Great, please state your expertise in these matters.
The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.
This isn't like stealing from a business. These are individuals most private conversations, potentially including their bank accounts etc. Poverty is no defence - and yes, I've spent a great deal of my life barely scraping by. You'll find poor people are significantly less tolerant of theft, especially from individuals, than rich. Whether that evidences the theft inherent in most forms of wealth generation I'll leave up to the reader.
Hackerspaces still exist - and seem to be booming again since the tech layoffs. Dropped by Noisebridge while I was visiting SF and as the kids say, the vibes were immaculate.
Do you participate in a hackerspace though, or do you just visit? I've realised I've become far too passive as a result of consuming mass internet media.
Because it works... The level of counterfeit currency is readily measurable. Currency can be withdrawn and replaced. Individual stolen notes can be tracked. Counterfeiting of the dollar and the euro today is a relatively minor problem
There counterfeiting is not the issue; it’s unauthorized transfers or alterations to the account ledger. In both cases there are many layers of backup record keeping and procedures to investigate and correct errors.
The participants (the banks) are trusted to validate transactions before sending them, and are responsible for fixing bad transactions. And if they keep screwing up they can lose access.
> In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.
To quote Fran Lebowtiz "A great audience is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are"... We've lost a great, ironic, self aware informed commentariat because a literate, emotionally stable audience for long form content has shrunk. Which means the work isn't there (or at least isn't distributed beyond a few substacks), to perpetuate and expand that audience.
I see the same effect all the time in fiction. Innovative challenging books don't get published (or even picked up by agents), because the publishing industry is run by the kind of people who are frightened and offended by such books. Which means the audience for those books become only those lucky enough to be exposed to older, denser, more innovative fiction - which invariably shrinks.
> Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.
True.
> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.
Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.
By state of nature I means the non human vilification life space.
Of course a concentration camp isn’t the state of nature
I’m saying human compassion far exceeds anything witnessed in the animal/plant kingdom. Some animals show affection for their offspring, but it usually doesn’t extend beyond that. There is no dog or lizard or tree version of mother Teressa
The Aztecs lacked horses and attack dogs. The Spanish by contrast had perfected combat with both. Both proved decisive over and over again. You're correct in asserting that guns weren't decisive - although initially he noise and visual display of firearms were a significant factor in confusing and frightening the Aztecs (especially the common people and subjugated indigenous groups).
I think the horses proved useful in some situations (at least to scare the people who had never seen riders), but then the number of horses was somewhere between a dozen at the start and never more than a hundred. And from what I've been reading their use in battle was often hit and miss because the cavalery often didn't have enough room to be effective.
The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.
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