> the only thinking you'll have to do is how to manage your private keys securely.
But it’s also the fun part, because it’s the first time you really need persistent end-user key management. Obviously a hard problem, but there’s a ton of money on the line if you solve the UX. And imagine what else you can do once we’re not relying on passwords and federated auth.
> While this may have been an unfortunate reality in previous eras, today we can get much better information from researchers and practitioners.
I don't think that's actually true. It's probably most true with science reporting, but does anyone think reading the firehose of specialist research output is a practical alternative to journalism for a general reader? Filtering and summarization are important functions when dealing quantities of information larger than an individual can handle alone. IIRC, even specialist research groups have paper reading circles to filter research papers in their own fields.
Then there's everything else. For a lot of stuff, you'd just be wading through PR and rumor without much ability to dig past that. For some news topics, like foreign affairs for instance, I'm not even sure where you'd even find timely, raw information to replace journalism about it.
We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Why would higher education be different?
The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.
>We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above.
Probably because a high school diploma has been so normalized that it is seen as the baseline. But that underscores the problem. Of course everyone having a high school diploma devalues it. That's part of why its seen as the default. If we make undergraduate education a similar default, it will just devalue that too. Not to mention what happens to the people who can't complete an undergraduate degree. They become even further marginalized in society.
It is faulty reasoning to notice that a bachelors degree correlates with good outcomes and then conclude that more bachelors degrees means more good outcomes. Good jobs are zero-sum. If there are more people who satisfy the requirements for good jobs, the requirements just increase. It's not like most office jobs require a bachelors degree, the fact that so many people have them makes them an effective zero-effort filter.
Without universal high school, the USA would still be a largely illiterate subsistence farming nation with high rates of poverty as defined at the global scale.
Even well-paying jobs in the trades require literacy and basic mathematics skills.
At one point a factory job would have been considered a good job. In modern times, they're on the low end. What counts as a "good job" is relative to the current standards of living and so you can't naively compare across timescales.
Yes, agreed. And our high schools evolved to prepare students for those good factory jobs. Now that those factory jobs aren't good, maybe our high schools should also evolve.
But the point is that we can't do away with K-12 schooling. Subsistence farming was, is, and will be a bad job.
College Algebra is required to enter a lot of trades. And not just because it's a requirement for the AS, but also because you actually do need to be able to understand the material in order to work in many trades. The students I tutor often fail college algebra, move on to their subject courses thinking they can tick off that useless stuff later, then realize they need a college algebra tutor after failing those courses because it turns out they need to understand how to interpret a table or graph of a function in order to do the job.
College Algebra is really hard for a lot of people. I can say with almost certain confidence that, even with extensive tutoring, they would never make it through that course without years of practice reasoning about mathematical objects in Algebra I and Algebra II and Geometry.
I think people who are naturally talented in STEM massively underestimate the amount of practice some people need to pick up the quantitative skills needed to enter many trades.
Which, I guess, means "everything". But really getting over that first conceptual hurdle is the hardest part. After that, it's a lot more hand-holding through exercises/practice than trying to surmount a fundamental conceptual barrier.
> What are some good examples of tables, graphs, and functions the students need to interpret?
Tables and ratios and rates of change abound in the trades. Especially anything related to electricity or water. You really need at least a conceptual understanding of variables and functions to understand a lot of the material.
Also, most tradesmen will want to run their own business at some point (that's where the money is), and tables/graphs/functions abound.
If you're struggling with college algebra, odds are good that you're uncomfortable:
1. interpolating values from a table (1/16 : x, 2/16 : y, ..., 1: z; oh no, I need to know the value for 3/32 and it's not on the table!),
2. evaluating a function at a point ("the equation tells me xs from ys and zs, but I need zs from xs and ys!").
Pick a trade and (1) and (2) are fundamentally necessary skills. Smart phone calculators obviate this some-what, but it's still important to have at least a conceptual understanding even if the mechanical skill of doing the math atrophies. Otherwise you won't even know how to use the calculator properly. See this all the time.
