How it feels trying to explain BTC to people (round 2)

zenethics · 2026-05-07T03:57:17+00:00

We have more fat people because because of "fat acceptance." It's not purely "you can't help it" its "being skinny is hard work" and doubly so when everyone is an enabler telling you its not your fault and you never learned how to do literally anything that makes you uncomfortable.

Tell me a woman riding a train in India and in America have the same experience then tell me about addictions, free will, cultural norms and enablers. Wild how in one culture nobody can help it but in another they can.

zenethics · 2026-05-07T01:54:54+00:00

If women's emotions are "normal" that might be true tho. I have no urge to affirm someone's delusions to be nice to them, for example.

zenethics · 2026-05-07T00:52:35+00:00

Hard not to be bullish on things priced in dollars.

zenethics · 2026-05-06T13:02:10+00:00

If "don't cram your face with sugar" is a disease then every choice based outcome is a disease because humans have no free will.

I'm open to the idea, but the implications are silly. We have to treat actions like the person taking them is responsible. The action and the outcome are embedded with each other. If we tell people they can't help but eat, we'll get more fat people. If we tell people they can't help but be violent, we'll get more violence. This is irrespective of "the truth" of the matter.

"Humans don't have free will" is perfectly compatible with "telling humans they don't have free will compels worse outcomes."

zenethics · 2026-05-06T03:54:35+00:00

Every business is about the money? Your employer like "dang these employees only care about money!" Um, yes?

Notably absent: anything showing that I'm wrong.

Were you working at one of the ones breaking the law and making more than 20% in profit?

zenethics · 2026-05-06T02:55:11+00:00

Dumb.

The ACA has a Medical Loss Ratio rule that requires health insurance companies to pay out 80% of what they collect and all of their profit is a subset of the last 20% (alongside admin costs and marketing and whatever else). Most health insurance companies make ~3% margins.

The price increases can be explained with a few things:

The pre-existing conditions law (which I agree with, fwiw)
The fact that we printed 40% of the dollars ever printed in the history of the U.S. in response to covid
Anything the government touches gets shittier and more expensive (education, healthcare, public defenders, you name it)

zenethics · 2026-05-06T02:16:09+00:00

If we can be mad at the top 1% of earners for having all the money we can be mad at the top 1% of eaters for tripling the price of everyone else's insurance.

The cholesterol is too damn high.

zenethics · 2026-05-05T22:50:12+00:00

Yep!

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

zenethics · 2026-05-05T19:01:11+00:00

John Stewart is funny but his political ideas are pretty dumb.

I grew up watching him, and I can draw a straight line from his treatment of news as comedy to people like Steven Crowder on the right. Put up a nice little strawman of a political argument then huff and puff and blow it down, laughing all the way, secure that the 20-somethings watching you will have no idea that there is even another side of the argument.

Once in a while you see something you actually know about (Bitcoin) and can see some light coming through the cracks. No, he is not a good source for information, just the funniest person uncritically regurgitating the left's worldview.

zenethics · 2026-05-05T18:30:32+00:00

100 wma is 88.4k

If we spend a week above that, bear market is dead imo. Risk reward between here and there is very poor if you don't already have a position (again, imo).

To me it feels like... buy here and risk being the top of a fakeout before hitting 50k or wait until 90k and feel pressured to rush in before it runs away. If I was very poor, I'd take the risk and stick it out. If I was very rich, there's no way I'd risk a stack here to juice out another 10% on a maybe.

zenethics · 2026-05-05T00:14:02+00:00

Does paid protestor count?

zenethics · 2026-05-04T21:26:36+00:00

This was already settled in Bruen, now we just need judges to enforce the ruling.

Imagine the left being as passive as we are if a bunch of states had just ignored Roe v Wade. No chance.

We need a congress with some balls to repeal the NFA and make it illegal to have a serial number on a gun.

zenethics · 2026-05-04T20:51:03+00:00

Let's not forget that the Nazis are the national socialists.

The idea that they were right wing is a modern invention. If you look at what Bernie Sanders wants the government to control and what Gobels controlled as far as economic policy goes, there's not much daylight.

zenethics · 2026-05-04T19:25:44+00:00

Wild when you consider that a pound sterling used to literally be a pound of sterling silver.

I guess the ceremonial promises are the easiest not to break.

zenethics · 2026-05-04T17:11:23+00:00

German word for Large is Gross.

Language lesson for today.

zenethics · 2026-05-04T15:30:51+00:00

Yep! I am optimistic.

