> I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted.
Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.
> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
What makes it the fastest?
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.
> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
>> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.
> This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible.
>> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> Do we know each other?
Probably not, but I can smell a state believer when I see him.
> No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
If they are, it's a pretty low baseline. They are but a shadow of what they once were.
>> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
> I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
The article I posted has a link [1]. There you can see the number of people arrested went up from 5502 in 2017 to 12183 in 2023. It's a pretty sharp decline in freedom of speech.
The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.
The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.
The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.
> American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue
The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.
American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.
You completely missed the point of what I wrote and ignored the majority, just so you could claim that Nazi speech is actually a left-wing issue — which is not a claim I think many people outside of the USA would agree with.
I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.
> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.
A spokesperson for Leicestershire police clarified that offences under section 127 and section 1 can include any form of communication and may also be “serious domestic abuse-related crimes”. [1]
It seems misleading to count arrests related to domestic abuse as "anti-free speech".
It seems very politically convenient to be able to hide that one number behind the other. To obfuscate something highly controversial by making it artificially conflated with something everyone would agree on with.
This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.
It would indeed be better to have the separate counts. It's also wrong to attribute to only one case what is a actually a larger category, unless there is actual evidence that it's the overwhelming majority anyways. Both can be true at the same time.
I'm not trying to win anything, and I do support privacy. I just think any argument, especially those citing specific numbers, should be based on an accurate description of reality.
>"That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed."
Give them a little time. They'll catch up. Comparatively to what the UK used to be it is sliding down, more and more. One should be more concerned about what is happening in their country rather than consoling themselves that there are worce places.
Bitcoin was envisioned by its creator to be used as a currency. To buy and sell stuff using it. If you ask today what is bitcoin you'll be told that it is a store of value. The purpose of money is not to be a store of value. It can be, but that is not its purpose which the case of bitcoin clearly illustrates.
> Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses".
And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
To become a medium of exchange, it needs to become a unit of account. That will happen as it's value stabilises, and that will only happen once it's proved itself as a store of value.
What if Henry Ford evisaged his Model T being used as a temporary alternative for when your horse is unwell? Or a fairground ride? Bitcoin is what it is.
> And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
Interest - the age-old solution. Offer me interest that both compensates me for not having use of my money and for the risk of getting it back, and we have a deal.
Value can only stabilise if there's either someone in charge adjusting the rate of printing to maintain a stable value. It cannot be done algorithmically as there's no way to determine the value from inside the system.
Non-deflationary currencies encourage hoarding which leads to wild swings in value. Deflationary currencies do much better. Look at the price chart of BTC vs XMR.
It depends how you measure value. By stabilise I mean stops growing in value by 50%/yr with big short term swings of 80%.
As it matures and gets close to it's ultimate value, volatility will naturally reduce.
Once it is used as the unit of account, everything else will fluctuate in value relative to bitcoin, which has more stable fundamentals than anything else on earth (fixed/zero issuance, liquidity etc), but this will be decades in the future when it's dollar value will be 8 or 9 figures in today's money
Not at all. It naturally stabilises the closer it gets to its ultimate market cap. The more it stabilises the more it will be used as a medium of exchange.
There is no evidence for this. When gold and gold-backed currency were used for trade, it fluctuated in value wildly and there were several depressions each decade. After centrally-issued fiat currency was introduced, it had a much more stable value, since it could be issued counter-cyclically.
How are you measuring the value of gold? How are you sure it's not the value of the quote asset that fluctuating wildly. If everything was priced in gold do you really think that the prices of everything would fluctuate wildly? For what reason? The only reason for any sudden changes in value of gold are due to demand, which is caused as people move their wealth out of fiat currencies which are collapsing in value.
The prices of things vary due to speculation as well as demand and supply. Gold is an industrial metal which has to be mined, thus making supply uncertain and exposed to the whims of miners. Central bank issued currencies are managed by varying the supply according to economic conditions, which has given economies much better stability as a result.
There's nothing special about gold except that some people think that it's a panacea. It's not, it's still an industrial metal. "Fiat currencies which are collapsing in value" has no basis in fact. It's just mindless ideology at best and no better than a conspiracy theory.
Fiat currencies are collapsing in value. It's a fact.
Price fiat in any hard asset like gold, real estate, bitcoin etc and it's obvious to see. The devaluation can be seen to be almost directly linked to the increase in the supply which approximately doubles each decade (no coincidence that real estate prices do the same).
