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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

    Sophistication often creates fragility. The human mind marvels at sophistication naturally; appreciation for resilience usually only comes after that fragile thing has broken. Of course it’s too late by then.

    All them young whipper snappers will continue to learn these life lessons the hard way, it seems.


  • This is not how patents work. At all.

    For one, patent owners are generally more than happy to license their technology to integrators, and even competitors, if there is money to be made.

    More importantly, patents cannot be used to get exclusivity on products. Rather, patents can only protect novel approaches to how a product is made or served.

    The patent system is designed to protect R&D costs exclusively, not some get out of jail card for anti trust. Of course, the patent office isn’t perfect, the system does get abused in anti-competitive ways. But in the end, it’s rare that that results in less consumer choice, because of licensing deals.




  • “Conservative” means… to conserve. You (and everyone) gets more conservative as they age because you kinda want to conserve the status quo you, personally are used to.

    Here’s the thing: with social progress, what you want to conserve is different from what the generation before the progress wants to preserve.

    You are a conservative, as in conserving, of the progress that we have achieved. The “conservatives” you refer to, the “political right”, are not conservative. They are regressives, the opposite of progressives (though they might not like the connotation of that label, and will denounce it). These people would like to regress society to a time when these members of society had more consolidation of power (feudalism, fascism, racist/sexist segregation). Nothing “conservative” about that in terms of a human lifetime. In fact none of those people were around to experience what feudalism, fascism, segregation etc. was actually like. Many of these people may have been sold a lie by the 1% for the exclusive benefit of the 1%.










  • You are right, crypto has nothing to do with currency printing. And yes, the environmental side too is a problem (unless it is produced inline with recycled energy) But governments issuing currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, people traded de facto currencies and IOUs amongst themselves.

    Bitcoin was conceived out of the 2008 financial crisis, as a direct response to big banks being bailed out. It’s literally written in Bitcoin’s Genesis block. The point of Bitcoin has always been to free people from the tyranny of big government AND big capital.

    Crypto isn’t that popular in developed countries with functioning monetary systems… untill of course those big institutions fail. I am still quite surprised, this side of Bitcoin is rarely discussed on Lemmy, given how anticapitalist it is.

    I get it libertarian, bad. And to some degree, there are a lot of problems there. But the extreme opposite ain’t that rosy either.