• 4 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s the curse of being a leftist. I walk past a coffee shop and think about how there are no third spaces left to hang out for free. Because they were systematically destroyed, in order to separate the people into individuals, and at the same time commodify their leisure at ever growing costs. How there are so many people working miserable jobs in those coffee shops, jobs that we don’t need in the first place. About the chains that have swallowed all the individual businesses that could’ve been of higher quality, had better working conditions and pay. About the bench outside with extra railings, so that the unhoused people couldn’t sleep on it. They’re forced to sleep in designated “bad hoods”, from where they will eventually be kicked out by pigs so that their hoods can be gentrified. And all those freshly gentrified hoods will have tons of empty condos that would never house even one of those displaced people…

    Then I smoke a joint, watch some cute animal videos, and forget about it until the next time I walk past a coffee shop.









  • I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially “boring” ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.

    Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but it’s been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year

    What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.


  • I AM NOT SHILLING CRYPTO IN ANY WAY OKAY THANK YOU

    With that out of the way, those are not intrinsic qualities of either. The fundamentals on which every shitcoin and the bored ape garbage were sold to the public are still very strong. This is like saying “online shopping is horrible” in 2004 - technically not incorrect, but very shortsighted. While the proof of work protocol (mining for it to function and who mines more is the truth) is unsustainable, proof of stake (who holds more is the truth) and mixed ones are fundamentally amazing. Imagine stablecoins pegged to indexes of international currencies. BRICS coin, for example. With smart contracts (rules built into the transaction itself) and being practically legitimate international currencies it opens up so many possibilities. Transparency and easy comparisons in payments - salaries, rents, goods and services. Immutability - you can’t just whack a person and steal the deed to their house. The “chain” part of blockchain - clear history of ownership of assets, no more “I accidentally bought a stolen car/house”. And eventually the contracts can be made complex enough to cover most interpersonal transactions.

    And the same thing for nfts. Especially now, in the rapidly exploding era of unethical AI art, music, etc. Artists could easily sell/lease rights for their work, including for it to be a basis for generative models. It’s not limited to digital products - whatever you want to to confirm ownership of can be tagged with one-way encrypted signatures baked into nfts.

    So both are great technologies that can still be improved on a lot. But it’s just that the ways in which they’re used today are almost exclusively rugpull bubble dogshit.



  • YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity.

    People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they’re primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone’s content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.

    Anyway, I’m not really disagreeing, and it’s speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.


  • The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it’s in their financial interest to do so just doesn’t conform with what we observe happening in reality.

    There is a fundamental difference between a business selling a product and one that simply takes a part of profits from others’ activity. Creators don’t have to take money through Patreon, they can choose any other platform, and for the subscribers it doesn’t make a real difference. Quite the opposite, if a different service was to take a lower fee (and put more money in the pocket of creators), or be more explicitly in line with their content, then people would be even more eager to support them there instead.




  • Crowds gathered on the square in front of the 14-story hotel to celebrate the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, Hotel Ukraine is up for auction as part of an effort to sell off some large state assets to help fund the military and bolster an economy

    Fucking hell man. If this was a movie, you’d call it lazy writing. Literally 90s 2.0, and they’re even making communism the bad guy again somehow.