The money thing in particular is super important, though. I do a lot of example problems that basically boil down to "if your fixed cost is $X and the equipment needs to be replaced every 2 years, and if you charge $Y, will you make a profit? What is the smallest value of Y that will make a profit? Etc." Students really struggle with this sort of thing, especially if you throw in seasonal variable with fixed debt payments ("how much do I need to make in the summer months to cover the loan payments in the winter months?"). Questions like this are at the heart of college algebra.
Like, would not be surprising if lots of small businesses fail because the owner doesn't do the work of making sure the unit economics can cover amortized costs, and then end up defaulting on their loan.
TBH even gig economy participants need to be able to do the more basic stuff from college algebra...
At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, and so a fixed number of "good jobs". I can grant that the number of good jobs isn't fixed on the scale of years. But people that want/need good jobs usually can't wait years for them to materialize. On the timescales that matter to individuals, the number of good jobs is fixed and so the competition for them is effectively zero-sum.
There also seems to be a scale issue when it comes to the availability of good jobs. That is, not all jobs can be good (i.e. high paying) and there is an essential order-of-magnitude difference between the number of high paying jobs and the number of low paying jobs required to make the economics work. So the proportion of good jobs is effectively fixed even on longer timescales.
Wealth doesn't map well to what we're talking about here. No economy can support an unbounded number of "high paying" jobs, for example. While wealth has gone up steadily since the world industrialized, a good (i.e. high paying) job is relative to the current standard of living and so wont be monotonic.
I don't understand this. The U.S. would be much worse without free, universal High School, regardless of whether you think it has devalued over time. I believe that if I didn't have a H.S. education, my life would be more difficult, but I get the feeling from these replies that people view a u.s. high school education as throw-away.
Many developed countries in e.g. Europe don't actually have universal academic high school like the US does - they have perhaps 1/3 of people go to academic high school, where it is more difficult than in the US (perhaps comparable to the difficulty of AP classes). The rest go to vocational or semi-vocational school.
You get there by merit not wallet, I thought usa has it the same to be honest. Sometimes I feel like Americans have very deranged view of Europe where half thinks it's some socialist equality utopia and the other half thinks a communist hellhole.
> You get there by merit not wallet, I thought usa has it the same to be honest.
The problem in the U.S. is that not all public schools are equal, so the "merit" to get into a certain school/scholarship is at least partly tied to your social-economic status.
For instance in my area, all public schools have removed arts/music/foreign language, but in the nicer neighborhoods PTA, boosters, and fundraisers have added those removed subjects back with parent donations. So you have a situation where when it comes to vote for a small tax increase to help our schools, many people are confused as their kids go to a public school with everything they need. These are schools in the same school district. New, upscale homes can also pay directly for their public school in the form of Mello-Roos taxes.
Thanks for that. Yeah, I'm all for education reform and different options so it's great to hear about different programs, but many of the comments here are dismissing education, both high school and higher ed, simply because it is less scarce or not what it used to be.
> If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.
this is true if you look at the sticker price, but does the actual cost for a low-income family grow at that rate? I'm having a hard time finding a source that shows by year what a bottom quartile family would have paid for tuition at an in-state public university or an elite institution.
I think this is bullshit. Why would institutes put such high sticker price or why wouldn't they put price clearly based on income level. No one likes when hospital do not give clear price for treatments, same applies for university.
Would it better if stores listed loaf of bread at $300 and then people can negotiate the price from there?
the grant is calculated based on your family's income, home value, savings, investments, number of children, and a couple other data points. they can't give an exact number until they see your FAFSA. it sucks that this is so complicated, but I argue most of this is necessary to fairly calculate grants. two different households making $60k might have wildly different abilities to pay for tuition.
I think you are missing my point–I believe free high school education is the U.S. is better than no free high school education, so why would free higher ed not be better as well?
What I am not saying is that education hasn't been devalued, or standards haven't changed, or anything else around the quality of education–simply that an education better than not in the u.s..