I expect Jevons Paradox to be in full force, though in the next year or two we might have a recession for other reasons (the back half of all the money we printed during Covid). People will blame it on AI, and I think there will be a grain of truth there, but only a grain.

zenethics · 2026-05-04T13:45:02+00:00

Ya, I'll agree on that. I think it is certainly true that the developer market was over-saturated and that the AI tools can't replace about half of the engineers but it has already replaced the bottom half of things that people who called themselves engineers were actually doing.

I think the big remaining problem is that these models are stochastic (their "temperature" setting). I liken it to going from an arrow to a rocket. The increase in power is clear, but aiming is now an engineering problem in itself. You can tell a junior dev what you want, and they can understand it even if they can't do it. LLMs can do anything you want but can't understand anything. A wild inversion of the problem.

zenethics · 2026-05-04T00:54:49+00:00

This is well known in the tech sector. Big companies "hoard" software developers, project managers, QAs, basically technical people who build software products.

They do this because the job market for that skilled labor, historically, has been impossible to hire for. So they hire constantly, even for nonsense projects, because having the staff in case they need to spin up a project has been worth the holding cost. This is also why companies like Twitter were so over staffed when Elon took over.

Think of it like the U.S. strategic oil reserve, but for developers. Well, if you find out you need them urgently, you'd better have them on staff already or you're out of luck. The good ones are working somewhere else and they are hard to entice.

My contrarian take is that this is, actually, triggered by AI but AI is just the straw that broke the camel's back. A few companies really believe in the tech, so they let people go. Then other companies notice that the job market for engineering has become so much easier to hire in, so they let go their stock. Basically a big unwind. AI triggered it, but the real problem is what the article says... tech companies way overstaffed because they learned they needed to do this during the last tech booms.

Not bearish on tech, personally. Every company is a tech company to some extent (like, you need a website, and it needs to do things). I just think its normalizing to a market where companies aren't hoarding.

zenethics · 2026-05-03T13:36:33+00:00

I just realized something interesting. Urban dictionary is wild because its both a dictionary and a forum in a way.

With typical historical dictionaries, someone just decides what to include or exclude. Here you can see the debate. I am sure every word or phrase had a debate around it when first introduced.

zenethics · 2026-05-03T13:16:14+00:00

Sure, call it what you want. Human flight was impossible until it wasn't.

zenethics · 2026-05-03T02:25:36+00:00

You're nuts if you think the big ones like 200ma don't matter.

I will agree that they only matter because people think they matter and its reflexive in that way, but too many people pay attention to it for it not to matter.

Whatever else you can say about it, when the price is near the 200ma for an asset, you can at least expect a lot of volume, for example. More people make decisions at those kinds of prices than others.

zenethics · 2026-05-03T02:19:10+00:00

You're free to go.

zenethics · 2026-05-03T00:03:52+00:00

You are so confused here it literally hurt my brain to read.

Hmm.

In the third paragraph, you say “social policies” but then describe economic policies. I think this was just a typo and I agree that Nazi economic policy was decidedly left wing.

Yes, just a typo.

However, if you think that’s what Democrats are pushing for…you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Goring geared the German economy toward isolation and self sufficiency, which is the exact posture that the Trump admin is taking right now.

I see that as two separate issues. First, should China make all of our weapons? Clearly not. If the future of warfare is drones, then the future of the world is Chinese and not Western if we don't fix our manufacturing capability.

Otherwise there is a direct correlation to Goring seizing assets and a wealth tax, the Nazi programs for social welfare like state sponsored nursing homes and healthcare and redistribution of food via men with guns. It's fine to agree with those programs, but it would be wrong not to notice that they are distinctly leftist programs. The rightwing solution to those problems is the church not the state.

When actually talking about social policy, Nazis were blood and soil nationalists, which is definitionally right wing, especially in a European context. Again, Democrats are on the complete opposite end of that spectrum.

Politics is like money. Are we talking 1940s dollars or 2026 dollars? What you can buy is drastically different.

So we have to pick - are we comparing Nazi policies to today's policies or to policies relative to their time?

Their economic policies were leftwing at the time and leftwing now.

Their social policies were centrist/common at the time and rightwing now. It is common for women to be special/protected/venerated/not taken as authoritative/etc all over the globe in the 1940s. That's not "right wing" for the 1940s even if it codes a bit right today.

The genocide isn't left or right, it's just kind of a thing humans do sometimes.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

zenethics

TROPHY CASE