There is something very special about gold. It has the best monetary qualities of any physical substance. It is only bettered by bitcoin which essentially dematerialises gold - stripping away it's physical attributes that hinder it (portability, scarcity, verifiability, divisibility etc).
I can answer that question: you don't have any. Your vague anecdotes don't count as such. You need hard figures and there aren't any showing any such thing.
I explained the evidence very clearly in my last answer. You're clearly not acting in good faith. You try and help people on here and this is what you get every time. GFY.
You should get some help yourself. And "GFY"? Very classy. Clearly demonstrates good faith on your part. Really shows the strength of your argument and your ability to deliver that argument. Only the most intelligent and educated people tell people to "GFY", obviously.
But back to your "argument". Google "anecdotal" and "non sequitur". But to save you time, here's a summary: you're not providing evidence, but instead a story that you created that attempts to support your augment. Then you deliver a series of non sequiturs, where your claims don't support your conclusion.
So again, please provide evidence instead of nonsensical and unsupported claims, then we can have an actual "good faith" discussion that I'm sure will be very helpful to everyone.
I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.
You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.
You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
Clicked the link but ctrl+f doesn't find any posts by you.
> The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.
That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?
> You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?
> And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims?
TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
> That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?
It's essentially automated tooling. The happy path (i.e. buyer and seller are in agreement) "just works" but when there's a disagreement you can rely on the contract to walk through all of the conflict resolution paths with whatever level of complexity the contract builds in for consensus from multiple third parties, etc.
i.e. It's tooling that replaces manual bureaucratic arbitration with state machines and consensus algorithms.
For two party smart contracts this means there's no third party but there's an inherent risk of exploitation by one party or the other by the design of the contract. It's inherent to two party contracts relying on any physical exchange but if you trust the party the contract is weighted in favor of, it cuts out any opportunity for arbitration and the complexity that comes with that. Now the only trust assumption is the two parties trust in each other.
For contracts with some arbitration process however things get more complicated. Who all is involved in arbitration. Who does the buyer trust. Who does the seller trust. What's the reputation of one of these arbiters? This reputation can be loosely represented as a set of markets for the arbiter with demand from sellers and demand from buyers. If those two markets are out of sync from each other that suggests an impartial arbiter and both parties can reason about that.
> What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?
Well. Part of it is that laws are an inherently fuzzy thing and how they are upheld is entirely dependent on a long running and constantly evolving chain of interpretations from past court decisions. And of course how they are upheld in a specific case comes down to how well lawyers are able to convince a judge or a collection of jurors who were more or less selected at random with anyone semi-literate about the law thrown out ahead of time. So it boils down to "who is best able to sway the opinions of this random collection of people who are as illiterate about the law as the lawyers could manage to get them". Which mostly just boils down to feelings.
Of course contracts often go to arbitration instead of to court proper so it's a different case there but arbiters are single authorities that almost universally side with the bigger entity (i.e. whoever is paying them to handle arbitration). So unless you are two large orgs, arbitration is inherently biased.
So an alternative is a largely automated system where multiple third parties who are selected ahead of time by the buyer and seller can be relied upon for arbitration and where their decision is for all intents and purpose final. The buyer and the seller have equal decision making power in the selection of these third parties and they can evaluate the reputations of these third parties prior to entering the contract.
i.e. you are moving away from trust in a large system with a thousand moving parts all performed by infallible people swayed by emotions and an endless process of appeals OR a single arbiter almost always paid by the larger party who will always rule in their favor. Instead putting your trust into a strict set of automated rules with a formal analysis of outcomes backing it + some optional assortment of selected third parties + a consensus mechanism for those third parties.
> TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
Yes. It is exactly that. A new medium to write contracts on. Manual bureaucratic systems and thousands upon thousands of people working in a complex legal system are replaced by a machine. Humans are still in the loop of course but only for making specific decisions at specific times in the process.
And at the time of agreeing to the contract the relevant parties can ideally rely on tooling to explicitly outline at what points each party is taking on a degree of risk, the likelihood of that risk, and the process for moving forward in those cases.
An extremely reductive TLDR is that the goal is to take a system that relies on an army of lawyers and legal analysts and reduce it down into something digestible and navigable by a single lawyer (or even a well educated layperson) with all the existing complexity abstracted away by formal methods tooling.
> The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it.
This is not true at all. It isn't left available to those who absolutely need it but to those who can pay for it. Those are two very different things.
You're attempting to construct a notion of need separate from the empirical experience of people's concrete choices, but that isn't possible if you want to be scientific. If a person spends $400 on a phone instead of 32gb of ram, they need the phone more than the ram. If a company spends $400 on ram instead of on some other production good, they need the ram more than the other production good - they expect it to generate more revenue.