I once picked up a hundred year old Latin schoolbook meant for grade schoolers (fifth grade, I think). It was significantly more information dense than the college course Latin textbook I had.
> We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.
Do you have a high school education? The education I got in H.S. had a big impact on my life. I couldn't imagine being done with school at 14 and thinking that was equivalent to 4 years of High School.
That's because high school education used to be the X, and successful people moved on to college (the new Y), but college is now the old thing and people are moving on to whatever Z is.
There are some things that does make everyone more successful. More education is overall better for society, even if it's no longer a guarantee of "success." Some things don't really get diluted but can enrich the lives of anyone they are involved in (if we disassociate the word "success" from a comparative cycle). For example, healthcare, books, digital entertainment, internet connectivity. The comparative advantage goes down, but the impact to the individual does not.
I think we are witnessing first hand why more education is not always overall better. There isn't much point in having everyone learn British Literature on a 30 year payment plan.
It's important to distinguish between education and the business of education.
I don't think I believe more education can ever be a bad thing. But the business of education in the US is an absolute nightmare that corrupts the spirit of learning it ought to protect, and I agree more of that business will not make things better for students.
Perhaps we need erudition or an education that is not as formalised and compartmentalized as it seems to be. I happen there is something to be gained from literature for example. But a degree is not necessary for that purpose. The degree ends up being used for signalling or to provide some structure to 3 to 4 years between high school and full-time employment.
It's sadder than that, because the latter two implies there were some evil mustache twirling decision makers in government who want to cause grief by raising tuition. Instead, it's a combination of good intentions gone awry: the government flooding the marketplace with money by offering student loans to nearly everyone, regardless of probability of payback; and the universities happily soaking that money up by spending increasing amounts of money on "student experience" and athletic programs, in a bid to attract students.
Giving everyone some baseline of education, I think, can be considered a good that doesn't need to be further explained. Reading/writing, basic math and science etc. Increasing the baseline to more advanced learning means a more informed general population, and therefore much more likely technical advancement and wealth creation.
It is the people that are seen as going beyond that education baseline that are the elite, and get the best careers and the most success generally (ignoring other factors for the purpose of this conversation). As you increase the baseline, what it takes to be elite also increases accordingly. I think we can all agree that it is inherently true that not everyone can be elite, in the same way that it's impossible for everyone to be above average, which is what I think you're getting at.
I think what this view may fail to consider is that the benefits of the baseline come to resemble what was previously considered elite as overall wealth increases. Middle class people now have larger homes, more vehicles, more luxury etc. than the lower-tier elites (ignoring the billionaire class here) did 100 years ago. That increase of the baseline living standard is tied to, though very much lags, the baseline of education.
Put another way, we can not eliminate the relative gap between the baseline and the elite, but, in absolute terms, as the baseline comes to meet what was previously elite in education the baseline well-being and standards of living also come to meet what was previously elite.
More importantly, correlation does not imply causation.
Just because people born to the right family, who are free of crippling disability and disease, and possess the innate traits that enable one to be successful in the workplace also happen to go to school does not mean that going to school will change the traits you were born with, reverse the disabilities you have, and see you adopted by another family.
Funny that was missed when it is the first thing you learn when you head down the road to attaining a degree.
I think we should bring back the guild system. Start a job as an apprentice, mentor with a journeyman, progress your way up, mentor apprentices while learning from others higher up, gain sufficient knowledge to build your masterpiece, graduate as a master in your field, mentor journeymen. Move on.
As someone who came into the industry through the vocational track this is interesting.
But it is confusing are 8th Light acting as a source of training for other companies or just internal use.
How many years is it 4 / 5 what certification do you get at the end?
Why are you using "trade" terminology normally those doing "advanced apprenticeship" where associate professions and calling us "apprentices" would have got you a hard look.
when I did mine in the UK I was a Junior member of the IMECHE on the path way to full chartered (PE) membership
It does seem a bit light how long is the apprenticeship
If FANG companies where serious about training / diversity this is what they should be doing take bright high school kids at 18/19 and sign them up for a proper 4/5 year apprenticeship.
