Clearly investment doesn’t depend on actual work being done… /s

What makes people’s lives better is services being rendered for mutual benefit.

Investment does play a role in facilitating this but mostly because our monetary system is set up in a way that investment is necessary to service outstanding debt. It could be different.

In general all types of dilemma situations are solved to a substantial degree by allowing people to communicate with each other and then individuals arriving at appropriate actions.

I am not advocating against regulations or the like but saying that individuals are of the hook because „I don’t matter anyway“ is a recipe for ongoing disaster.

We need all types of push back against injustice, unfairness, and plain stupidity. Making excuses doesn’t help anyone.

Btw. did you really talk to your kids about this and really explained them the situation in a way they can appreciate it? For instance, take a large number of treats divide them on the table and show them who gets what for a game they built… I think this would be a exceptionally great case to discuss business ethics and the perils of unregulated markets in a way that resonates with kids. Don’t leave this opportunity on the table!

Hey, first of all kudos to you for all your hard work and having the heart in the right place.

I don’t really want to take any specific position on this issue as I don’t have enough context to make a fair assessment of the situation. However, I do want to point out one thing:

By supporting a specific approach to solve a problem, you generally remove some incentives to solve the problem in some other way.

Minted to this situation, I think it would be interesting to ask what are other potential solutions to the problem of child abuse and how effective may they be compared to things like PhotoDNA? Is it the biggest net benefit you could habe or maybe even a net cost to work on this to solve the problem of child abuse?

I don’t have the answer but I think it‘s important to look at the really big picture once in a while. What is it that you want to achieve and is what you are doing really the most effective way of getting that or just something that is „convenient“ or „familiar“ given a set of predefined talking points you didn’t really question?

All the best to you :)

Thank you! This is a really important observation about anything controversial „child“ related. Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are by looking at how much they are willing to spend on the welfare of kids outside their immediate point of concern.

All of these types of problems are likely better solved in some other ways. Why not have general mental health coaching in schools freely available to increase the chance of early detection of abusive behaviors? Why not improve the financial situation of parents so that the child is not perceived to be another burden in a brutal life? Why not offer low-friction free mental health coaching to all individuals?

The way the world is organized now is ABSURD to the highest degrees! We pretend to care about a thing but only look at issues narrowly without considering the big picture.

In the end, politics and the way power is distributed is broken. There are too many entrenched interests looking out for their narrow self-interest. There seems to be not enough vision to unite enough power for substantial change. Even the SDGs don‘t seem to inspire the developed nations as something to mobilize for. We need the fervor of war efforts for positive change.

Doing the right thing and doing things right needs to become the very essence of what we as individuals stand for. Not consuming goods or furthering the idealogical agenda of a select few. Each and every one of us should look into themselves and look into the world and work to build a monument of this collective existence. We were here. Let us explain to all following us how we tried our best to do the right things in the right way and where we fell short of our ambitions and hope that others might improve upon our work.

Sorry, I think this turned into a rant but it comes from the heart.

> Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are.

There is also (almost always) an unhealthy matching support for an enormous military with nuclear weapons whose sole purpose - when push comes to shove - is to indiscriminately murder the same babies once they have grown up.

Its a symptom of a deeper mental pathology.

The thing with war is, and especially with nuclear weapons - it does not wait for the babies to be grown up. It might have gotten more precise to avoid direct hits of babies as they make for bad PR, but that still happens a lot and mothers with their babies on the run in a burning city is not much better either.

That would require demurrage which is never going to happen. I'll be honest. It's not demurrage itself that we need, it's just much easier to implement. What we need is a linkage between the lifetime of debt and money. Defaulting on debt should destroy money. I.e. money is only valid as long as the contract (the debt) that created it is valid. Given a sufficiently advanced electronic currency you would track the expiry of every single dollar. The lender then would decide whether he wants to extend the expiry of the dollar and thereby extend the due date of the debt.

