Hmmm, I see that Stacks has 2 seed rounds, a series A, and a VC round all separately listed prior to the token fundraising. Good to see you were able to be partly successful at traditional raising, at least enough to afford the lawyers and the filing fees, before you had to raise from tokens. Not every one has those opportunities or connections.
Meta-comment: can the mods shadow-ban the Pooh Patrol already? They are agents of a hostile foreign power that has no respect for human rights at all. You don't need to give them space to spew their bullshit here.
+1 Genuinely wanted to have a conversation about the intricacies of the Intel supply chain that may have led to such an apology. Certainly, some hacker news community members could have shared some insight from practical experience.
Instead, the conversation was constantly being derailed in a concerted manner. [0]
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."
These perceptions are notoriously unreliable because they're driven not by evidence (someone else having a different view from you does not count as evidence), but rather by the passions of the perceiver. Basically, people who feel strongly on a topic can't imagine that someone who feels the opposite could possibly be in good faith, so they make up stories about manipulation, astroturf, shillage, spies, foreign agents, bots, and/or trolls, to explain what feels inexplicable. It's an extremely common dynamic on the internet, and it's also extremely poisonous, so we don't want it here.
That's not to say there's no such thing as real abuse—just that there needs to be something objective to go on before making any such claims, and people on the internet having different opinions than you does not come close to clearing that bar. On the contrary. I've written many detailed explanations about this, some of which are listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod, if anyone wants to read more.
I can expect that if a sufficiently high body count or death rate is reached (now or in a future variant), certain high-risk activities will require proof of recent vaccination to participate in. See also: seatbelts, child-specific seats, etc. Why should I, a responsible member of the public, be forced to put up with other people's needlessly risky behavior when it directly affects me and mine?
In the real world we accept risk vs reward. My neighbours having a kitchen knife in their house presents a nonzero risk to me, and that's a-ok and I don't wander about wearing a stab vest.
Or, we can do what we've done in the past to address this very situation by giving everyone the following choice: get the vaccine, or forfeit some privileges. It's not hard, and it's not without lots of precedent, so it should not be controversial.
Well, you can. France are doing it. They are having 200k daily cases.
So it's not really "or", it's just "and".
You can either have everyone gets corona, or you can have everyone gets corona plus a miserable digital dystopia, loads of restrictions on everyday life etc.
Either way, unless you manage zero covid which is almost universally considered to be impossible at this point in most of the world, your options are still "hide inside forever" or "get corona". Which brings us right back full circle to risk vs reward.
Very few French are dying of it (like, 300/day), which I'd call a massive success story. Containing COVID is of course out of the question at this point, and I never argued otherwise. However, the risk of life and limb to people who did get vaccinated is nevertheless increased by the presence of those who did not, because the unvaccinated get sick and eat up hospital resources that would then be denied to people who need medical attention for unrelated reasons. Moreover, they increase the risk of spreading COVID to people who cannot get the vaccine (e.g. babies, folks with weak immune systems). So, it really is in everyone's interest to get everyone vaccinated -- everyone's risk of dying a preventable death decreases.
What's the cost of this? Why, it's the very same as the cost of getting most everyone vaccinated for literally anything else we get vaccinated for! No one has a conniption about vaccine regimens for measles, mumps, polio, etc., because the programs for implementing them at scale have been so successful that hardly anyone gets hospitalized or dies from them anymore. Want to attend public school? Get vaccinated. Want to join the military? Get vaccinated. Want to live in a college dorm? Get vaccinated.
The marginal cost of adding one more required vaccine on top of the ones almost everyone regularly gets (and almost no one complains about) in order to participate in normal society is negligeable.
So no, it's not a case of "everyone gets corona" vs "everyone gets corona and we have a miserable digital dystopia", as you put it. It's a choice of "everyone gets corona and a lot of other people needlessly die for want of medical care" vs "everyone gets corona and/or the vaccine, you have to fill one more checkbox on your vaccine card (which already has a dozen or so), and comparatively fewer people die for want of medical care." Life will get back to normal either way; at this point it's really a question of dealing with the selfish, paranoid, delusional, despicable people who would rather see the mass death of their fellow countrymen over having to fill one more checkbox on their vaccine card.
France: About 150 deaths per day, 200K cases per day.
UK: About 150 deaths per day, 200K cases per day.