Guilds are awful for immigrants and racial minorities, who are often the new entrants excluded by the guilds. Many “Jewish law firms” exist to this day because Jews were excluded from existing WASP law firms.
Guilds reflect the societies they are in. Society had more bigotry in the past, and so did the various institutions within it.
Also, it's weird that you call out guilds for being discriminatory but then give an example of discrimination in employment. We have fair employment laws to prevent this type of behavior and arguably could have "fair guild membership" laws if it became a problem.
It's fair to argue against guilds for driving up prices by limiting membership.
You’re overlooking that the non-white population is much younger (the median white person is 42, the median Hispanic person is 28) and they are driving all population growth in the country. (The absolute number of non-hispanic whites started declining in 2010). Given those changing demographics, when guilds act to limit membership (as you acknowledge they do) the bulk of those excluded are going to be non-whites.
And employment discrimination laws won’t solve the problem because the discriminatory effect arises from the legal practice of protecting existing members at the expense of potential new entrants.
I proposed guild discrimination laws similar to employment discrimination laws, making it illegal for guilds to exclude on the basis of protected categories.
That wouldn’t help. In a country where the non-white population is rapidly growing and the white population is shrinking, and also is trying to catch up in terms of education and income, the population of guild members will be whiter than the population of potential new members. Limiting supply (favoring existing members over potential new members) will in practice disadvantage non-whites.
There was a very clear example of this recently in Chicago. Lori Lightfoot explained that she wouldn’t pursue police funding cuts because under the union contracts, cuts would have to be made from newer employees first. (Last in First out.) That would mean that 2/3 of the cuts would be Black and Hispanic officers, even though less than half of the overall force is Black and Hispanic.
I’m trying to think of why it would be worse. Is it because skills become less transferable, thus making it harder for an apprentice to move from one master to another?
Perhaps that is by design - companies are wary of investing time and money training junior employees because they can just leave before the investment pays for itself?
Not sure what the answer is here; just playing devil’s advocate.
It’s because it gives guilds the power to control the pipeline of skilled labor and exclude new entrants to limit supply. Guilds are generally run by their members, and the existing members are much more likely to be white and native born than potential new entrants. Their management structure also makes it more likely that prejudices will be acted upon.
When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they systematically excluded Black people, for example.
A federal government can dictate what it thinks morality should be, but in practice cannot enforce morality in a free country.
Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous generations). Travel the world and you'll see that (perhaps outside some European countries) the US of today is just about the least racist country in existence.
Guilds/Unions formed today won't have the same issues as ones from 50-60 years ago because the general view of people today isn't what it was back then.
No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.
Craft unions, like in construction, are more like guilds than the industrial unions. You must qualify in one way or another to be a union member before you can get hired by a union company.
But in an industrial union, as an example get hired by an automaker with a UAW contract (and not in a so called right to work state), you are a UAW member.
You mean you can't have lower level people working on bug fixes and small tasks while you save bigger more difficult work for more advanced people? Who says they won't be productive? What is your measure of productivity?
I'm talking about the fact that hiring managers expect applicants to have 100% of the listed skills for any position because their corporations would rather spend money on stock buybacks than employee training.
Maybe this is one area where legislation can help enforce a social norm. Corporate training used to be practiced at prior generations of generations- IBM, GE, HP, etc. With corporate profits at the levels at they are today, Big Tech can afford to spend a little more on expanding internship and training opportunities.
Ph.D's get paid a pittance relative to what they do... and for like 3-5 years.
Apprenticeships for things like plumbers and electricians pay a decent wage interspersed with education.
On the long term a Ph.D may do better than a Master Electrician, but in the short term it's a way better deal. My friend out of HS who started working for Nissan and then Infinity was making 60k+ before he was 21. He's capped at around that much -- like 60-70k -- but most of our high-school friend circle wasn't making that kind of money until our late 20s (and at least one became a teacher, and still doesn't get that much in terms of pure cash comp).
