ricecake @ ricecake @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

It can be, but it's not typical. I've actually used the barter system more often than I've even heard of people actually using crypto for routine business transactions. And I live in an area where barter is not a standard arrangement.

It's not just the cost of the transaction, which can vary depending on demand (lack of predicability is another issue), it's also how long the transactions can take. For any retail establishment, taking an hour to process a transaction is entirely unfit for purpose. A minute is too long.

In your use case, you're using Bitcoin more like a payment processor than as a currency. Something like PayPal would work just as well if your bank played ball, and would work faster and have more predictable costs.

Yes and no.

It's a collection of numbers with properties related to how they're found that make them difficult to counterfeit, and the way they're recorded makes it difficult to steal. This, as well as a handful of other properties, give digital currencies behavior not entirely unlike the things that make cash useful.

Unlike money, it's not backed by a government. This means that it's much more volatile in terms of value. Say what you will about the state of the US, it's unlikely that the dollar will significantly change value over the next year. It's essentially guaranteed that the price of every cryptocurrency will be wildly different a year from today.
Put them together and you've got a wonderful vehicle for laundering money or bribery, which is what this all is.
The other key aspect of money that it's missing is being generally useful outside of speculation. I can reliably use my dollars to pay for goods and services, and most significantly to pay taxes and satisfy debts in the eyes of the law. Cryptocurrency is inevitably either instantly converted to money once someone gets it, or it's held onto under the assumption it'll be worth more later.
Money has value because it gets you "stuff". Cryptocurrency has value because it gets you money.

It's fake money, but it's a very complicated and realistic fake money.

Just for the record I looked at how they encrypt and sign the data and it's nothing I would call over the top or particularly troublesome.
Signing data that's used to configure a piece of hardware isn't unreasonable in my book.

It would certainly be better to have a mechanism for custom tags, and better yet the ability for you to trust a filament producers key, but the mechanism they've used for the signing really doesn't say anything to me of note.

That's the rough bit: they're still useful, and they won't withdraw their support. What are they gonna do? Vote for a Democratic representative? You'll just see the pro-trump republican lose to the anti-trump republican, and that's a difference that only goes as deep as campaign speeches.

You don't have to go out of your way to defend things that are putting a nice veneer on eugenics.

And for the record, if you read the article it's clearly about them being arrogant and generally absolutely fucking weird. "If more people like us don't have children, the world will stop seeing innovation and economic prosperity. It's very important that the right people reproduce."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_and_Malcolm_Collins

Well that's just a fucking trip of dysfunction.

Just that bit is a lot.

If the population declined and it makes the economy do less well, won't people just have more children like they did the last time the economy was in that state? Every environment has a carrying capacity for the creatures that live in it. It's not uncommon to see fluctuations above and below that equilibrium point.
Instead of pushing people to ignore the factors that cause the limit in humans, like not wanting or needing more children, maybe find a way to organize society so hitting that limit doesn't cause massive problems, or try to eliminate some of the factors creating the limit. It's insanely difficult in our society to have even one child who's healthy, cared for, and prepared for their adult life while also being personally healthy, prepared for old age, and enjoying the variety of pleasures of existence.

The flip side is we don't think about the old ACs that destroyed themselves inside the expected lifetime, we only see the freaks that blast on regardless of damage and just never deteriorate. If the old ones all lasted 50+ years, we wouldn't see people needing to buy new ones.

It's still probably the case that older devices without plastic control boards lasted longer, but it's worth remembering that we only see the edge cases.
Also, some of the old appliances will keep trying to function even when they've degraded to the point of being nearly inoperable, where the new device will be able to detect that it's not working right and shutdown, probably before it's not worth it to run anymore, but probably in time to be reparable.

A lot of the new ones, as you said, take longer because they default to an eco mode and use less resources. Mine at least has a mode that ignores that and just goes all out.

I usually don't use it because it's easier to just plan ahead and I don't really ever need it to finish that fast.

It's also nice that it can tell if something needs more or less washing by checking the water occlusion.

You were backing someone up? I responded to someone asking how people weren't upset and you replied about how it's the worst. Telling someone they're wrong for not being irritated by something kinda feels like you care.

The whole thing is great, but for me 3:50 is where you can really pick up the whole vibe in just about a minute. Particularly the perfectly respectful way of handling not knowing how to pronounce someone's name. And then lapsing into a hallucinogenic zone out time.

Alright. And you felt the need to express that you thought it looked stupid to a person saying the meaning was clear to them, so they weren't upset?

Do you get why someone might think the meaning wasn't clear?

If it was your first time seeing the prefix used that way, and the meaning was immediately clear despite not being your style, why do you care?

Okay. And as I said, I don't really get hung up on number formatting if the meaning was clear.

If it's not confusing, and it was understandable, why in hell do you care enough to argue about it even if it wasn't the style you'd prefer?