Same population size. Massive delta in restrictions.
I would say "have a good day", but after your big old rant about you wanting to force people into doing stuff and how they're all despicable, I mean, meh, look inwards.
I agree that being vaccinated is sensible. I just think that's it. Nothing else besides uberlockdowns have any demonstrable effect on long term mortality (e.g. over the course of a year). We don't need anal vaccine digital ID checks or FFP83 hazmat suits unless you just want to make the world worse because you're grumpy.
This is a false equivalency. Being vaccinated or not is the difference between requiring days/weeks in the hospital or only spending 1-2 days with a mild headache. It's "mildly inconvenienced if you do, damned if you don't".
I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point.
We cannot move on until the thick-skulled members of society realize that their unwillingness to get vaccinated is the number one thing stopping us from moving on.
I'll say it again: we cannot move on with it until people are vaccinated. It's not a choice. It's not something where we just say "eh well it looks like it won't get better so let's move on". It physically cannot happen.
I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but moving on is an entirely separate issue. We can move on as soon as people stop panicking and decide to accept the risks. In fact that's already happening in some states.
Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that another coronavirus HCoV-OC43 caused another worldwide pandemic starting in 1889. It killed a lot of people. There were no vaccines or effective treatments. The same virus is still endemic today; the only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us get infected as youths and the resulting immunity protects us later in life. People moved on.
Circumstantial evidence - no direct evidence for HCoV-OC43. In fact it is simply conjecture.
It would be instructive to compare the virulence factors encoded in SARS-CoV-2 vs the common cold coronas.
People can move on when Covid stops making people seriously ill and compromising our healthcare systems. That is not yet, indeed the way we are going it may be never. Even if Omicron turns out to be 'mild', the next variant may not be.
I think there's a possibility that omicron may mark the end of this pandemic. Anybody who refuses to get vaccinated will very likely get omicron within the next few weeks. So your immune system will either develop antibodies as a result of being vaccinated, or as a result of being infected. Well, there is the third option of dying from covid, but the current evidence seems to indicate that the risk of hospitalization or death from omicron is lower than from covid-19 or delta.
To be sure, the descendants of the novel coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan in 2019 will float around the human population indefinitely. Omicron isn't the end of covid, but it could be the end of widespread hospitalizations and deaths. At least until the next crisis comes along.
You're still not understanding. We are not "waiting". Waiting implies that we are making some type of conscious choice to put things on hold. But there is no choice. We cannot simply choose to stop waiting. We cannot move on until people are vaccinated. We are blocked, not waiting.
Lol, you act like this is the first time in humanity's history that we've had a virus. Humanity continues despite it and we will continue despite many people choosing not get easily vaccinated.
Eventually people will move on. It's the human condition.
Humanity "continuing" or "moving on" naturally due to the passage of time (which will be quite a long time) is a completely different thing than humanity "choosing" to move on. Your original comments imply/ask that humanity collectively "chooses" to move on and stop letting covid affect us, but again, that is simply not possible. It's not something we choose.
Individuals can individually choose to pretend covid isn't a thing, but society as a whole cannot simply choose to suddenly restore our medical infrastructure, fix supply chains, grow the labor market, etc. Covid's effect on those things won't magically go away just because someone says "you know what, I'm tired of waiting on covid! I'm going to be normal now!"
Adjustments to these will happen over time and humanity may "continue", but when that happens is not a choice we make.
Most of those issues are due to choices like quarantine and lockdowns.
In the UK we have issues with driving tests because everything closed down "cus Covid". Except the virus had nothing to do with it and now most of the instructors have already had their mild cold anyway.
0.2% of the population dying, heavily weighted towards the elderly, does not break supply chains.
I mean, there is a third option that neither of you have presented. We could fix the emergency room and infectious disease ward situation with federal money, and then move on instead of using federal money to prolong lock downs. Addressing infrastructure isn't always popular, or the fastest, but it lasts longer and solves the problem of overcrowding.
Yes, it might mean another 9 months to a year of lockdown, but it would be there still when (not if) another disaster occurs. Now, people will get angry at subsidizing private hospitals... but I could go on about how emergency care should be publicly funded anyway. But I digress.
> Yes, it might mean another 9 months to a year of lockdown
Oh goodness no. There’s a supply limit for medical professionals that will take half a decade to solve even with unlimited funding. And as this is a worldwide issue, not just an American one, you can’t just outbid the rest of us for migrant healthcare workers.