I wouldn't know, I'm just a high school dropout, but if they barrier of entry to getting into a PhD "guild-system" is to also go through Associates, Bachelor, and Master degree, then I don't think its worthwhile for 90% of jobs that only require technical mastery.
People always parrot this but how many Doctors do you know with no degree? Take a poll at Google engineers and see how many are actually self taught and have no degree. How many Wall Street bankers/traders/etc have no degree? How many US Senators have no degree? How many World Leaders in history have had no formal education? Not counting dropouts, what percentage of Billionaires have no college education? The reality is still that the overwhelming majority of "successful" people still have degrees. You can argue what the root of this is whether it's the added knowledge or signalling of the degree, or intrinsic self motivation of the person, etc. but that fact still remains.
> You can argue what the root of this is whether it's the added knowledge or signalling of the degree, or intrinsic self motivation of the person, etc. but that fact still remains.
More discussion on "the root of this" might lead to the above changing.
Having your parents fund your startup and getting all their friends to support you until you hit critical mass where you don't need their help anymore.
How do you get enough experience for employers in said field to take a chance on you? It's all about getting over that initial hurdle of 100% unexperienced.
And that do all fields have budget places where you can work in for peanuts? Are all fields of the "just figure it out on the job" variety? Software is a weird bubble, but are all industries able to do that?
Yeah, for the most part. You have to get your foot in the door. Usually by having a family member or friend give you a leg up. There are few professions that have some sort of on-the job learning for the inexperienced that can be replaced by college. Especially at the BS/BA level.
If you don't have that foot in the door you are usually spending a few years working for "Exposure" or "Networking opportunities." Sometimes for minimum wage or less. Unless the job is so hard that it's constantly churning workers. I'm sure a lot of jobs will take you off the street with no experience, but they will be dangerous and/or unpleasant.
Naturally when generalizing there will be exceptions. But that was essentially the rule when I got out of college. 2+ years experience prerequisite for most "Entry-Level" positions.
A PhD degree doesn't "prove" anything. It's a chance for you to build your own education using the resources at your disposal, under a mentor. There is vastly too much variability in the experiences of PhDs, even within any single field, to generalize. This makes it difficult to market the PhD as a credential or meal ticket. It's a license to compete, that's all. And as you can read in this forum, it's held against you by a lot of people.
Luckily, I knew this when I started my PhD program, because of an oversupply of mentors and role models within my own family. Also, I was planning on carving out my own niche anyway because I'm a punk. But it's not for the faint of heart.
Still, I'm skeptical about modifying PhD education to turn it into a "credential" that comes with an employment guarantee. Part of academic freedom is the freedom to study something that nobody cares squat about. Also, many of the people who are attracted to doing that, are unlikely to prosper in a mainstream career anyway.
For myself, I realize that becoming a programmer after high school might actually have been better from a lifetime earnings standpoint, but it assumes that I would actually have survived an entry level job in a code factory or IT department.
A PhD only signals that you have an unhealthy relationship with academia.
I've interviewed and worked with so many PhD from top tier schools and it's astounding to me that someone can spend 6+ years studying a quantitative science, at a school like MIT or Harvard and still not have a basic understanding of statistics, and worse be incapable of genuinely understanding any of the quantitative tools they used for years.
The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research, they simply know how to mechanically replicate the processes you need to survive in academia today.
Another thing with a PhD is that it is no guarantee that you'll even be hireable. I know of a number of PhD candidates who have trouble interacting in a professional setting outside of the of 'I deserve deference because I have a PhD, you don't necessarily even deserve respect' mentality.
I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development program where really the only way to fail out was through attitude issues. One of the people who oversaw the program mentioned that she's only ever seen people with PhDs and higher fail out over this issue.
I wonder if the same people would have failed out of any job requiring human interaction. One thing graduate education does is attract people who know that they would struggle in a mainstream work environment for whatever reason. Some are outright crazy.