The fundamental problem with short term thinking (positive time preference) is that people want to "flee" into fictional wealth. Rather than build a long lasting monument (companies like blue origin count as monument) they prefer to increase a number on a balance sheet in the form of a bank account. What makes fictional wealth so attractive? As mentioned above money is just the other side of a debt contract. By withholding your money you extend the debt. In other words, a lot of people promise to work for you. Having idle servants is the entire reason behind accumulating money. If you truly wanted to achieve full employment then all money earned must be spent eventually, to be more specific all debts must be fulfilled. It would mean that your wealth cannot exist in the form forced coercion of other people. Employees would still come and work in your companies but they would leave each day with a fair share of the wealth they helped create. All your wealth would have to be long lasting and the environment, which is the longest lasting form of prosperity, would be considered part of your wealth.

Ancient Egypt had something closer to a "grain standard" meaning that farmers deposit grain in a storehouse where they receive something akin to a coupon which you can trade in for grain. Their money is representing a claim to a spoiling good! The horror! The complete antithesis of the gold standard. Just imagine what a backwards society that must have been! Of course the truth is everyone remembers ancient Egypt as an advanced civilization for its time.

No rant at all, you make very good points. Thanks for sharing

wow, so much missing nuance and little actual understanding… I am not religious but bless your soul… is all I want to say to this

While I find decentralized digital ledgers interesting and potentially useful, I am always surprised how people think that they need to jump on bitcoin as it somehow must be the best choice for the future of money. At least to me it seems unlikely that the first feasible solution to a difficult problem is already the best. Several problems with bitcoin provide evidence for this idea.

Thus, it seems like the mechanism which keeps bitcoin running is something similar to the sunk cost fallacy or framed differently attachment to a state of the ledger that is perceived as favorable by the invested community. I hope that people will realize soon enough that bitcoin should probably more be treated like a nice art project - not more, not less.

“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce

I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides.

If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.

Profanity matters. It motivates people. Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk. You tell them “FUCK WALL STREET” and you got a crowd ready to take down the traders. Publishing a position paper on the potential negative impacts of naked short selling while taking into account the views and interests of all stake holders ... cool. But you’re not motivating people with that.

By the way, FUCK Wall Street.

> Profanity ... motivates people

Yeah, that's the problem. Too many people swayed by cheap laughs and the thrill of anger. Thus the failed insurrection earlier this year. It's hard to predict what'll be fun this week.

> Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk.

I guess we should package up the science into more concise bits. How about 5 minutes instead of 1 hour?

lol you're saying that people stormed the capitol because of profanity?

This reminds me of a time shortly after 9/11 when an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming "People like you caused 9/11" just because he stole a jack in the box mascot head car antenna topper.

> lol ... an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming

On the second thought, this makes me sad. I hope someday I'll be an old man living among friends, instead of watching my neighborhood devolve. It's all perspective, of course. I've been the hipster, now I'm the gentrifier. Still, one can feel the pain of that old man.

No, that's not what I said. "Cheap laughs and the thrill of anger" is a superset. More succinctly, "bread and circus." There's nothing new about it.

I mean, you do have a point.

Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal.

But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet.

And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?

> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?

Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.

I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle.

In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see.

All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.

I support that kind of speech. Not the teacher example, but if it happens in some voluntary gathering, I really can't see why not. Like I said, people sometimes get emotional and you can't expect from everyone to stay calm no matter what. It's better to vent frustrations with words than doing something stupid and irresponsible.

> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?

I feel like there's a disconnect. Movies may not depict it so, but curses and profanity have always been a part of language. So the "shift" is happening in the opposite direction the way I see it.

I think your example highlights exactly what people are reacting to.

School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions.

Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.

Slowly, but surely, more and more words are being chipped away from the definition of free speech.

Putting the free speech thing aside, the problem here is that it can and it is being used as a pretext to silence the dissidents and the opposition.

So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition.

And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony.

The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).

> So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders?

It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people.

> If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms.

I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there.

> More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech.

Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive.

> The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes.

Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.

> This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit

This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.

As a European I can‘t resist but to say that I wish that we would start banning all of the American internet cooperations that are required by law to share their data with the US government which has time and time again shown that they are willing to abuse access. Remember the time they wanted to wiretap Angela Merkel? Good times!

It‘s really astonishing to what extent people are willing to be hypocrites not only but especially in the US... American exceptionalism, what a f*cking joke... Might explain how the Republican party and American establishment could create such a mess of the country. It would be funny if it wasn‘t so damn sad and dangerous for all the other countries and people. /rant