There's also "no such thing" as a decibel, since a bel is also not an official SI unit. Yet we all understood what you meant when you said kilodecibel (instead of the more formally proper "hectobel") despite it not being an SI unit and being two si prefixes attached improperly.

I fail to see the meaningful distinction between one thousand-percent and one-thousand percent. I agree that they used a common abbreviation for a number. I just don't actually care, which is what I said to the person incredulous that someone could not be upset.

A percentage is a dimensionless number, but percent is still a unit. Just think about how you use it. Something can increase by 5 students, or it can increase by 15%.

Regardless, is "m" standing for a concrete measure and ”%” for a proportional one really the source of since confusion and anger? What about db, or decibel? It's a measure of the ratio of quantities on a logarithmic scale, and is regularly applied to sound, electricity and other values. Is it as confusing?

Okay. I don't typically get that caught up in the formatting of a number if the meaning is clear. 1k means 1000 in basically every context, and a unit indicator doesn't make it more confusing to me. Are you likewise baffled by something being written as "1km"?

Because the meaning is obvious?

I've found my preferences have been creeping up in price again, but only because I've found I want an actually physically lightweight laptop, and those have been getting more available, linux-able and capable.

I only need a few hundred dollars worth of computer, and anything more can live on a rack somewhere. I'll pay more than that for my computer to be light enough I don't need to think about.

I don't think that reading of the who page tracks, and I kinda struggle to see how you got what you did from it.

Gender [categories] refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.

Gender interacts with but is different from sex

Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity.

Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

(As an aside, I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky)

I really feel like there's this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.

It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed.
"Gender" is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it's expected that people know which is being referred to by context.

In your example involving race, I don't think that's a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they're not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to.
In the "gender is a social construct" case, I don't think there's agreement about what the word "gender" is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.

It's like if someone says "gender isn't a social construct" and I keep hearing them imply "women are naturally more differential and domestic, and men more forceful and outdoorsy", even once they explain they meant an individuals identity is more than social convention.

I think there's a conflation of terms here. There's Big G Gender, and little g individual-gender-identity.

Genders are social constructs. "Girls like pink and ponies" is not tied to anything except culture.
Your gender identity however, is absolutely not a social construct. Otherwise people wouldn't be raised as one gender, live that way for decades and then figure out that the reason things have felt "wrong" is because they've been living a gender that doesn't fit.

The given examples were about gender identity, how that's correlated with biology, and how it's more than just how you present yourself to the world.

Conflating Gender and gender identity can lead to a lot of confusion.

Accept "I have no idea" as an answer, and don't use it as an opportunity to push things in the direction you want.
learn to account for people being wrong, and don't punish them for it.

Engineers want to be accurate. They don't want to give answers that they're unsure about or just speculating.
Early in their careers they're often willing to, but that gets beaten out of them pretty quickly by people with deadlines. Expressing uncertainty often means the person interprets the answer in the direction they want, and then holds the engineer to that answer.
"It could be anywhere from 2-8 months I think, but we won't know until we're further into the design phase" is taken as 2 months, planned around, and then crunch Time starts when it starts to go over. Or revising an estimate once new information or changing requirements are revealed is treated as incompetence, even though more work taking more time is expected.

It's in the self interest of the engineer to be cagey. "I don't like to give estimates this early" is much harder to turn into a solid commitment than an earnest best estimate given the current known state of the project.

Similar for resources required or processes. Anything you don't say is unlikely to be held against you.

I get that it can be frustrating to know a deeper and more nuanced definition of a thing and come up against people using a simpler, different or "hijacked" definition: I work in computer security and enjoy playing with machine learning. Most people get a very different impression if I say I do a lot of stuff with crypto and AI from what I mean. They hear finance bro and wasteful chatbots, and I mean user authentication, privacy and statistics.

A big point of friction I see is that it seems you're reading the words people say, interpreting them as though they're coming from the same background as you, and then responding in their terms.

If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance"

There is frustration that is generated by the "gender is just a social construct".

hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct

The "performance" and "just" a social construct interpretations are what you're bringing, not the person typing.

Being told gender, that you had to struggle to find a way to make right, is reducible to how you were socialized or choose to act flies in the face of the existence of trans people and the difficulties they invariably have and is justifiably infuriating.
That the message is being given by people who very clearly, in both intent and action, believe the exact opposite should make it clear that there's a dictionary mismatch somewhere.
I feel like it stems from the belief that "social construct" implies "social constructionism".
Social constructionism is a specific theory involving social constructs , and acknowledging the existence of a social construct doesn't imply acceptance of that theory.

I don't think any reasonable person would argue that law is anything other than real by fiat of convention or collective agreement, but someone could easily disagree with the notion that scientific discovery is more about social convention than empirical reality.

Most people mean it in the sense that the WHO means it: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1