Quite possibly. I do know it's common to the point of being a trope that some graduate students are just in graduate school to defer having to enter the work-force. Some see it as a way to put off having to make major decisions or processes like job hunting. Not like there's no real reason some opt to do things like that. It is markedly easier to accept scholarships and do the grad school circuit than find a job if you have mid to high grades.
I'm surprised to read a comment like this. It seems like an incredibly harsh generalization. I know plenty of PhDs who have a good relationship with academia, or even no relationship.
I also think it's unrealistic to expect PhDs to have a "basic understanding of statistics" unless they specifically studied it. I would be shocked and dismayed to see a PhD statistician misunderstand basic statistics; I wouldn't blink if a PhD mathematician or physicist made basic statistical errors. It's hard enough to achieve research-level mastery of one domain in five years, and many mathematicians and physicists (most?) do not need stats.
If you're talking about fields like psychology or sociology, I personally disagree with the expectations they're held to. I believe we would have less of a reproducibility crisis if research projects had statistician coauthors and peer reviewers, rather than just PhDs for whom statistics is not a core competency. That would be fairer and more realistic.
Finally, to be blunt it's hard for me to take this comment seriously when you say something like this:
> The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research
Bollocks. Ph.Ds don't mean much unless you want to do research and provide cheap labor for 5 years.
I'd say a Master's is the new BA/BS. With everyone getting an undergrad degree via online schools, or via 6+ years of undergrad college, it's ability to filter is weak. A brick-and-mortar Master's serves as a way to differentiate from that pack; I'm not sure what an online Master's equates to.
Maybe an online master's will actually be a better filter than brick-and-mortar? I'd say it takes more fortitude to stick with an online program and finish it, so at some point maybe 'online' won't be a pejorative, it'll be a bragging point.
A PhD degree does generally prove expertise in whatever the subject of your dissertation was and provides access to a couple of networks. Not always guaranteed, but if someone has a PhD I generally expect that they are at least competent at whatever their dissertation was about. And I've only been burned once.
The value of the expertise & set of networks, though, can range from "extraordinarily valuable" to "worse than useless".
In STEM fields the expertise & network is usually at least good enough to keep you busy with decent-paying work for a career or so.
In CS it's usually good enough to get you either a 100K job with lots of freedom or a regular old 300K job at a big tech. So, not really worth doing if your goal is just maxing out lifetime earnings, but certainly there are worse outcomes. From there you're on your own, though.
I never said the degree was a benefit itself! Just that it might satisfy "Most successful people have X"
(Although, here in the UK at least, the quality of degrees genuinely does vary by university in a way that roughly corresponds to their rankings. I know that's an unfashionable observable but I have seen enough degree programs at different universities to know it's likely true unless I happen to have seen an atonishingly unrepresentative sample. Partly this is self fulfilling because lower ranked universities are forced to take less good students and the level of the programme has to be adjusted accordingly, but part of it really is to do with quality of teaching.)
The value of college is not being diluted. It's the signal to employers that college degrees is useful filter that is being diluted.
Hiring in general is done poorly and I understand why. It's hard to differentiate between so many candidates especially for entry level positions where a lack of job history makes it difficult to evaluate talent. So it makes sense that employers optimize for lazy signals like completion of a degree.
In general universal education is far better for a country.
Let's turn this around. Suppose we cut back on education, to inflate its value while ensuring that the population as a whole is less educated. This should make us more prosperous. An example is our widespread prosperity thanks to the high value of medical doctors.
I mean there's a lot more to university than "success preparation". While university is indeed no guarantee for success, it does seem to help a lot with your understanding of the world and your ability to think critically.
I'm lucky enough to come from a country with free decent universities, so maybe it's easy for me to say, but I can't even put a price on how my education changed every single part of how I think and understand the world. That it prepared me for a well-paying job is just a nice side-effect.
How well do you think the misinformation that laid the foundation for the political shitstorm the US is in now could have taken hold if most people had a college education?
