies offering no actual value and taking in cash?
Edit: I originally conflated cryptos with ICOs, and have since corrected the mistake.
Again, this is my point. Any time there is an overabundance of straight white males, and only straight white males, discrimination is presumed, with no actual evidence to suggest that these groups are equal in every task.
You wouldn't argue that there are not systematic differences in physical performance between these various groups, but somehow cognitive performance, which is even more strongly influenced by environment and upbringing, is not allowed to be examined objectively.