Yeah. On top of that the article is a bit misleading as the goal of crypto, gold, etc is not to become rich, but not to become poorer due to inflation.
You can have different, non-conflicting goals. Specific projects bring something in particular to the table. Permission-less transactions on an immutable ledger is the very least most bring. A form of rebellion against centralized banking and an unfair global financial system where if you have the means and the connections you can get away with pretty much anything: lemon socialism, laundering billions and paying pittances on your taxes.
To some, these are important goals; to others they are troublesome things to get rid of because they believe centralized economic systems are superior and inherently more trustful and less prone to abuse by criminals and terrorists, or that the perceived ecological impacts crypto mining are excessive.
There are valid points on both sides, but it'll be extremely hard for me to change my position on crypto when it's become a personal lifeline for so long.
I think that those "Let's make our own DE" dumb kids are both a symptom and a cause why Linux never broke on the mainstream workstation market.
Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X. Why waste all the time on such a massive amount of extremely useless work? Just because it is fun?
And yeah, you can downvote this into oblivion, I don't care. The fact is that 80% of the comments on this thread are making fun of the very same retards for the very same reasons.
>Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X
In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking.
Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing, implementing, testing and fixing. It is very expensive and only affordable for companies that can make enough money with to return the investment. Linux has no presence on the desktop because vendors that make the most money with it have 0 presence on the desktop.
Additionally, out-of-the-box functionality matters a lot. DEs like XFCE have insane tweakability, but outside of a handful of settings most users don't take advantage of that. The majority of Windows and macOS users don't spend hours tweaking their setup to perfection, they just install Chrome and Spotify and maybe vertically orient their taskbar/dock if they're feeling spicy and it's off to the races.
And moving the needle on the out of the box usability front often requires changes that can't be made by changing the default configuration or becoming a contributor to an existing DE. The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.
>The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.
That's kinda the point of PopOS in the first place: retrofitting GNOME and Ubuntu with extra utilities for a better "out of the box" experience. Manjaro does basically the same thing on the Arch side of the fence, and both are essential to providing that experience you're describing. The GNOME team isn't intentionally holding back features or making intentionally bad choices here, they're just part of the brick in the wall. The GNOME desktop should be bland, so that the distro can provide a default and the end user can make changes where necessary. It's all part of one big machine.
Linux has no presence on the desktop market, yet apps like Steam and Spotify are ported to it, often with special considerations in mind. If we're talking about market share, you can have it: but in terms of software availability, everything is on Linux now. Wine is good enough to run any Windows app carte-blanche, and all of the most common apps (eg. Telegram, Discord, Zoom) have native clients.
Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast is not a matter of manpower, it's about the modularity of your system and the power the end-user has.
No matter how unpopular this approach is, I must agree... I've been on Pop OS for years, and it really is the best GNOME I've seen. However, GNOME itself is pretty weird and even slow these days – yet it's nearly the de facto Linux DE. And System76 is adding more bells and whistles, probably not making it more snappy.
This is sad to see, because there are stable, nice, and fast DE's, like Budgie. Or KDE, of course, but I'm more of a GTK person.
I also would like it more if System76 contributed to existing project like Bugie instead. It's tiresome how GNOME monoculture is dictating everything in GTK nowdays.
Unity was perhaps the biggest blunder in all of Linux-dom in terms of getting this OS out there; Ubuntu was sitting on the perfect opportunity to pull the rug from under Microsoft at XPs end of life -- could have just done "Hey, you want a simple, ultra-stable, ultra-familiar experience now that XP is gone?" And keep something Gnome2-ish and be the Volvo of computers.
And instead went with "Let's see if we can out-sexy Apple!" No. You can't. Ugh.
So VSCode, which is basically slomo Sublime Text for retards and Typescript which is usable only for prototyping are a good enough compensation for having most of their income from Linux (on Win and Azure) after all the almost criminal FUD they poured on Linux[0]? Come on, get real.
A lot of the people I know who were an-cap 10 years ago are millionaires today. At least from my circle. The problem is that the money-printing people are billionaires and it is a game you simply cannot win.
And frankly, these days being a millionaire is not as fancy as it sounds - you can barely get a nice 7-series + a bit above average flat and living off investments/rent would require a very frugal lifestyle.
Can barely buy a 7 series... Frugal lifestyle... Move out of the Bay Area, buy a nice house, get a Tesla model 3 performance, it’s faster and cheaper than the 7 series, and maybe reconsider what’s in your lifestyle that’s so expensive that being a millionaire is barely making it.
"Can't retire. Not worth it to work. Five will drive you un poco loco, my fine feathered friend. The poorest rich person in America. The world's tallest dwarf. The weakest strong man at the circus."
I have never in my life been to SV - I live in Prague. $1mil is 25 million Czech Crowns. A nice 7-series (slower than model 3, but much more comfortable - this is what I care about) is ~4 million. You have 21 left. You buy this flat (https://www.bezrealitky.cz/nemovitosti-byty-domy/649275-nabi..., I won't mention the 3% property-transfer tax out of politeness...) and you're broke. If you're the saving/money-wise type this is your nightmare.