Tether is the FUD that never stops giving, anyone remember Bitfinexed from 2017?
Do people try to manipulate price? Of course they do. Sometimes it works, retail investors get excited and pile in. Sometimes it doesn't, and whales get rekt. Markets are messy.
How do we fix this? Stop barring Bitcoin companies from working with mainstream banks, and USDT volume will dry up.
If Bitcoin companies maintained an adequate level of know-your-customer/anti-money-laundering compliance, maybe the mainstream banks would work with them. But as it stands, the banks have no reason to take any risks in dealing with them. If people resort to Tether and get burned, it's not the banks' problem.
Indeed. The crypto dream often involves being able to move huge sums of money around the world, with no ability to trace it to real people. This is the opposite of what established financial systems want. Of course they don’t want to legitamize crypto currencies, they’d be introducing a massive vector for crime and tax evasion.
Bitfinexed is looking a lot more legitimate since US regulators have started investigating Tether over the same accusations that Bitfinexed levelled against them.
Because the entire global economy is premised on having enough growth to pay off the debt incurred by previous generations. If people choose to be less productive the whole edifice comes crashing down.
This is true if human productivity is the only thing driving growth. The suggestion here is that automation replaces that human input as most jobs are actually more about supporting the innovation rather than innovation itself - if you remove the need for those supporting jobs many, many more people can work on the innovation bit instead. Society would benefit greatly.
Some people, maybe even most, won't actually achieve much or contribute anything to the furthering of the human race, but that cost is worth paying for if enough actually do. We probably have hundreds of Einsteins, Turings, and Musks working in the roles supporting the innovators because they can't get out of those roles. That's bad for all of us.
Given the things GP described as being unproductive, things that almost all of us find humanly valuable at a very basic level, perhaps the edifice needs some serious refactoring if that's the case. I love life, I don't love work. Work is part of life, but I can't love life fully if I don't love my work.
A system based on the idea that every member of society must be productive is so hideous and inhuman to me it makes me angry to think of someone seriously propounding this productivist dogma. Why, exactly, is society structured in such a way that most of my waking hours are spent getting ready for work, commuting and working? It's a tragedy to be born, grow up, and spend your days grinding away just to stay alive. That's the one life you have, and I'm wasting it just for the fact of staying alive?
It's no surprise that young people aren't happy with this.
Maybe the key is to change what we consider productive. Our main measure of productivity is GDP and it has some really perverse methodology. If a defense manufacturer builds a bomb and sells it the government, that is considered positive GDP. If next year that bomb is taken and dropped on one's own country thus destroying value is it considered negative GDP? No, again it's positive production because the pilot and bombadeer sold their services to the government too!
Meanwhile, if one parent in a relationship stays home to care for the couple's children thus rendering a highly valuable service to the family, it is not counted!
Only academics who have furvent faith in the dogma they've been handed down can see such a contradiction and maintain their faith. Recently we have been seeing economists trying to augment gross measures like GDP. And we've seen the rise of behavioral economist who are trying to better integrate human factors into economics.
People care about privacy, and more are willing to pay for it. There is a massive opportunity for direct monetization through cryptocurrency users, and the things you could build when this problem is solved...
As someone who uses cryptography daily (and not for crypto currency), I would kill for that.
The problem is that it's really hard to build good abstractions. You can't get the math to do things that the math doesn't do, so the complexity comes from (1) preventing people from mathematically shooting themselves in the foot, and (2) twisting the math into something that approximates real world problems.
We all want to be able to say "here is cryptographic magic that tells you that this data is trustworthy", but trust is fundamentally a human problem. Cryptography ultimately allows humans to make and move around declarations of fact, but how you glue those facts together is messy because humans are kind of bad at saying what they mean and meaning what they say.
> the only thinking you'll have to do is how to manage your private keys securely.
But it’s also the fun part, because it’s the first time you really need persistent end-user key management. Obviously a hard problem, but there’s a ton of money on the line if you solve the UX. And imagine what else you can do once we’re not relying on passwords and federated auth.