Is there a fix for this? Is it just a payment of loans issue, or is it a working conditions issue or is it a lack of interest issue? Or is it some combination of the three, or another, unknown thing (or a known, unmentioned thing)?
Granted, I have zero power. I ask because I'm curious and just want to know.
It takes a long time to train medical professionals, and the current number is for the world 5-ish years ago (the training delay depends on the actual role, but that looks to me like the common one). If you want to have enough to cope with the extra demand from COVID, it will just take a long time.
> I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point.
Anecdote: I had to go to the ER in 2017 in San Francisco and my experience was exactly like this back then too. It was a ~4 hour wait in the ER waiting room, then another several hours on a bed in a bright loud busy hallway, then some tests, back to the hallway for a few hours, and then emergency inpatient surgery.
Unfortunately that can vary from hospital to hospital, it also depends on how you're triaged.
If you go to SF General, yes, you're in hell. Its an extremely poorly run city hospital that is where most GSW victims go, its busy. If you go to UCSF or CPMC, you'll get world class care.
Seatbelts and drink driving rules don’t totally eliminate car crashes, but they do reduce their frequency and consequences. Likewise vaccines and masks for COVID.
Indeed, if we had 100% vaccine uptake, or 100% sobriety, then all COVID incidents would be vaccinated just as all car crashes would have sober drivers.
“Learning to live with COVID” ought to imply “learning to live with masks and vaccines”, not “lose your sense of smell and be ill for an extra week each year”.
With Seat Belts & Driving rules we still have 45,000 Driving related deaths a year in the US. We don't ban automobiles because that number isn't 0.
Seatbelts and vaccine's are high impact & low-cost. The same cannot be said about every possible driving or covid restriction. Closing schools has a real cost, sending kid's home from school for a week every time they have a fever has a real cost, requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
We had 38,680 motor vehicle deaths in 2020. We haven't had 45,000 since 1989; 54,000 in 1972. The rate has been steadily decreasing (with a few ups and downs along the way) for about the last 50 years(1), even though miles driven has been steadily increasing(2). This is because we, as a society, as a government, decided to study the problem and implement changes to improve the situation.
Comment I was responding to is complaining about vaccines being “dammed if you do dammed if you don’t”, so you’re shifting the goalposts a bit here by adding the extra restrictions for e.g. closing schools.
> sending kid's home from school for a week every time they have a fever has a real cost,
Hmm. This is what happened to me as a child in the U.K. in the 90s, but perhaps the increasing frequency of both parents working makes this harder now.
Closing schools, sure, that’s got social etc. costs.
> requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
I don’t see how this is true. Care to elaborate?
Also, your school days are 8 hours? Mine were 09:00-15:30, plus travel time.
>> requiring kids to wear masks for 8 hours a day has a real cost.
> I don’t see how this is true. Care to elaborate?
Kids are developing and need to learn facial non-verbal social cues. It also directly impacts learning, it's harder to understand the teacher, or for the teacher to understand the child. Do you think wearing a mask makes it easier to learn English as a second language? How about dealing with a speech impairment? And overall masking and other policies also just generally makes school less enjoyable more anxiety driven, which also leads to learning loss. They have a real-cost and just as important it is incredibly low-impact when you have other options like vaccination available.
> Also, your school days are 8 hours? Mine were 09:00-15:30, plus travel time.
The base school day sure, but the commute and morning/afternoon activities means masking up for even longer.
Face masks and vaccines will be the new seatbelts and DUI laws at the rate we're going. I predict that certain activities like flying on an airline, going to public school, or working at a job with close quarters will one day require proof of vaccination and/or masking up to participate. Omicron won't be the last variant, and there is no guarantee that a future variant won't come along that is just as virulent but far more deadly.
> I predict that certain activities [...] will one day require proof of vaccination and/or masking up to participate
I think those policies will slowly go-away in the North East & West Coast as the public and media comes to term with how ineffective they are. 96% of the population of my county (including those not eligible) has had it least 1 covid vaccine dose. At some point you just stop benefiting from continued restrictions.
> Omicron won't be the last variant, and there is no guarantee that a future variant won't come along that is just as virulent but far more deadly.
And the next terrorist attack could be even more deadly - stay subscribed for our upcoming report on why you should be more afraid.