These two exchanges are not disconnected either: phone prices are affected by revenues of companies which use ram for production. And those revenues are determined by purchases of phones. The person demonstrates through their choice that the use of ram for an indirect purpose of making phones (however indirectly that might effect it) is more valuable to them than the direct use in their computer. The person is not excluded from "having" the ram in the most general sense: they have it indirectly because they benefit from its use in production whose products they value more than the direct use of ram. The person, along with all other consumers, participates in organizing production in the manner that best benefits them, according to their needs, which may not necessarily involve them directly owning the thing.
The article linked here brings some more details, but also, the official statement doesn't use the word "compromised". If it did, well it would be a statement with different meaning than the one that was released for us to read.
From GP: "But you don't use AI to define rules on the fly."
Neither Claude nor Perplexity change the rules they work by on the request to request basis. Code that Claude outputs isn't the code the Claude runs on and Perplexity did not on its own decide to create python scripts because other ways it was calculating large sums did not work well. Those tools work within the given rule set, they do not independently change those rules if the request warrants it.
> Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.
This isn't really true. As GP said, there isn't a kernel level anti cheat for linux. You can switch a flick on BattleEye to run on linux but it wont be a kernel level as it is on windows. So there is an incentive for them to not turn it on because it simply is the worse version than the windows one. As far as I know even on windows you get cheats even if it is kernel level. Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.
> Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.
There's an easy way to not get cheaters, or at least to slow down their impact: stop making your games "free to play". When cheaters have to buy 60€ games everytime they get b&, eventually they'll run out of money.
If anything the Tarkov ban treadmill is a way to drive sales. Even if some of them get disputed as fraudulent due to stolen card numbers, BSG may still come out ahead.
Battleeye games get flooded with cheaters no matter what. On most anti cheats is the same anyways. Just see tarkov for a battleeye game with rampant cheaters
Rolling back a change that causes loss of user trust does not automatically restore that trust. It takes time and ongoing public commitment to regain that trust.
> If that was the case, then why does the site from the EU first off track
If you are asking why there isn't a "reject all" button on their webpage then the answer is simple. There is one. The "Accept only essential cookies".
> and secondly why does it use a cookie banner rather than some other solution that would not be malicious compliance with the law?
GDPR (general data protection regulation) is about general data protection, not about technology. It applies the same no matter if you are using cookies or something else.
> Can a company go wrong implementing the same approach as https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en uses? Why is that considered malicious compliance with the law?
The example you've given is an example of compliance since there is a button to reject all tracking cookies. Whenever you read the words malicious compliance within the context of this discussion you can just swap it with the word illegal which is the correct word for the behavior that is being bemoaned here.
> Whenever you read the words malicious compliance within the context of this discussion you can just swap it with the word illegal which is the correct word for the behavior that is being bemoaned here.
I don't think that's the case. A number of people downthread are quite explicit that they find being asked at all annoying and don't think websites should be allowed to throw up cookie banners all the time.
I'm asking "if cookie consent banners are the less than idea solution, why isn't the official EU government site implementing it in a way that is ideal?"
If a company is deciding how to comply with the GDPR on its website, can it go wrong with copying how that site does it? Alternatively, if it tries something that is new, do they risk getting sued by the EU for not following the GDPR?
My claim that it isn't malicious compliance to use cookie consent banners, but rather the least risky approach since that is exactly how europa.eu complies with their own laws.
> I'm asking "if cookie consent banners are the less than idea solution, why isn't the official EU government site implementing it in a way that is ideal?"
Cookie banners are perfectly valid solution to the problem. GP originally said that the ideal solution is to avoid cookie banners by not tracking users. Not that if you want to track users there is a better solution than presenting them with a cookie banner.
> If a company is deciding how to comply with the GDPR on its website, can it go wrong with copying how that site does it?
No, because that is how it is spelled out in the law. Rejecting tracking must be as simple as accepting it. On the EU website both those options are presented in a clear way.
> My claim that it isn't malicious compliance to use cookie consent banners, but rather the least risky approach since that is exactly how europa.eu complies with their own laws.
There is no malicious compliance. If it is done as it is done on the EU site then it is compliant. If it isn't then it is illegal. Malicious compliance means that the letter of the law is strictly followed so to cause/do something not intended by the law. In case of hiding the reject button, that is illegal.
Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.
> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
What makes it the fastest?
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.
> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
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