• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Honestly I think hidden valley is fine. It’s middle of the road, but I get that it may put off non Americans. The thing with creamy dressings like ranch, Bleu cheese, and Ceasar is that the good shit is really good, the middle of the road is going to have some who hate it even though they love the good shit, but others will still like it even though they agree that the better stuff is better, and a lot of people who’d like even the middle of the road stuff will dislike the lower end versions (like store brand).

    I don’t even like buttermilk dressing on salad, but anything fried is so much better dipped in it. There’s a reason it’s always offered alongside yankeeschnitzel here as well as often alongside fries. And yeah it’s comparable to an equivalent quality mayonnaise based sauce for fries.







  • I’m of the opinion that most Americans should start supplementing fiber around 30. Earlier may be better. Also start making pro fiber dietary choices like whole wheat bread, beans as a staple ingredient (they can replace meat in a lot of dishes), breakfast choices like oatmeal, whole wheat toast, fruit, or bran flakes, and snack choices like fruit, vegetables, or popcorn.

    Honestly I wish I’d gone high fiber younger. I’ve never had what you’d call excellent digestion, but a high fiber diet (slowly ramped up) and supplementation have brought it back to like when I was a teenager.




  • Yeah I’m totally in favor of inventing things for the hell of it. But i don’t think that hating a technology because of how it was pushed on society is necessarily bad until it develops a legitimate use case. I dislike them because I still see people thinking “this cool technology must have a problem that it solves” rather than looking at problems and asking what technology could solve them. But at the same time it’s also been a serious case of tech lovers not caring to understand the problems they wish to use tech to solve. That was annoying a long time ago, but now I live in a society that’s been made worse and worse by that specific problem over the past 20 years.




  • Ok I think I need to reframe what authority means here. An authority is a government or an organization or individual that a government authorizes to act on its behalf. It is the decision maker when it comes time to physically remove a claimant from the premises.

    A blockchain is a leger, a document. What you’re proposing sounds to me like legally defining it as the final say in ownership. To do that is more or less a complete rewrite of property laws in a way that would have far reaching effects, especially on marriage, government enforcement, and lending. On lending this would basically eliminate the capacity to use your house as collateral without a full conditional sale, and in that case I really hope you trust your banking institution. For government enforcement, this would eliminate leins as a means of compelling payment of owed money, which means other methods would be required (this is especially an issue in contexts like child support, where debtors can be particularly hostile). And for marriage this will really screw with inheritance and divorce proceedings. The fact that you can’t cash out and sell the house asap when your partner requests a divorce is something I personally think is good.

    Additionally, in every democratic nation to my knowledge, the existing registry of land is public. Public of course when referring to ownership by the collective of citizens, something the blockchain is less so. But it’s also publicly visible, just like the blockchain, except instead of having to download it you go to the appropriate store of public records and request to see it or to obtain a copy. At the very least in my country there’s a ton of information you can get in such places for asking. Property transfers, court records (unless a judge has sealed them, usually because sensitive information is contained within), building and digging permits, birth and death certificates… Most people only get what’s relevant to their life, but some people (like investigative journalists) have to look through public records for a living. Could it be valuable to digitize it all and upload it? Yes but not without risks, which also apply to blockchain here.

    So yeah. This leads into a famous question: What is Property? And ultimately that’s a fairly deep rabbit hole, of its own. So what is ownership? The ability to direct the state to utilize its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defense of your right to control something. No ledger can confer that. A state can declare a ledger the ultimate record of ownership, but it can just as easily take it away.


  • Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation’s fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren’t being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they’re probably not jumping through those hoops.


  • To preface: I’m not a gold nut and I believe that it’s generally wiser for stable developed nations to use fiat currency to enable them to operate in a generally Keynesian approach with controlled inflation.

    That said while I agree it’s unwise for nations unable to do that themselves to back their currency with a stable fiat currency from a different country, I don’t think crypto is the solution. Coinage is. And I’m talking old school coinage where the government isn’t backing it with metals, they’re making it out of them. Probably something like silver.

    A backed currency is because a government can’t be trusted not to overinflate. If you want to bypass trust, the answer isn’t another currency in which all value is theoretical, it’s currency in which the value is in your hand and verifiable, with the government acting as the one setting units, assuring proper valuation, punishing devaluation, and publishing means for institutions and people to confirm valuation, such as physical properties, alloy percentages, and the easiest tests.