Around here the restrictions only happen when the waves happen. I’m not the person you’re replying to here so I have a slightly different expectation: these will come and go regularly until the combination of vaccine and virally induced immunity is sufficient to stop the spread.
> And the next terrorist attack could be even more deadly
I have the opposite experience. My circles are super left/socialist and are also very pro-crypto. Reorganizing a traditional web 2.0 app into a web3 app governed by a DAO is very much a proletariat revolution. In web3, users, not the SaaS operators, own the means of production and wealth distribution.
I have found that left-leaning techies (or at least the ones I've run into) seem much more interested in federated options such as Mastodon or the IndieWeb; distributing the costs of web app infrastructure into something local and negligible (ex: just running on a Raspberry Pi) and creating a whole network out of those, with moderation, administration, etc. done on a per-instance basis.
Granted, there's a few problems with the federation system (mainly that finding an instance whose admin you agree with can be daunting; Mastodon being a clone of Twitter and all its flaws; etc.) but I don't think they'd be solved by adding blockchain technology.
In my view web3 is socialist in the same way that the national socialists were, i.e. claiming to support social ownership while really being bankrolled by big business. There's nothing that gives capitalism a worse name than burning 5% of the worlds electricity to generate imaginary money, nothing more socially unjust than (to quote Satoshi) "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more", nothing more oligarchic than the original gangsters and venture capitalists manipulating the cryptocurrency schemes, nothing more kleptocratic than irreversible transactions and unfixable bugs and systems that seem like they're designed to facilitate fraud, and nothing more plutocratic than pyramid schemes and pareto distributions worse than those of any nation state on earth.
First of all wow, comparing crypto fans to nazis, that's quite a stretch!
Second of all, the crypto 'community' is not one giant community with homogeneous ideas, there are many who scoff at being bankrolled by big business and venture capitalists. I can't imagine anything less 'big business capitalism' than a system where no one entity has any control, and where users have the ability to democratically control the services/protocols they use.
There's no requirement to participate in 500000% APY LP farms or buying a bunch of meme coins and shilling VC funded ponzi schemes to be a fan of crypto. Critique that BS all you want but it's not everything.
I would consider myself a socialist libertarian and a fan of crypto. The best part of being free and open source is that we can always come along and make better software and better ways of organizing ourselves. Personally I see DAOs and zero-knowledge proofs as the most important uses so far, I think there's a lot of really cool potential there for organizing systems in ways that weren't possible before.
The core argument for x^2 is basically just that it's the only function with linear derivative, so for rational voters who calculate marginal benefit of additional votes purchased at cost x^2 (in terms of likelihood of changing the outcome of the "election"), you get a welfare maximizing outcome.
Definitely a challenge for many mechanism design approaches to intervening in the world. As I understand, the only really solution is to experiment in the real world, see what holds and see what doesn't, and tweak accordingly (e.g. test out different interfaces that communicate how the mechanism works!)
It incentivizes the welfare-maximizing result. I don’t have a short “intuitive” explanation of why handy but the math is covered in section 8.3 of Public Choice III (should be easy to get in college libraries, pdf copies can be found online if needed).
There are a few mathematical reasons. I forget the details, but I remember that a key point is to consider marginal cost: the derivative of a quadratic is linear. I think the Central Limit Theorem is also relevant, as someone else here pointed out. Anyway, if you really want to know, you can read the papers!
Actually it's a good point and IMO for a population that may have a certain distribution of voting credits e.g. shareholders of a stock, adjusting the exponent can make sense to more fairly distribute power.
You address this by taxing at the fiat on/off ramps. The ones with access to the deepest liquidity also happen to operate in jurisdictions that have functioning governments that are amenable to passing taxes on PoW. And if that doesn't work, you impose sanctions and tariffs on the countries that permit limitless PoW mining, up to and including black-holing their IP blocks.
You can ban CFCs in refrigerators/products that come through customs and monitor their emissions from space. The first is just impossible and the second probably impractical to pin on the carbon output of specific mining operations.
The taxes on PoW specifically interfacing with the financial system is a weak form of banning it and is definitely something that would work though, but what the gp seems to be arguing strongly against. They are asking why the energy price can't be updated to encompass the negative externalities instead of indirectly taxing it through the PoW's blockchain when it interfaces with the financial system.
Disclaimer: I work on STX and its blockchain