So, you don't quite need to live in SanFran in order to not consider $1,000,000 serious money.
Yes, I could go back to my home town of Sofia, but even there 1 mil won't take me too far (certainly not make me an all-mighty mogul, this is 100x times of capital volume away. and if we're talking about buying journos and influecing public opinion, then - 1000x of capital volume). And to be honest I envy people in urban areas such as Austin (ČR is rated ~150th in the world (between Zimbabwe and Botswana) on granting construction permits) for having a real supply-demand based housing market, where you are not getting brutally punished for wanting to raise a family.
And yes, I currently live off rent, take only gigs I consider meaningful (currently hoping to get in Fidelity IT), but drive an 8-year old 530xi and live in a rented 3-bedroom flat as I expect my BTC to grow in value quicker than real estate (as has been the case in the past 8 years). This is the frugal lifestyle I mean.
> And frankly, these days being a millionaire is not as fancy as it sounds - you can barely get a nice 7-series + a bit above average flat and living off investments/rent would require a very frugal lifestyle.
Oh come on... yes a millionaire lifestyle isn’t a billionaire lifestyle but still.
Given that the current world exchange currency requires 43 aircraft carriers and 6,185 nuclear warheads (+ all the support they need, thousands of very worhtwhile human lives a year, etc), any electricity consumption seems a small problem. Not to mention that the oil-to-electricity transition would require ridiculous investments anyway.
It is not a hypothesis and it is not about the US. It is a fact that the current global currency is USD and it is enforced thanks to the role of the global policeman and unquestionable military might. However over the (many) years it has caused growing problems both inside and outside the US.
P.S. I think that the US was playing this role very well over the past 76 years and am perfectly happy with 90% of what has been done.
> US would never switch to BTC as legal tender because they can't control the supply of BTC
Most evidence shows the U.S. no longer benefits from the dollar as a global reserve currency. And lots of governments have currency boards or currencies they don’t control.
1. The currency board countries are very small players, mostly beaten to blue and also not all currency boards are tied to USD.
2. The bulk (I guess 90%+) of global lending is still in USD - a currency which the Fed can debase at will - as has been happening since 2008 and happened at a grande scale in 2020.
This brings only frustration and bitterness - the last two things you want in international relations, especially in the post-nuclear age soft-power days.
Silk road days are gone. Ulbrich got disproportionately punished + convicted on very very dubious hired gun charges. Since then a similar approach was applied on almost every darknet marketplace around, resulting in that these days with BTC at ATH the darknet marketplaces are at an all-time crisis (even though legacy media is still pushing the "criminal's money" narrative :/). Not to mention that all the major mining pools have voluntarily chosen to collaborate with governments on censoring the blockchain, etc.
Let's hope it is just a side-step given that BTC with censorship/regulation is just a breaking of a glass-wall away from perfectly free monetary unit.
P.S. If you are looking to get no-KYC truly anonymous BTC you'd better live in a top-10 city (e.g. Prague), because in a top-100 city (e.g. Sofia) it is not quite straight-forward and takes tons of waiting/selecting.
> Ulbrich got [...] convicted on very very dubious hired gun charges.
No, he didn't. He got convicted of money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Evidence related to the alleged murder for hire scheme was presented at trial and was weighed in the sentencing phase in terms of what sentence he got within the range authorized for the crimes he was convicted of, but he was not tried, convicted, or sentenced for “hired gun charges”.
Ulbrich was never convicted of a violent crime. (Though plenty of evidence did show he tried to commit murder-for-hire.) He was convicted of money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics.[1] For this he was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years.
> Not to mention that all the major mining pools have voluntarily chosen to collaborate with governments on censoring the blockchain, etc.
BTW Juraj is a great source on anything crypto-related. And from what I now there has been no resistance from the pools so far (at least the EU/US-based ones, though in China it is probably even more difficult.)
That post explains how it might be possible for someone with 10% of mining power (and 100% of legal power) to block certain transactions. Nowhere in that post does it claim that such an attack has succeeded or that mining pools are collaborating with governments.
It is not an attack since by current market conditions there wouldn't be the need for an attack. The owners of the mining pools are not stupid and BTC is not an anonymous (and FREEEEEE whatever this means) currency these days. I hope we can agree on at least this fact.
BTW Juraj is a great source on anything crypto-related. And from what I now there has been no resistance from the pools so far (at least the EU/US-based ones, though in Chine it is probably even more difficult.)
This seems to nicely lay out how the censorship may happen and be implemented. But it only briefly touches on one small example of censorship currently taking place. Is there anything else to support this portion of your previous post?
> Not to mention that all the major mining pools have voluntarily chosen to collaborate with governments on censoring the blockchain, etc.
